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IDH promotes a vision of landscapes where sustainable production of agro-commodities contributes to the protection and restoration of critical ecosystems, while enhancing communities’ livelihoods. This vision can’t be achieved by relying solely on public funding. A key question that many organizations are struggling with, is how to structure landscape initiatives so that they attract new sources of finance.
We are aiming to provide an answer to this question, through our Production, Protection, Inclusion approach we are piloting in 12 landscapes in 8 countries. This requires working at different scales (global, national, regional, and even village-level), and with various stakeholders: governments (national, regional, district), business, farmers and communities.
What we do in practice?
• We secure government commitments and engagement at different levels of jurisdiction: municipality, region, and national level. This helps “derisk” the landscape.
• We build strong links to supply chains: producing companies at the jurisdictional level, but also buyers, traders, and their clients (brands and retailers). We help them find solutions to achieving their sustainability commitments.
• We engage with farmers/communities, ensuring that no-one is left behind – inclusion is critical to the success of landscape initiatives
Note: Concrete examples will be given on how this is working in different context (Brazil and Indonesia), to illustrate the above points. However, this is not enough. We also need to change the way investors look at these landscapes. This requires development of new financing instrument that are capable of attracting private finance. This is what we’ve done, by incubating the &Green Fund, a blended finance instrument that can take first loss and derisk investments in landscapes. A few examples will be given on where this fund invests and how.
IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative (“IDH”) accelerates and up-scales sustainable trade by building impact oriented coalitions of front running companies, civil society, governments, knowledge institutions and other stakeholders in several commodity sectors. We convene the interests, strengths and knowledge of public and private partners in sustainability commodity programs that aim to mainstream international and domestic commodity markets. We jointly formulate strategic intervention plans with public and private partners and we co-invest with partners in activities that generate public goods. About IDH’s Landscapes program: The IDH Landscapes Program is active across 12 landscapes in 8 countries, where IDH works with global and local businesses, CSOs and governments to build sustainable landscape governance models. Through sustainable land-use management planning, it creates areas where agricultural products are grown sustainably (Production); natural resources are safeguarded (Protection), and smallholders and communities thrive (Inclusion).
