Collaboration between sectors

Urgent and transformative action is needed to address the complex, interconnected challenges facing society today, including climate change, water scarcity, food security, poverty, and biodiversity loss. Putting nature at the heart of any solution is increasingly recognised as the foundation for securing climate resilience and sustainable development. No one organisation holds the solution, and siloed and fragmented approaches cannot address the challenges at scale.

Collaboration between sectors towards common societal goals is essential to bring the diverse perspectives, complementary skills and resources to enable the systemic change and innovation required to address the challenges. Collaboration between governments, financial institutions, companies (both within and across different industries and their supply chains), and civil society organisations is vital to drive and champion the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity.

Working in partnership is at the core of FFI’s approach to conservation. For many years, FFI has constructively engaged with extractive and productive industries, with multi-stakeholder sector and cross-sector initiatives, and with those influencing corporate decision-making, in order to ensure positive outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Our corporate partnerships play a vital role in innovating and testing approaches (for example nature-based solutions) and promoting collaboration across landscapes and seascapes in which multiple sectors are active, in order to mitigate the impacts of development. We also provide tangible, real-life examples of best practice to help inform government policy. FFI’s deep-sea mining report has stimulated responses supporting a moratorium from some lenders and raw material users, causing shifts in government policy on marine ecosystems and sustainable blue economy initiatives.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, projections for growth in energy, infrastructure, extractives and agriculture are staggering. Unmitigated impacts are driving the rapid decline of biodiversity, with disastrous consequences for carbon emissions, water security, human health and the lands and livelihoods of local communities. Reconciling economic, social and environmental objectives presents an enormous challenge. With urgent, concerted and collaborative efforts, there is still time to halt biodiversity loss and reverse the trend of nature’s decline while meeting other societal goals.

The CALM framework (Collaboration Across the Landscape to Mitigate the impacts of development), produced by FFI, responds to shortcomings in the business-as-usual management of complex multi-use landscapes. It addresses the need for transformative change to ensure that landscapes are resilient, development is sustainable and social and ecological values survive and thrive.

CALM is a conceptual framework that brings a socioecological lens to land use and mitigation planning aimed at national and subnational governments, industry and other key actors within a given landscape. It promotes an inclusive and integrated landscape approach to the avoidance, mitigation and management of adverse impacts from development that engages with all sectors and scales of activity.

Delivery of the framework requires multi-stakeholder engagement and seeks to promote cross-sectoral and collaborative uptake and application of the mitigation hierarchy to achieve local and landscape objectives.

Further supporting materials include:

• A simple infographic explaining the mitigation hierarchy to farmers (English and French)
• Detail on applying the mitigation hierarchy at a landscape level (English and French)
• Three working tables looking at (see sidebar to download tables):
  – Impacts of sectors
  – How biodiversity and ecosystem services respond to mitigation actions
  – A linking table that covers impacts to biodiversity and ecosystem services
• Short animations explaining in brief what a socioecological system is (English and French) and avoiding and mitigating the impacts of development through collective and collaborative action (English and French).