Roles and drivers of agribusiness shaping Climate‐Smart Landscapes: A review

Abstract

The Climate‐Smart Landscape (CSL) approach has recently emerged as an integrated management strategy to address the increasing pressures on agricultural production, ecosystem conservation, rural livelihoods, and climate change mitigation/adaptation. Agribusiness companies play a controversial role in achieving CSL goals. On one hand, their operations cause land and natural resource degradation. On the other hand, they have technical, managerial, and financial resources to invest in more sustainable landscapes. Despite the controversy, empirical evidence on which practices agribusiness companies plan to undertake for sustainable landscape management and their intentions to contribute achieving CSL objectives is scarce and fragmented in the academic literature. To fill in this knowledge gap, this paper describes and reviews agribusiness companies' planned practices for integrated landscape management worldwide. Additionally, this paper evaluates to what extent companies plan to engage in two crucial factors to achieving CSL: stakeholder involvement and activities' monitoring. Results show that despite many agribusiness‐led initiatives have potential in contributing to more sustainable practices, major steps should still be taken to involve stakeholders and monitoring their process and outcomes to actually achieve CSL goals.

European environment policy for the circular economy: Implications for business and industry stakeholders

“…EU (2019e) anticipated that its Integrated Nutrient Management Plan shall stimulate the markets for recovered nutrients. This document specified that the EU's Water Reuse Regulation encourages European farms to reuse water for agricultural purposes (EU, 2019e; Salvini et al, 2018; Unay‐Gailhard & Bojnec, 2019). The Commission is assessing the possibility to treat sewage sludge and secondary water (Kacprzak et al, 2017; Smol et al, 2015).…”

“…The rise of rapid urbanization within the emerging economies is expected to intensify the competition for certain raw materials and to destroy our natural environment (Huang, Chen, Su, & Wu, 2020; Rodrigues & Franco, 2019). Eventually, this can have (it already has in some parts of the world) a devastating effect on our global climate (Salvini, Dentoni, Ligtenberg, Herold, & Bregt, 2018). The projections are that the demand for the world's resources including biomass (like fruit and vegetables), fossil fuels (like gas, oil or coal), metals and minerals would more than double between 2015 and 2060 (Leipold & Petit‐Boix, 2018; OECD, 2019a; UNEP, 2019).…”

Inclusive agribusiness under climate change: a brief review of the role of finance

“…Third, and vice-versa, smallholders can use their relations with agribusinesses to get access to financing, by using offtaker contracts as bank security, or by receiving financing from the agribusinesses for agricultural inputs. Also, and finally, agribusinesses can forward their climate engagements with financiers to the smallholders they work with, by enforcing certain sustainability standards, or by supporting farmers in making their production practices more climate-smart [18].…”

Editorial: Building and Delivering Real-World, Integrated Sustainability Solutions: Insights, Methods and Case-Study Applications

“…Smarter models will however require sufficient training data and operational frameworks assimilating data across a broad range of sampling platforms and data types. Agri-business will likely play an increasing role in sustainable landscape management by involving stakeholders and monitoring progress and outcomes (Salvini et al, 2018). Collectively, we can move faster to confront such complex interplay involved in translating scientific evidence into real-world operational or actionable solutions (Lamontagne et al, 2019).…”

“…Sayer et al (2013) proposed 10 core principles for an integrated landscape approach for reconciling agriculture, conservation, and other competing land uses. Building on these principles, the Climate Smart Landscape (CSL) approach has emerged as an integrated management strategy to address the increasing pressures on agricultural production, ecosystem conservation, rural livelihoods, and climate change mitigation/adaptation (Scheer et al, 2012;Salvini et al, 2018). The CSL approach is strengthened by a broad array of different science-based indicators, metrics, frameworks and modeling systems that enhance its capability to make more informed, integrated decisions.…”