A Company Roadmap for Effective Company Landscape Action and Claims

STAGE OF INVESTMENT

Commitment Action Performance

ACTION

This section highlights the operational considerations of pre-requisites, measurement and claims, that particularly apply when taking landscape or jurisdictional scale action.

Pre-requisites

Before taking action it is important to understand the pre-requisites for ' what constitutes a landscape investment or action’.

Two criteria for company investments or actions need to be in place for them to qualify as contributing to landscape or jurisdictional performance. These criteria establish the minimal steps to ensure the necessary relevance, scale and measurability of investments.

  • Landscape investments and actions address critical sustainability issues in the landscape and contribute to agreed landscape goals.
  • Landscape investments and actions aim to have impacts beyond individual supply chains.

    • Three further criteria compound the benefits of landscape investments and actions by aligning and embedding them with other processes, programmes and actors in a given landscape. The degree to which these criteria can be fulfilled is highly dependent on the local context, but they should be prioritized where and when possible:

  • Landscape investments and actions include support to multi-stakeholder landscape coordination processes.
  • Landscape investments and actions are embedded in collective action plans, ensuring complementarity with other activities and interventions in the landscape.
  • Landscape investments and actions contribute to broader systems level change, helping to create the enabling conditions for achieving agreed landscape goals.
Prioritising landscape engagement

Measurement

The goal of all landscape monitoring systems is to have good quality, consistent, validated data about actions taken and landscape-scale performance change over time. Monitoring is a shared responsibility that engages companies, local governments and other stakeholders and is an integral part of any landscape investment. Companies that invest in landscape initiatives have the following monitoring responsibilities, with some particularly relevant to the action stage of a company’s landscape investment:

Relationships between landscape monitoring system elements

Claims

Company landscape action claims or communications are expected to include the following core elements:

  • Description of the type of landscape action;
  • The sustainability outcome(s) prioritised by local stakeholders towards which the action is contributing;
  • Scale and duration of the action or investment, and whether it is financial or in-kind;
  • Bounded geographic area where the action is taking place;
  • Timing and duration of the action (e.g. when and over what time period the action is being implemented);
  • The name of the landscape initiative and local multi-stakeholder process in which the company is participating, where such a process exists; and
  • Partner(s) through whom the action is being implemented, if any.

The following statement is an example of an action claims that incorporates the core elements:

We are contributing $1X over 5 years to support restoration efforts in A landscape with B implementing partner. Our goal is to support C landscape initiative to achieve its vision of 1M hectares under restoration by 2040. Since March 2022, we have been investing in D and E types of activities that aim to bring 50,000 hectares under restoration by 2027.

More information on the minimum expectations and supporting information to strengthen company landscape action claims are described in position paper two "Effective company claims about landscape investments and actions".

Supporting links:

Please note the supporting tools and resources were developed by different organisations or collaborations and are not collectively endorsed by the organisations participating in this roadmap.