In our series, Demystifying Landscape Finance, leading voices on the frontlines of landscape finance reflect on what it will take to unite locally led, nature-based solutions with the right financial tools, infrastructure, and institutions to drive landscape-scale change.
———————————
Relentless pursuit of growth and a bigger bottom line often comes at the cost of social and environmental well-being. Rapid deforestation, destructive agricultural practices, and dwindling water and food supplies all threaten the health of the communities that ultimately keep the global economy running. While increasingly popular financing solutions such as carbon credits and green bonds attempt to combat these challenges, they are often deployed for individual problem- and sector-based projects with little consideration of broader impact across regions. Many of these resources have a short shelf life, and funding needs for the long-term time horizons of ecological restoration and social processes focused on systemic change rarely align with investors’ visions or their mandates.
Enter landscape finance, a refreshingly inclusive approach to navigating the persistent and often restrictive challenges of the existing finance system. Just as integrated landscape management (ILM) outlines a holistic approach to managing natural resources across sectors and territories, landscape finance offers a framework to reimagine where and how funding flows across climate, biodiversity, land use, and economic sectors. This challenges funders to address the interconnections between the world’s most formidable environmental and development problems. It also provides the framing they need to explore opportunities to finance more inter-connected portfolios at a scale large enough to affect meaningful change in threats from climate change to food insecurity and supply chain resilience. It also encourages funders, governments, and investors to move away from historically fragmented forms of funding conservation and development work, which is crucial for achieving long-term sustainable development goals.
“Landscape finance doesn’t focus on funding individual projects,” says 1000L finance solutions lead Seth Shames. “It provides a practical framework to direct investments strategically across entire landscapes or territories to meet multiple economic, social, and environmental goals.”
Landscape finance works to weave diverse funding sources— such as those supporting nature conservation, restoration, and climate action—into a unified strategy. This more harmonious technique creates what 1000L partner Commonland calls the 4Returns, generating social, ecological, and cultural outcomes that can ensure a more resilient planet. It considers the system as a whole and identifies strategic local investments that can address environmental and economic needs. This approach ensures that efforts are not just piecemeal but parts of a comprehensive plan to achieve long-term sustainability for a region.
In an ideal world, integrated innovations beget integrated benefits. While landscape finance is not a silver bullet, it’s inherently designed to ignite meaningful change in the following ways:
Landscape finance can bridge the divide between environmental resilience and economic gain
Traditional financing methods tend to address environmental and economic areas in isolation, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Landscape finance breaks down these silos by coordinating investments that promote economic vitality and environmental health together, ensuring sustainable growth that supports both people and the planet.
Landscape finance can help ensure a healthier planet
Investing in landscape management isn’t just good for biodiversity, it also fortifies these regions against the adverse effects of climate change. By restoring and maintaining diverse habitats, landscape finance helps preserve biodiversity and builds ecological resilience, creating healthier environments that can withstand and adapt to climatic shifts.
Landscape finance offers inclusive solutions that champion local leaders
What really sets landscape finance apart is its cornerstone of inclusivity. This approach ensures that investment decisions are not just top-down but involve local communities, giving a voice to those most affected by environmental and economic changes. It’s about building capacity and fostering local ownership of sustainable practices.
Landscape finance is the revolution our economic system needs
Unlike traditional financing models, landscape finance centers systems-wide well-being—not just economic but also social and environmental. Traditional financing models focus too narrowly on financial returns, often at the expense of environmental integrity and social equity. By incorporating nonfinancial factors into financial planning and assessment, landscape finance can support a more balanced strategy that considers long-term environmental and social outcomes and adapts funding models to support comprehensive landscape-wide sustainability goals.
Landscape Finance in Action: Alto Mayo, San Martin, Peru
Though landscape finance is still emerging as an applied field, landscapes are already seeing increasing success in applying landscape finance to support regional long-term growth and sustainability.
The landscape in Alto Mayo in the region of San Martin, Peru, is a prime example of the power and potential of landscape finance. As one of the country’s most ecologically diverse and important areas, its ecosystems provide essential services such as water regulation, climate stability, erosion and flood control, and crucial habitats for biodiversity. These are critical for human well-being both locally and regionally, affecting climate and livelihoods of people in the lower Amazon basin and beyond. San Martin also depends heavily on agricultural outputs for economic gain.
Unfortunately, these rich ecosystems are highly threatened by infrastructure expansion, in-migration, and land use changes from expanding the agricultural frontier for smallholder coffee and cocoa to large-scale rice and livestock production. The region is also one of the most deforested in the Peruvian Amazon.
These challenges were historically exacerbated by government agencies and policies that addressed each problem individually but failed to address connections between them. However, an inspiring, locally led process that championed inclusion and dove deep into the cause of existing challenges sparked a collective movement that brought together ambitious groups from the regional government and private and public sectors to explore solutions through multidisciplinary and landscape lenses. This pushed national officials to institutionalize their efforts into a regional strategy that focused on piloting and implementing integrated solutions, including a collaborative climate change strategy, as well as formally institute an office for sustainable public and private investment aligned to their goals of reducing deforestation and improving livelihoods.
Aaron Bruner, Conservation International’s Sustainable Landscapes & Seascapes Economics fellow, said the San Martin landscape was a natural choice to advance integrated landscape finance. “San Martin is a global leader in working towards sustainable development in the context of climate change,” Bruner noted. Together with Conservation International, 1000L co-convener EcoAgriculture Partners recently received a grant from the Global EbA Fund to develop integrated landscape-scale investment in ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) efforts, including climate change adaptation, biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods.
Within San Martin, the Alto Mayo basin has emerged as an admirable example of this collective work in action. The landscape hosts a robust collection of interwoven financing approaches that support sustainability at scale and drive economic growth in ways that also ensure social and environmental resilience for local ecosystems and communities. A co-management plan led by Conservation International Peru to secure protected area forests is bolstered by REDD+ programs, which provide financial incentives for developing countries and agricultural producers, through conservation agreements to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. Investments in smallholder coffee value chains and tourism ventures by both the regional government and private sector companies like Starbucks help secure livelihoods for farmers and their families.
These laudable efforts have already put Alto Mayo on the map as a leader in implementing these integrated solutions. But the beauty of an emerging field like landscape finance is that there are always new heights to reach. Percy Summers, Conservation International’s director of sustainable landscapes in Peru, notes that there is still more work to be done to truly achieve long-term sustainability.
“There is an important opportunity to build enabling investments into the investment strategy that address nonfinancial factors such as traditional/indigenous knowledge exchanges, impact and monitoring communications, and capacity strengthening of local leaders,” Summers notes. “Though not directly related to finance, these play essential roles in attracting investors for future projects.”
While some argue that landscape finance can create dependency on external funding and sideline local economic autonomy, as seen in Alto Mayo, the ultimate goal of landscape finance is capacity building, not dependence. It aims to empower local stakeholders, ensuring they have the tools and resources to manage their own resourcing needs and sustain benefits based on their own priorities—necessary elements for thriving landscapes and landscape partnerships.
Landscape finance has the power and potential to facilitate coordination and collaboration among stakeholders, helping them to work toward their joint objectives and shared vision over time. One thing is certain: Beyond its role as a groundbreaking strategy in the world of investing, adopting a landscape finance approach to support biodiversity, climate resilience, and sustainable development is a necessity for a more inclusive, resilient world.
