Landscape initiative maturity: Infrastructure for a nature-positive future

Landscape approaches are the only path to a nature-positive future

Landscape approaches are not simply “landscape-scale projects.” They are multi-stakeholder, place-based partnerships designed to address complex, interconnected challenges holistically.

At their core, landscape approaches recognize that ecosystems, livelihoods, and economies function as integrated systems. Decisions made in one domain ripple through others. A shift in land use affects water availability. Governance structures shape how communities access resources. Agricultural practices influence biodiversity and climate resilience.

True landscape initiatives bring together local communities, government bodies, private sector actors, and civil society to co-create shared goals and collective action plans. They break out of siloed thinking, moving beyond single-issue interventions toward systemic transformation.

When done well, landscape approaches deliver:

• Restored ecosystems that sequester carbon, protect biodiversity, and regulate water cycles

• Resilient supply chains anchored in stable, productive landscapes

• Inclusive governance that amplifies the voices of marginalized communities

• Economic opportunity rooted in regenerative production systems

Landscape approaches are uniquely positioned to address the interconnected risks that threaten both people and planet. They are the infrastructure for a nature-positive future. Yet, despite this transformational potential, they remain chronically underfunded and under-supported, often due to a lack of mainstream understanding, perceived investment risks, and unclear returns.

The challenge is not just finding capital—It’s realigning financial flows

A significant amount of capital has been committed to nature-positive goals by corporations and financial institutions. The capital exists.

But money is not flowing into landscape initiatives at the speed or scale required. The fundamental challenge is not mobilizing new finance; it is realigning existing financial flows toward landscape-defined priorities.

This matters across three key audiences:

For companies: Securing resilient sourcing landscapes is critical to long-term sustainability. Understanding the materiality of ESG risks—like deforestation, water scarcity, and human rights violations—requires good knowledge of a company’s own supply chains and dependencies on key sourcing areas. But systematically addressing these risks requires understanding the local context and engaging with key local stakeholders to co-create lasting change.

For the finance sector: Portfolio performance depends on functioning systems. Investments are only as resilient as the landscapes in which they are situated. Climate shocks, resource depletion, and social instability in a landscape can destabilize entire value chains and asset classes.

For donors and impact investors: Supporting landscape initiatives offers the greatest potential for systemic impact. But identifying where to invest—and how to ensure that investment translates into lasting change—remains a significant challenge. While the strategic case for landscape investment is increasingly clear, navigating this space remains difficult. Landscape financing is often perceived as risky, opaque, and hard to evaluate.

The core issue is this: There is no successful landscape action without a credible multi-stakeholder initiative underpinning it.

Good governance is the missing link

Landscape approaches are only as strong as the partnerships that drive them. The hard work of multi-stakeholder alignment, building trust, resolving conflicts, co-creating plans, and ensuring inclusive decision-making is the backbone of successful landscape action. Without it, even well-funded projects may fail.

A landscape initiative may show promising environmental progress. Perhaps data shows that deforestation has dropped by 15% in the past year. But if that progress relies on fragile governance structures, lacks diversified funding, or excludes key community voices, it will not endure.

Good governance ensures that:

• Investments go further because they are aligned with locally defined priorities,

• Benefits are shared equitably across diverse stakeholders,

• Plans are resilient to political shifts and market volatility,

• Action is coordinated, not duplicated or contradictory;

Yet, this foundational work is chronically underfunded. Corporates and investors often want to fund outcomes: restoration projects, carbon sequestration, and regenerative agriculture. Recognizing the importance of good governance structures is a crucial step, as they serve as a proxy for a better return on investment. Better governance means a higher likelihood of delivering impact and building consensus at scale.

This is the paradox: There is no impact without good governance. And good governance is what we often neglect to finance.

Landscape initiative maturity: Infrastructure for sustainable landscape initiatives

The core criteria for mature landscape initiatives, developed through the collaborative efforts of the ISEAL-convened Landscape Practitioner Network and technical partners like CDP address this gap. This concept builds on earlier work, with LandScale having been central to shaping the concept from its inception.

Landscape initiative maturity serves two core functions for landscape finance:

1. Signalling investment readiness

Landscape Initiative Maturity offers a structured way to assess and communicate an initiative’s progress. For corporates, investors, and donors, it provides a credible signal about an initiative’s stage of development and where further support may be needed. It validates that an initiative is building toward:

• Scale: A boundary large enough to influence systemic conditions (e.g., a jurisdiction or watershed).

