The Business Case
Private sector interventions to make supply chains more sustainable have grown dramatically over the past two decades. Certification has become a widely used tool for driving sustainable practices in a multitude of sectors. This system is applicable at farm- or concession-level scales, but not designed to apply at the landscape level, where competing claims on the use of natural resources like land, forest and water need to be addressed. Most urgently this holds for vulnerable area’s in developing countries (Amazon, Sub Saharan Africa, Indonesia). So next to scaling more sustainable production practices in high-risk value chains like palmoil, beef, soy etc a need emerged to innovate landscape level solutions in new set-ups of public private partnerships!
Intrigued by the complexity of these challenges and the urgency to work on solutions that can be scaled I had the opportunity to lead a rapidly expanding team in IDH between 2013 and 2016 to build the Initiative for Sustainable Landuse (ISLA; www.idhsustainabletrade.com/annual-report-2016/landscapes-2016). It proved a Herculean challenge but it also triggered wide and generous public and private support for IDH after the €20mln seed funding in 2013 from the Dutch Government. Currently 11 landscape programs are running through IDH in seven countries triggering over €100 mln investments in sustainable landscapes.