For 50 years, I have grappled with complex, interlinked issues like food insecurity, rural poverty, ecosystem damage, and biodiversity loss. These challenges, now described collectively as the “poly-crisis,” are deeply connected to the effects of climate change. But being on the ground at Climate Week in New York this year felt remarkable. The rich, collaborative discussions on regenerative landscapes as a central solution to the poly-crisis was inspiring and made clear that a transformation in approaches is underway. It was especially gratifying for me as a long-time landscape champion—At last, a clarion call for aligned, large-scale planning and action across regions and territories!
Yet as I navigated through the sea of Climate Week events where global nonprofits and corporations used the possessive apostrophes affixed to their names when describing a landscape where they worked, I kept returning to one question: Whose landscape are you talking about?
You might think that, technically, an area the size of a landscape cannot belong to any one person or group. You would be right. Each landscape encompasses a wide range of groups living and working there—from farmers and producers to businesses to communities, local governments, and civil society—all of whom have a long-term vested interest in their common region or territory.
With this context in mind, I reflected on whose voices and interests received the most airtime over Climate Week. Corporations and financial institutions showed remarkably increased interest in landscapes and were vocal about the opportunities for climate-friendly investments. They are seeing ways to make money from landscape investments, manage risks to their supply chains and reduce their costs of working in these places. This is undoubtedly an exciting advance: We will only get widespread system change for food, people, and nature if major economy players like these are on board.
Governments and inter-governmental organizations are also getting behind landscapes. They are mobilizing landscape initiatives to meet nationally determined contributions to climate change, biodiversity targets under the Global Biodiversity Framework, and Land Degradation Neutrality targets. A burgeoning number of technical experts and consulting enterprises also attended Climate Week marketing their services and information technologies in support of landscape efforts by these better-funded actors.
These external groups are indeed often important landscape players. But most seemed to be promoting their own vision of the desired future of those regions rather than serving a more holistic vision crafted by local communities, who are the real stewards of those landscapes.
Several events showcased local landscape leaders, particularly from Indigenous territories and landscapes, as well as bioregional and territorial partnerships. There were fascinating conversations about the deep change processes needed, from individual perspectives to our collective consciousness, to work effectively together for holistic landscape management. These communities don’t see their lands and waters primarily as ‘sourcing regions,’ ‘nature conservation regions,’ or ‘climate mitigation regions.’ The landscape is their home, providing not only products, ecosystem services, and valued wildlife but also spiritual and cultural value; food, water, and livelihood security; and safe and comfortable homes and settlements. They struggle to sustain these values amid the planetary polycrisis and broad economic and demographic change. For them, the most valuable landscape partnerships are those that build community, reduce conflict, protect critical resources, and boost livelihoods for their children and grandchildren.
When they were present for discussions about their home territories, it was heartening and inspiring to hear from these local voices. Yet there was still something missing.
Where is the funding for these community-led landscape partnerships, and what investments do they prioritize? Where is the long-term support infrastructure for their work? Where are the local partnerships in landscape program governance and priority-setting?
Everyone is conducting ‘consultations with local stakeholders.’ But we must go beyond a cursory consultation. We need to take this one deep, transformative step further and elevate and support locally led initiatives and organizations directly, implementing the plans they have negotiated internally to meet their own vision. Most of these partnerships could greatly benefit from the information, connections, technical expertise, and financial support of actors outside their landscape, but not if it is primarily in service of needs and goals defined by others far away.
Indeed, many initiatives are emerging that center and champion community-led landscape partnerships, like the Latin American Model Forest Network, the Common Ground initiative in India, the Global Evergreening Alliance, and the Kenya Landscape Actors Platform coalition, as well as indigenous territorial initiatives like the Mesoamerican Alliance of Forests and People. The 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People initiative is forming a global network to help build the infrastructure to support them. Some philanthropic donors are experimenting with ways to fund these local partnerships directly, including long-term, trust-based giving and donor collaboratives.
We need a dramatic transformation of the many systems that influence how we interact and engage with our surrounding environment – from food to finance to biodiversity. This transformation must happen at local, national, and international levels. However, we are not yet creating positive connections among efforts at those levels. Local communities are disadvantaged in negotiating (or fighting) with national government or environmental actors who threaten to convert their farms into nature reserves or companies controlling their land-use practices to sell to international markets that demand strict accounting to rules set by others far away.
Can we use this newfound energy and interest among more powerful actors and funders to promote thriving, regenerative landscapes and shape them to center local place-based development? Can we craft new models of business, public and private finance, and philanthropy that support regenerative economies aligned with the values and aspirations of Indigenous people and local communities? Can we build institutions, including markets, that support locally led landscape development with community leaders at the helm?
With the right ingredients, collaboration, and funding, I believe we can.