• Multi-stakeholder governance: An inclusive platform where local communities, government, and private actors make decisions together.

• Collective goals and actions: A shared action plan with clear social and environmental milestones.

• Collective monitoring: A system to track progress and report transparently.

This is a roadmap for continuous improvement. It helps distinguish between emerging and more mature initiatives, allowing them to demonstrate the operational capacity to absorb capital effectively and deliver sustained change. While the sub-criteria provide a framework, each landscape initiative’s journey to maturity will be unique.

By providing validation of these maturity variables, tools like LandScale create a “trust signal” for the market. LandScale offers a space to gather and showcase maturity information, provides support to initiatives during their evaluation, and validates key information to create a clear roadmap for improvement. This allows investors to identify initiatives aligned with global best practices, reducing perceived risk and accelerating capital deployment.

2. Highlighting where governance must be strengthened

Landscape initiative maturity also generates insights into areas needing support. This is not to penalize initiatives, but to signal where targeted technical assistance, capacity-building, or funding for governance processes can strengthen outcomes.

For companies and investors seeking to address their risk exposure through landscape approaches, this function is critical. If you are investing in or sourcing from a specific landscape, a strong governance infrastructure is a prerequisite for creating lasting impact and de-risking assets and supply in the long term. Landscape Initiative Maturity enables informed conversations about where to direct resources—not just into projects, but into the foundational work that makes projects succeed.

Maturity and Impact: Two halves of the same whole

To unlock landscape finance at scale, we must distinguish between two types of data that are often conflated:

• Landscape initiative maturity measures readiness—the governance structures, financial strategy, and stakeholder alignment that enable an initiative to absorb capital and drive long-term change.

• Impact performance measures outcomes—the environmental and social results an initiative is delivering.

These are not alternatives. They are complementary signals.

A new initiative may not yet have a proven track record of impact, but if it demonstrates strong governance structures (high maturity), it signals high-potential investment. Conversely, an initiative with past success but lacking the infrastructure to sustain it may be more vulnerable to risk and may need support to develop those structures.

Importantly, landscapes may not meet all maturity criteria for various reasons. They may be nascent, or certain elements may not be contextually relevant. This should not automatically dissuade investment. Rather, it highlights where investment in either landscape interventions or capacity-building for the initiative may be most impactful.

Building confidence for capital deployment

The launch of validated landscape initiative maturity framework on the LandScale platform marks a turning point for landscape finance.

For landscape initiatives

The landscape initiative maturity process acts as a diagnostic mirror. It highlights gaps in governance or planning, not to penalize, but to direct capacity-building efforts where they are needed most.

Completing an evaluation with LandScale provides a roadmap toward resilience. It helps initiatives identify operational blind spots before they become crises. Furthermore, displaying the “Validated by LandScale” badge distinguishes initiatives to donors and buyers, instantly elevating their credibility. This is about strengthening your partnership, elevating your profile, and differentiating yourself as an investment-ready landscape initiative.

For investors and corporates

Understanding maturity can help de-risk engagement. It allows investors and companies to identify initiatives that align with global best practices and are structurally positioned to deliver on commitments.

This is becoming increasingly relevant for compliance and target-setting. The Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), for instance, emphasizes multi-stakeholder engagement—including participation in landscape partnerships or governance structures—as a way to support companies in implementing their nature targets. Similarly, CDP uses the core criteria to help companies report on their landscape engagement with greater rigor and consistency.

For companies, assessing the Landscape Initiative Maturity of the landscapes they source from is becoming a necessity. It provides transparency into the extent to which enabling infrastructure is developed and identifies gaps that should be addressed to strengthen readiness for commitments and investment.

The path forward: Build the foundations for lasting change

Landscape approaches are too important to fail for lack of governance. If we are serious about a nature-positive future, we must move beyond fragmented projects and start investing in the structures that make systemic change possible. That means prioritizing maturing partnerships, funding multi-stakeholder governance, and aligning capital with landscape-defined priorities.

A call to action for all stakeholders:

Let’s shift how we operate. Let’s look beyond outcomes alone and prioritize initiatives with strong governance foundations. Where maturity is still developing, let’s fund the readiness work, because without it, impact will not last.

This is how we move from ambition to investability.
This is how we turn landscape potential into durable change.

Start building maturity. Start realigning capital. Let’s raise the floor for the entire field.