How to put landscape theory into practice

The concept of taking a landscape approach to address environmental and social challenges is not new. The potential benefits and challenges for companies embarking on such an approach are increasingly well-known. What has been less well articulated up to this point is how companies can put the theory into practice. 

ISEAL, the global membership organisation for sustainability standards, has been convening landscape organisations to develop guidance that helps companies take action in a landscape or jurisdiction. The guidance is designed to help them scale up and accelerate sustainability within and beyond their supply chains.

In 2022, it issued guidance that set out the practical steps companies might take in using landscape approaches to enhance sustainable supply chain management. This was a useful starting point for many businesses still grappling with how they might prioritise action beyond their supply chains to create the most impact.

Now, ISEAL has gone one step further. By working with a select group of 20 practitioner organisations already engaged in landscape or jurisdictional approaches, including WWF, IDH, LandScale and Conservation International, ISEAL has facilitated the development of a series of four position papers. These joint positions are designed to provide companies with more easily accessible and consistent guidance, so that they can invest in the right landscape activities and feel confident in how they communicate about their engagement and the sustainability outcomes that result.

The first paper sets out the prerequisites and criteria that determine what actually constitutes a landscape investment or action – and how this is different from supply chain actions. The criteria are designed to build a commonly agreed definition of landscape actions and strengthen consistency of language.

Landscape investments and actions tackle sustainability issues that have been prioritised by stakeholders in the landscape and that contribute to agreed landscape goals. Critically, the actions contribute to outcomes beyond individual supply chains. Companies should be able to show how their actions are going to deliver on these goals and should support effective monitoring to understand what progress is being achieved. 

While most landscape actions will focus directly on environmental and social outcomes like conservation, restoration, or land tenure reform, companies should also invest in the multistakeholder platforms that support aligned action. This ensures coherence across landscape actions and amplifies the impacts that can be achieved.

The second paper offers clear guidance on making claims about landscape actions and investments. Companies want to show how investments they make contribute to their sustainability commitments. But landscape-scale impacts can take a number of years to realise, and companies want to talk about their good work. 

As it takes quite a long time to see those results, being able to talk about targets and actions becomes more important; that might well be the only claim a company is able to make in the first few years. The guidance paper presents advice for making claims about actions taken and the types of information that should be included. The idea is that companies are able to provide enough information about the actions to put their efforts in context.

For example, for a company to make a credible claim about its landscape actions, it must include information on the type of action, the targeted sustainability outcomes, the scale and duration of the action or investment, including whether it is financial or in-kind, and the geographic area of impact, among other things. 

The paper also emphasises the importance of providing supporting information to substantiate claims, such as demonstrating a clear connection between the action and the prioritised sustainability outcomes, and showing how the action complements existing efforts or addresses past negative impacts.

One of the key questions companies have about landscape investments is what this enables them to claim about performance outcomes. The third paper sets out some initialguidelines for companies on the claims they can make about how their investments or actions have contributed to performance improvement in a landscape.

All too often, companies have a carbon accounting mindset, keen to attribute numbers to activities. However, in a landscape setting, where multiple actors and actions contribute to different sustainability outcomes, individual company-impact reporting is just not feasible – and might get confusing. As an alternative, the paper explores early-stage methodologies, approaches and types of claims based on the degree of ownership and responsibility for the outcome.

While “attribution” claims infer that the outcomes resulted directly from specific company actions, this is almost never feasible or realistic in a landscape setting. Attribution claims require the highest level of causality and quantitative rigour and are typically reserved for discrete outputs or short-term outcomes.

Instead, the paper focuses on the value of collective claims, the idea that company investments or actions are part of a collective effort that achieved the sustainability outcomes. Company claims are about contributing to the overall outcome. 

However, where companies or other stakeholders want to talk about their specific contribution, the paper proposes an approach to apportioning the results. “Proportional” claims provide a way for contributors to claim a proportional share of the outcomes through collective negotiation and agreement about how to allocate the results. This type of results allocation is novel and requires further testing but can be particularly useful for quantitative reporting against individual company commitments or disclosures. 

For companies to be able to talk about what they’re doing, and the results achieved, they need to have good quality monitoring data. Part of the commitment to invest in landscape approaches includes support to collective monitoring, which not only helps to align measurement activities, but is cost effective and improves the overall picture of landscape performance. The fourth, and final, position paper explores these elements.

Companies can derive benefits from supporting a collective monitoring framework that allows for comprehensive assessment and reporting on landscape performance, and insights on agreed-upon sustainability goals and targets. They should also contribute to establishing a reliable performance baseline and ensure that both the activities they fund, and the broader landscape performance, are consistently monitored.

Ultimately, a well-structured collective monitoring framework and active company participation in it are foundational to making legitimate claims about the positive impact of the company’s landscape investments and actions.

ISEAL’s four position papers will also be transposed into an online roadmap, embedded on the JA Resource Hub, making it easier to navigate and digest all the insights and guidance across each stage of company investment. It provides more information about the organisations involved in developing the position papers and their role in landscape and jurisdictional approaches and provides links to additional tools and resources that support company engagement in landscape and jurisdictional approaches.

ISEAL acknowledges that the position papers cover new territory. Yet, the overall framework, bringing together insights and practical experience from many of the leading landscape practitioner organisations, helps to map out a pathway for companies to not only take landscape action but to feel confident about the claims they can make.  

This new practical guidance gives companies a roadmap for incorporating landscape approaches to create sustainable impact. As companies continue to navigate the intricacies of landscape investments, ISEAL hopes that the steps and practical advice presented in the position papers can help guide them toward more effective investments and even greater impact.