Our key takeaway: No company can tackle systemic issues like deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change or forced and child labour on their own. Having a network of partners to act collectively can help companies expand their reach and impact beyond their own operations and suppliers to a broader ecosystem of actors. Guidance from the Jurisdictional Action Network underscores the importance of landscape and jurisdictional approaches to addressing systems-level issues and provides a roadmap for how to design and monitor an effective landscape approach. For one, companies should design collective action frameworks with the inputs of affected stakeholders, ensuring that their perspectives and priorities are centred in the framework. Companies should also ensure that landscape actions and investments have measurable goals and indicators that target action at multiple levels, for example investing in quantifiable activities like training for farmers, biodiversity restoration and conservation in parallel with supportive actions that ensure the sustainability of those investments. When reporting on progress, companies should communicate about concrete outcomes and learnings to increase transparency and build stakeholder trust. And, they should ensure that they communicate insights back to the workers and communities at the heart of the initiative.
The Jurisdictional Resource Hub, an Initiative of the Tropical Forest Alliance and the Jurisdictional Action Network, published a Roadmap for Effective Landscape Company Action and Claims (May 2024):
- What does it mean to take action or invest at a landscape or jurisdictional scale?: The goal of landscape and jurisdictional approaches is to address sustainability challenges “holistically and at scale.” Taking action in line with this approach can allow companies to foster lasting impact beyond their individual supply chains and strengthen the overall market for sourcing materials. There are five criteria for a landscape or jurisdictional approach. First, landscape investments and actions are designed to manage cross-cutting sustainability issues that can impact a broader ecosystem of actors and factors, like deforestation, unsustainable agricultural practices or labour rights. They should also be designed with the input of diverse stakeholders, prioritising the perspectives of those who will be most impacted or involved with the action. Second, they seek to create a meaningful impact that goes beyond individual suppliers or supply chains. For example, landscape actions strengthen the well-being of workers and communities across the supply chain instead of at one farm or factory. Third, they include supporting multi-stakeholder processes to address systemic issues. This means that quantifiable actions like training for farmers, biodiversity restoration and conservation activities should be complemented by supportive actions that ensure the sustainability of these investments by building local capacity and governance. Fourth, they are embedded in collective action plans, “ensuring complementarity with other activities and interventions in the landscape.” Landscape actions should be coordinated with other local actors, which can mean co-financing of activities and creating partnerships to tackle issues. Fifth, they contribute to systems level change and help create an enabling environment for sustainable progress, such as by advocating for government policies and good governance, or facilitating innovative financing mechanisms. Companies can prioritise their actions depending on their impact and presence or influence in the context.
- What is a company’s role in monitoring the impact of landscape actions and investments?: Measuring the impacts of landscape action is crucial because systems-level change on issues like deforestation, biodiversity loss, climate change and respect for human rights can be subtle, and often occurs over a longer time horizon. Monitoring the impact of their investments and actions benefits companies not only because it provides credible evidence of their efforts, but also because it can strengthen alignment between different partners; improve the effectiveness of collective actions to understand what is working and what is not; and enable cost- and resource-sharing among different actors. While all actors have a responsibility to monitor the impact of landscape investments, companies can play their part by helping to establish a shared framework with concrete targets and goals; providing baseline data available to them; directly monitoring activities and performance, or providing financing or in-kind support to partners to do so; sharing with partners the data they have access to, such as anonymised or aggregated supplier information; sharing project insights in turn with suppliers, workers and community members; and using the collective monitoring framework as the authoritative source for any claims and communications about efforts.
- How can a company make credible claims about actions and their own contributions?: The guidance advises companies to take care in what information they share publicly, how they share it and how they credit it. This is important because clear communication can promote transparency about actions and investments, as well as building stakeholder trust and collaboration. The roadmap includes a decision tree for companies to determine which types of claims are most appropriate for a particular context. For example, if a company is solely responsible for an outcome (and can prove it), they may be able to claim attribution for the actions – though this requires “the highest degree of causality, quantitative accuracy and rigour because it results in the right of sole ownership of an outcome.” By contrast, if the outcome is a result of shared efforts, they can make a proportional claim (if it needs to be apportioned to distinct actors in order to be reported credibly) or a collective claim (if it does not need to be apportioned). The most credible claims are those which are measurable, time-bound and reflect the priorities of the local stakeholders to which the action is contributing.
