This Guidebook for Landscape Investments aims to inspire and guide businesses in scaling up successful and impactful regenerative landscape projects. It includes 12 case studies showcasing replicable success factors and solutions deployed to overcome barriers, highlighting the impact that agrifood companies can achieve when working collaboratively and investing at scale.
Drawing on existing approaches, the COP Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes defines regenerative landscapes as inclusive land management approaches that integrate regenerative agriculture, conservation and ecosystem restoration. The case studies included here help illustrate what this means in practice. We selected the featured projects according to three key criteria, based on the Landscape Initiative Maturity Framework developed by Landscale, the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance (ISEAL), and supported by several landscape implementation organizations:
Size
Projects have to be a minimum of
10,000
hectares or have a clear plan to reach it
Multi-stakeholder collaboration
Projects must be collaborative, where businesses show leadership by working with a diverse range of stakeholders
Monitoring of progress
Projects must be monitoring progress against their objectives.
The regenerative landscape projects included in this Guidebook span continents and cropping and farming systems. Each project is unique and is designed to address the specific challenges of the production landscape where it is located. Across the projects, however, five common insights emerge. These include success factors and challenges to expect throughout implementation. We encourage businesses to integrate these in their projects.
1. Leading landscape programs coordinate a diverse set of partners to maximize size and impact
Examples include collaboration among a minimum of 3 organizations and a maximum of 28 per project. Partnerships are strategic and leverage the expertise of different organizations to achieve shared goals. Global agrifood businesses rely on trusted local partners who are embedded in the landscape and provide solutions tailored to local contexts. Through the projects, farmers and businesses at every stage of the value chains are:
Working with value chain partners to share the costs of the transition
Collaborating with non-governmental organizations to design program eligibility criteria and monitoring frameworks
Partnering with research institutions and academia to validate the results of their work
Engaging with government and development agencies to promote socio-economic inclusion through their projects
Co-designing fit-for-purpose financing mechanisms with financial institutions
Providing training and assistance to growers with technical implementation partners
Relying on implementation partners to convene multiple stakeholders and coordinate work on long-term objectives
2. Programs are increasingly measuring and reporting on outcomes but a lack of alignment on measurement indicators drives up monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) costs
Through the projects, companies are working to achieve positive impacts on climate, biodiversity, water, soil health, farmer livelihoods and animal welfare – in alignment with outcomes identified in WBCSD’s Global Framework for Regenerative Agriculture. Across the case studies, carbon reduction and removal, soil health enhancement and farmer productivity and profitability emerge as key priorities.
The companies use comprehensive frameworks – co-developed with scientific partners and technology providers –to monitor, report on and verify progress. In most cases, they use MRV tools to attest to the implementation of practices and to track the achievement of outcomes related to them. The approaches used in these case studies combine the use of field visits, field samples, remote sensing, satellite imagery, GIS technology and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven models to quantify on-farm practice changes and outcomes generated. At times, farmers engage in data collection through participatory approaches.
Although businesses are working towards common objectives across these impact areas, there is a proliferation of measurement indicators. This makes it difficult to aggregate results. In part, this reflects their adaptation to the context of each landscape: they measure water availability and productivity in water-stressed landscapes; metrics such as hectares of native vegetation protected and restored are prevalent in high-deforestation risk regions. However, the lack of alignment among measurement indicators reflects difficulties in finding cost-effective yet robust systems to collect data in at-scale projects.
Table 1: Common objectives on five impact areas – aggregated from the case studies
Note: While many objectives are common across all case studies, some objectives are specific to a subset of projects included in this report. Not all projects share exactly the same objectives and they do not necessarily use the same measurement indicators.
3. Successful programs recognize farmers are at the center of the transition and support them through incentives and technical assistance
Adapting to increasingly adverse climatic conditions, building resilience among farming communities and ensuring sourcing security into the future are key priorities for all actors involved in the creation of regenerative landscapes. Through the case studies, agrifood sector players show a deep understanding of farmers’ needs in the journey to resilience and adopt a multitude of strategies to address them. Two key factors are common: facilitating fit-for-purpose access to finance for farmers in the challenging early years of the transition (which requires changes in inputs, machinery and behaviors) and providing specialized technical training for producers through the establishment of demonstration plots, the creation of farmer-to-farmer learning networks and partnerships with expertise centers.
