If one landscape can store carbon, restore biodiversity, and feed communities, why must capital fund only one outcome? Who benefits from keeping these markets separate?
Rural landscapes store vast amounts of carbon, protect biodiversity and provide the food that communities and economies depend on. In healthy, well-managed landscapes, these functions support one another. Healthy soils can store more carbon while improving food production; biodiversity helps regulate water and climate; and agroforestry can strengthen ecosystems while creating more diverse and resilient rural livelihoods.
However, today's financial system often treats these outcomes as separate. Carbon, biodiversity and food production are usually financed, measured and rewarded through different markets, standards and investment approaches. This fragmented system can encourage land managers to focus on a single outcome rather than the overall health of the landscape.
This technical session explores how landscape projects can deliver multiple benefits simultaneously and how finance can better support these integrated outcomes. Drawing on examples from Latin America and lessons from carbon and biodiversity markets, participants will examine where current standards create unintended trade-offs and how new approaches to measurement and verification could reward carbon storage, biodiversity restoration and food production together. The discussion aims to identify practical ways to align finance with landscapes that are more productive, more resilient and better able to deliver lasting environmental and social value.
