How Could Companies Engage in Sustainable Landscape Management? An Exploratory Perspective

Abstract

Current concepts that aim to align economic development with sustainability, such as the circular and green economy, often consider natural systems as externalities. We extend the green economy concept by including the landscape as the provider of social, economic and environmental values. Our aim is to explore how companies could engage in creating landscape-inclusive solutions for sustainable landscapes. We propose a conceptual model of the relationship between companies and landscape services based on a demand for landscape benefits by companies, implications for wider society. We present a short overview of how scientists addressed the role of companies in landscape-inclusive solutions. We also give some examples taken from the World Wide Web to illustrate the variety of ways in which companies already invest in landscape services. Our findings suggest that the relationship between companies and landscapes is not yet strongly recognized in sustainability science. However, examples from practice show that some companies do recognize the added values of landscape services, to the extent that they invest in landscape management. We conclude that future research should provide information on the added value of landscape-inclusive solutions to companies, and increase their capacity to engage in regional social-ecological networks.

Exploring the Role of Science in Sustainable Landscape Management. An Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Berkowitz and Medley [18] express the values that home gardeners experience as services, for example, in terms of enjoying species, inspirational, and health benefits. Opdam and Steingrover [19] show how companies may gain corporate benefits by including landscape services in their food chains and social strategies. Karrasch et al [20] use landscape services in relation to the values achieved by adapting coastal landscapes to climate change, and they use them in a spatially explicit way by linking them to landscape elements.…”

“…This clearly illustrates the need for multi-scale governance. Opdam and Steingrover [19] discuss how and why companies may get involved in governance networks in their region, thus extending the formal and non-formal types of governing with a market-based mechanism. Also, Garcia-Llorente et al [17] observed that governance networks for social farming were partly based on market-based mechanisms.…”

“…Suh et al [29] investigated the role of knowledge and environmental perceptions in the willingness to buy smart irrigation systems among home-owners in three states in the USA. The factors they found to be of influence (including awareness of the urgency of the water problem and social network related factors such as what the neighbours do) can be understood by using the theory of planned behaviour [30] that is used by Opdam and Steingrover [19] to describe the willingness of companies to participate in sustainable landscape management.…”

Connecting business with the agricultural landscape: business strategies for sustainable rural development

“…The perspective we bring is landscape ecology, a cross‐disciplinary field of study that integrates ecological and social systems through a spatial framework of landscape (Forman & Godron, ; Opdam et al, ). These social systems include businesses, and Opdam and Steingröver () found various types of business engagement in landscapes, yet they concluded that there is little knowledge about why and how business contributes to landscape‐inclusive solutions for sustainability. We increase this understanding by focusing on how food business entities engage across different scales and levels of business–landscape relationships in rural agricultural landscapes.…”

Bridging practices, institutions, and landscapes through a scale-based approach for research and practice: A case study of a business association in South India

“…Business has started playing a role in business-protected area partnerships such as restoring tropical forests (Treuer et al, 2017). However, these approaches have not been mainstreamed, or systematized (Opdam and Steingröver, 2018). Less than five percent of all the companies refer to ecological process in their sustainability reports (Bjørn et al, 2017).…”