LANDSCAPES RESTORED TOGETHER
Integrating Biodiversity and Food Systems through Multi-Stakeholder Landscape Partnerships Integrated landscape approaches have grown globally as an effective management scale to address interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity that fragmented, sector-based strategies have proven inadequate to resolve. Moving from concept to implementation requires navigating complex inclusion, governance structures, and demonstrating long-term impact. Commonland catalyzes landscape restoration by bringing farmers, conservationists, businesses, and governments into structured partnerships through the 4 Returns Framework. Guiding multi-stakeholder collaborations through a systematic process, the framework targets four critical returns—inspiration, social capital, natural regeneration, and financial sustainability. This supports a shift from fragmented conservation towards integration of conservation and food systems. Evidence from proof-of-concepts across diverse geographies demonstrates the potential for reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. Robust long-term evaluation continues and supports adaptive management.
Biodiversity–Food Systems Entry Points BIODIVERSITY ENTRY POINTS
The Biodiversity–Food Systems Challenge The triple crisis of feeding growing populations with sustainable diets while preventing biodiversity loss and adapting to climate change demands holistic, integrated approaches to food systems and landscape management. Yet fragmented, sector-based strategies continue to dominate. Agricultural intensification creates destructive feedback loops where food production erodes the natural systems it depends on. Policy paradigms—some prioritizing conventional intensification, others advocating sustainable, locally adapted systems—create incoherence across environmental, agricultural, and economic objectives. Despite growing recognition of integrated landscape approaches as promising frameworks, implementation faces substantial barriers. Policy incoherence and ineffective decentralization continue to hinder cross-sectoral coordination. Many multi-stakeholder platforms remain dependent on unsustainable external funding and robust evidence of long-term, large-scale impacts is limited. Evaluations of food systems change are difficult to compare, and conclusive evidence on causal pathways, particularly for resilience improvements and transformative processes for gender equity and social inclusion, is still lacking.
“The complexity and scale of landscape degradation means we cannot solve the challenges alone. Landscape transformation requires holistic, systemic solutions.” ©Commonland; Reblex Photography Learn more about Commonlands 4 Returns Framework here.
Ecosystem diversity through landscapelevel restoration that regenerates natural habitats and connects diverse ecosystems with productive agricultural areas to create resilient ecological networks.
FOOD SYSTEM ENTRY POINTS Scaling biodiversity-positive agricultural practices and social organization through establishing landscape partnerships that connect smallholder farmers with conservation organizations, businesses, and policymakers around shared restoration goals.