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.