Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative

3GF Africa Regional Conference 2015
Partnership Market Place
Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative
When:
Where:
Speaker(s):
Wednesday, 13 May, 17:00-18:30
Tent in the fountain area
Lee Gross, Senior Manager at EcoAgriculture Partners, lgross@ecoagriculture.org
What is the green growth challenge you are trying to overcome? What are the key barriers to change?
Globally, agricultural systems, ecosystem health, and rural resource-based livelihoods are in crisis. Over the next 50 years,
agriculture will be forced to go through an extraordinary transition to meet production needs sustainably, in the context of
climate change and growing populations. Global challenges like biodiversity loss, poverty and food insecurity are highly
connected, but the single-objective strategies that are often pursued to solve them - grow more food, conserve more habitat - can alleviate one problem while worsening another. By addressing challenges at a landscape level, innovative businesses, partnering with partners in civil society and government agencies, are able to build on connections between agricultural production, livelihoods, and the environment and harness synergies in a more powerful way.
What is your partnership approach / hypothesis?
The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative (The Initiative) is an international collaborative initiative of
knowledge sharing, dialogue and action to support integrated landscape management (ILM) around the world that achieve
three simultaneous goals: improved food production, ecosystem conservation, and sustainable livelihoods. The Initiative
supports the uptake of integrated landscape management at a globally significant scale by sharing and evaluating
knowledge, experience and challenges; showcasing and assessing tools and methods for implementation; building capacity
of innovators and institutions; mobilizing innovative models of finance and business engagement, and advancing an ambitious agenda through research, advocacy, and partnerships.
Who are the partners involved and how? Who are the other stakeholders?
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The Initiative is comprised of nine co-organizing international institutions and more than 60 strategic partners from North
and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia that are contributing their resources and considerable expertise to promote
and strengthen landscape management around the world. We engage with policymakers, ministries, donors, civil society
organizations, researchers, landscape managers, business leaders and farmers to demonstrate how a whole landscape approach can help them achieve goals as diverse as mitigating climate change, increasing rural incomes, reducing risks and
improving agricultural productivity.
What are your partnership objectives and what achievements have there been to date?
Over the past two years, The Initiative has documented 365 unique cases of these integrated landscape initiatives in
Africa, Latin America and Asia. This revealing and unique data set paints a compelling picture of the value of this approach, as well as the obstacles facing it. From it we have derived clear recommendations for policy and funding changes
at the national and international levels that would have dramatic impacts on the quality of land and resource management around the world. Meanwhile, we have established a body of evidence of where, when and how this approach is
succeeding as a means of implementing sustainable development in diverse contexts around the world, publishing more
than 20 reports and case studies, including key synthesis reports for business and financial institutions engaging in integrated landscape investments.
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LPFN Co-organizers include: EcoAgriculture Partners, Bioversity International; Conservation International; Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations; International Fund for Agricultural and Innovation; United Nations Environment Programme; World Agroforestry Centre; The Ministry of
Economic Affairs of the Netherlands and World Resources Institute.
Using local, national and regional knowledge sharing events, workshops and trainings, the Initiative has improved the
institutional capacity, technical skill, financial ability and policy influence of more than 20 landscape initiatives in 14 countries. The Initiative has begun to contribute to more supportive national policies and investment programs in at least five
countries: Sri Lanka, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia and Vietnam. At a major Initiative convening in 2014, the Initiative
worked with landscape champions from more than 97 institutions to develop the African Landscapes Action Plan, a comprehensive strategy for scaling-up ILM across the continent that was endorsed by NEPAD.
What is the potential of this partnership to achieve impact and scale?
The Initiative offers a powerful collaborative platform and network for action and advocacy to accelerate progress in
transforming food, agriculture and land use systems to improve synergies and reduce tradeoffs between agricultural
production and environmental sustainability.
As the leading global partnership investigating and promoting transformative integrated approaches to sustainable
development, the Initiative is uniquely placed to communicate critical and timely messages to key actors at the levers
of change, based on the weight of authority of its co-organizers and the depth of experience and expertise of its partners.
Over the next three years, the Initiative will build on its successes and lessons from East Africa, and landscape-specific
work elsewhere, to expand its geographic scope globally, increasing country-specific activities in other regions. The
Learning Landscape Network model, now being implemented in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania, will be replicated in at
least ten other countries where a critical mass of Initiative partner organizations is working. In addition, the Initiative
will seek to expand and deepen its strategic partnership base to address cross-cutting issues in ILM such as gender,
population, health and nutrition, agricultural investment strategy, and city-region food systems.