The business perspective
Sustainable practices are good for business.
As users of ecosystem services, the private sector has specific interests in securing long-term production along commodity supply chains, and reducing their environmental and social impacts and risks. Equally responsible for sustainable agriculture as public investment and regulation, the private sector can play different roles: from policy-driven to voluntary investment. These can include compliance to mandatory regulations, flexible methods to offset and compensate ecological and social impacts of production, and improved social and environmental standards to fulfil corporate responsibility and reputation goals.
Private sector involvement, however, goes beyond large-scale impact investments. Recent findings from Credit Suisse highlighted that for business investment in conservation finance, the private sector should prioritize projects that optimize ecosystem services through improved natural resource use and restoration of degraded areas. To maintain a sustainable value chain for production, companies therefore require improved practices and ensured agro-ecosystem services provision down to the farm level. Farmers, however, face barriers in adopting these practices. The private sector can, therefore, play an important role to support them.
Current management of ecosystem services is often driven by public programmes and lacks coordination across sectors. Co-investment from both public and private investment are, therefore, needed to operationalize sustainable landscape management for ecosystem services. Innovative financial mechanisms that pool public investments to facilitate a coordinated approach that provides a packages of incentive measures to support the adoption of environmental practices and improve productivity can provide an attractive basis to encourage responsible private sector investment.
To build the business case for private sector investment, ecosystem services management must be mainstreamed into development and investment strategies. Public-private dialogues are needed to increase multi-stakeholder partnership and engagement with local and sector policy makers. Such partnerships can support the design of more coherent, supportive policies and coordination frameworks that enable multi-objective and multi-stakeholder landscape initiatives for sustainable production, livelihood development, and ecosystem services protection.