OVERVIEW
Landscapes are where WWF's work touches the ground.
A landscape is a socio-ecological system that consists of natural and/or human modified ecosystems, and which is influenced by distinct ecological, historical, economic and socio-cultural processes and activities. A “landscape approach” is a way of managing the landscape by long-term collaboration among multiple stakeholders, with the purpose of achieving sustainable landscapes. It involves convening key stakeholders to build consensus about landscape management and decision making. A landscape approach is useful when there are diverse resource requirements, interactions and interdependencies in resource management, and a need for sustained commitments by stakeholders to meet sustainable landscape objectives.
Landscape approaches are increasingly being recognized as an important solution to the core challenges of our era, such as climate change, food security, poverty reduction and conservation.
Sustainable landscapes unify varying efforts, take action to scale, secure and connect wild areas and wildlife populations, build climate resilience, enable cross-border action and allow access to larger financing and higher levels of political commitments. Landscape-level approaches have strong potential to turn the tide on biodiversity loss, climate change and social inequity, as well as enabling countries to meet their stated obligations under the Aichi targets, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Bonn Challenge and the Paris Agreement.
Our work
- Working with partners to advance landscape-level, multi-disciplinary approaches to increase impact on the ground.
- The Landscape Finance Lab, WWF’s incubator for landscape programmes. The Lab helps to structure, launch and fund deals at the landscape scale. It does this by incubating sustainable landscapes using innovative financial instruments, leveraging market forces and unifying stakeholders to create investable solutions. The Lab takes an integrated approach to move beyond the silos of individual interests and industries. It unites all stakeholders and environmental, social and economic aspects – including private sector investment funds, impact investing platforms and public sector grant funding windows.
- Developing and prototyping innovative integrated land and seascape approaches to produce greater strategic impact at scale.