Despite the potential for nature restoration to bring benefits for multiple sectors across Europe, the funding gap remains immense and urgent. This is astounding, considering the costs of land degradation for sectors like food and agriculture – soil degradation is estimated to cost EU farmers an average of €1.25 billion a year. While estimates vary, several prominent observers agree that we are currently falling short by hundreds of billions of dollars for biodiversity, nature-based solutions and reversing land degradation at the global level.
We need new financing models that share the load across societal sectors if we’re going to achieve the multiple European targets that include climate and nature. Along with 19 international organizations including the World Resource Institute, Gold Standard, The Nature Conservancy, and EIT Climate KIC, we’ve put forward one such framework: “Landscape Finance”, a financing approach that supports holistic, systemic, and community-driven landscape restoration.
Holistic landscape restoration is a model for restoring landscapes that enables local stakeholders to make their landscapes more climate-resilient, as well as more socially and economically prosperous. Holistic landscape restoration has more than just ecological benefits – by bringing people together to restore their landscape, it can build social cohesion and capital among and between communities, as well as serving as the backbone of thriving local and regional economies. By producing benefits for multiple sectors and stakeholder groups, holistic landscape restoration can contribute to a more resilient and sustainable future in line with the EU Green Deal’s vision.
Through Landscape Finance, policymakers could catalyse transformative change via holistic landscape restoration, making lasting impact on Europe’s landscapes. Here are some recommendations for how EU policymakers can integrate a Landscape Finance approach into their work:
1. LANDSCAPES AND LANDSCAPE PARTNERSHIPS NEED TO BE RECOGNISED IN POLICY FRAMEWORKS FOR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE AND TO MEET MULTIPLE TARGETS
EU institutions and member states should allocate resources to support landscape partnerships that drive holistic landscape restoration. Public funds in the form of unrestricted and flexible grant funding should be made available to support multi- stakeholder landscape partnership and governance processes to catalyse restoration. This is the most catalytic of all funding opportunities within holistic landscape restoration as the partnership develops the vision and plan for the landscape, providing governance and driving long- term restoration.
Implement incentives that are aligned to nature. It is critical to redirect or eliminate environmentally harmful incentives, such as subsidies, on behalf of activities that restore ecosystems and enhance ecosystem services. Accelerating the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and applying the reform with integrity will be instrumental in aligning nature and agricultural biodiversity objectives and finance. By aligning policies to reward benefits appropriately and financially penalise harms, governments can encourage nature-positive actions and discourage harmful ones.
Holistic landscape restoration can serve as an enabling platform to streamline implementation of national plans targeting the same landscape. National and regional development plans (including National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans) of EU member states should recognise landscapes and landscape partnerships, facilitating vertical and horizontal policy coherence and integration of national spatial planning and budgeting across sectors. This should be done to best suit the policy and fiscal systems of each country. However, regardless of each country’s level of decentralised decision-making, landscapes can be leveraged to implement adaptation, nature restoration and drought plans, among other policies.
The commission should develop harmonised accounting and reporting frameworks for landscapes that enable the private sector (companies and investors) to report against emerging sustainable finance regulations such as the Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation.
2. PUBLIC FINANCE CAN PLAY A CRUCIAL, CATALYTIC ROLE IN HOLISTIC LANDSCAPE RESTORATION
All guidance documentation for the Nature Restoration Law developed by the European Commission should explicitly recognise the value of landscapes in tackling multiple goals and be translated in national restoration plans. By fostering cross-sectoral collaboration among government agencies, NGOs, businesses and local communities at landscape level, diverse interests can be aligned, and resources pooled, to implement strategies that tackle multiple challenges in a cost-efficient and effective way.
The commission should produce a guidance document on how to incorporate landscape restoration into national restoration plans.
The commission should develop a mechanism with the mandate to provide earmarked funding for landscapes. Within the current multiannual financing framework (MFF), Directorates-General that will benefit from restoration (CLIMA, ENV, AGRI, EMPL, REGIO, SANTE, etc.) should earmark portions of their budgets for landscape restoration. These earmarked budget elements could be put under one governance system, a dedicated restoration fund. Equally, dedicated financial support should be considered in the new MFF (2028–2034). This could be done through a funding programme similar to the European Innovation Council Accelerator, targeted towards attracting private finance to holistic landscape restoration activities and processes – for example, by providing guarantees to de-risk investments, or by providing subordinated funding as part of a blended-finance approach. The European Investment Bank could provide advisory support to such a vehicle and/or provide co- investment.
3. WITHIN HOLISTIC LANDSCAPE RESTORATION, INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS SHOULD ADOPT A LONG-TERM HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE, INCORPORATING RESTORATION OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENHANCE CLIMATE RESILIENCE
EU institutions and member states should provide public funding for landscape restoration initiatives to enable the integration of grey infrastructure projects with improvements in associated green infrastructure. Taking a holistic approach to these investments at landscape level will be more cost-effective, and it will improve the resilience of the total investment to the physical risks of climate change while generating multiple valuable public benefits. Large scale landscape restoration projects should get similar financial support and attention as large grey infrastructure projects.
We need Landscape Finance more than ever
As farmers protests crank up a notch and EU officials threaten to dial back Green Deal measures, the question of how to achieve the EU Green Deal’s vision has never been more pressing. More than ever, we need new financing frameworks like Landscape Finance to support nature restoration as well as help farmers to transition to more regenerative practices at landscape scale. For more information on the Landscape Finance approach, read the full publication here.
About Commonland
Commonland is a not-for-profit organisation that brings people together to restore landscapes and regenerate the Earth: our common land. Since 2013, we’ve been on a mission to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land to ensure ecosystems, economies and communities thrive well into the future. Today, we work in over 20 countries to facilitate landscape restoration and drive change at a global scale. Our practical approach – the 4 Returns framework – is helping people worldwide to restore our home planet and keep it healthy for generations to come. In November 2023, Commonland co-authored a new report proposing the application of an investment concept called “Landscape Finance” as a financing approach for supporting holistic landscape restoration with a coalition of 19 environmental organisations, including the World Resource Institute, Gold Standard, The Nature Conservancy, and EIT Climate KIC