Engaging farmers and putting them at the center of the transition takes different forms and is always geared to address the most pressing needs of farmers and farming communities in each production landscape. Some projects adopt participatory approaches, where producers hold governance roles in the program’s decision-making committees, to ensure long-term commitment to a given project; others leverage existing farmer producer organization and cooperative structures to reach critical mass quickly and gain the trust of farmers; others invest in community needs – such as women’s entrepreneurship, access to healthcare and education – to support the most vulnerable rural communities, whose well-being the resilience of a landscape depends on.
Among programs specifically tracking farmer retention over time, the reported retention rate ranges between
-
demonstrating strong positive results for – and feedback from – the farmers engaged
4. Programs are increasingly leveraging innovative finance in the form of fit-for-purpose financial instruments, along with new ways to stack public and private capital
Financing and accelerating the regenerative transition at a significant level requires comprehensive and holistic financial support mechanisms. The case studies show that regenerative landscape actors are adopting innovative financing mechanisms with blended capital to de-risk the transition for farmers. Many of these combine commercial capital with:
Public incentives and subsidies, leveraged and stacked to commercial capital in blended finance mechanisms
Outcome-based payment systems, including payments for ecosystem services, used to reward producers who achieve pre-determined verified and quantifiable outcomes
Carbon finance, in the form of carbon credits, used to reward producers for their decarbonization efforts, in alignment with voluntary carbon market and insetting methodologies
First loss guarantees, used to de-risk lending
Crop insurance, made available at subsidized rates
Nature-based solution financing, mobilized to spur nature-positive production
Concessional capital, made available by governments, philanthropies and corporate foundations through grants.
Some programs predetermine which percentage of capital should flow directly to farmers - among these, the percentage ranges between 65-85%.
Additional examples of fit-for-purpose financing mechanisms are available in the Successful Co- investment Models that Transform Global Agrifood Systems report compiled by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Global Compact and WBCSD for the UN Food Systems Summit +4 in July 2025.
Some programs predetermine which percentage of capital should flow directly to farmers - among these, the percentage ranges between
-
5. Common challenges still persist and require a phased approach to tackle them as programs move up the adoption curve
The programs we cover in this Guidebook show promising success factors and initial positive results. However, common challenges persist across geographies and production landscapes and across finance, technical and cultural barriers. These challenges make it difficult to reach the scale required to affect change in entire landscapes.
5. 1 Transition finance
There is a cost associated with the transition toward regenerative landscapes, with farmers unable to carry the burden of high upfront costs and long payback times on their own. Financial support for producers can take various forms, with some programs using philanthropic capital to kick-start their operations and spur initial investments in the production landscape.
However, moving from funding to financing is critical. It requires de-risking the transition for commercial investors to unlock the required capital through blended finance. Such finance at a landscape level provides a structure through which all landscape stakeholders can co-invest while also reaching their individual investment and return objectives. Initiatives such as the Landscape Accelerator: Brazil (LAB) are working to activate blended finance through place-based approaches toward regenerative landscapes.
5.2 Technical assistance
The transition also requires new skills and competencies. Advisory services and technical assistance for farmers are essential to enabling behavior change, including the adoption of new inputs, practices and technology.
To achieve scale, however, the provision of these services often becomes more decentralized or network-based, relying on existing structures such as farmer producer organizations to ensure faster and effective roll-out. Further, the costs associated with MRV at the landscape level – ensuring the consistent implementation of practices and accessibility of digital tools, maintaining data integrity and accuracy with increased production or sourcing volumes – present a significant challenge to achieving the levels needed.
During the pilot phase, bespoke support addressing individual farmer needs and MRV testing are crucial to establishing best practices and identifying solutions. As the number of projects increases, the focus shifts to streamlining these processes, leveraging technology and building local capacity to manage and sustain the initiatives independently.
5.3 Change management
Behavior change requires trust and results. Producers don’t always benefit from the transition at first due to upfront risks and implementation challenges. Identifying farmers who are ready and able to invest in new solutions and who can show positive results and inspire others to change is critical during the early stages of the transition.
Reaching critical mass requires knowledge-sharing networks, practical demonstrations need to be accessible and farmer producer organizations can be instrumental in mobilizing larger numbers of producers. When reaching landscape scale, coordination challenges can be significant and require governance structures to balance collaboration with efficiency.
case studies
hectares currently enrolled
total hectares targeted by 2032
farmers currently engaged
partners engaged
