Philip Varghese

This report highlights the immediate need to reform subsidies and incentives that negatively impact biodiversity and human well-being in socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS) — areas where the interaction between people and the landscape maintains or enhances biodiversity while providing humans with goods and services. Drawing on a diverse set of perspectives from local actors, the report explores the nuances of how different types of subsidies and incentives affect the environment and livelihoods. It provides policy solutions to support and respond to Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which calls for identifying and phasing out harmful subsidies by 2025 and reforming them by 2030.

Drawing from first-hand experiences managing productive landscapes and seascapes, this brief provides insights on how landscape approaches can promote biodiversity-friendly business through local stewardship, cross-level collaboration and peer learning. Landscape approaches are collaborative strategies that promote biodiversity-friendly business practices. These approaches involve diverse stakeholders, such as local communities and other actors along the value chain, working together at a landscape or seascape scale. Leveraging landscape approaches to advance sustainable business practices for biodiversity is an iterative process, involving adaptation and course correction to accommodate diverse needs and interests among stakeholders. This enhances collaboration across and beyond a value chain. These approaches also capitalize on traditional knowledge, which has been embodied through augmenting local experiences and wisdom to help integrate different knowledge systems that are complementary, creating new business opportunities for biodiversity-friendly innovation. Recommendations: (i) Bolster local stewardship to build and pursue a common vision with enhanced recognition of the livelihood and business values of biodiversity; (ii) Institutionalize a participatory approach to cross-level collaboration that incorporates review and monitoring and capacity development elements; and (iii) Promote biodiversity elements in education and peer-learning to mainstream biodiversity in business in alignment with global policy goals for sustainability.