Why this series
Business faces rising climate, nature and supply-chain exposure. Could place-based collaboration - by river basin or bioregion - lower risk, strengthen compliance and build resilient supply?
What this interview covers
In this conversation, Heather Elgar - LandScale Lead and an Advisor to the Gerana Initiative - reflects on why place-based collective action is essential, how ecological principles translate directly to business resilience, and what it really takes to strengthen landscape partnerships on the ground.
With roots in policy, restoration partnerships, and now global landscape assessment, Heather brings a rare clarity on what good looks like — and how companies can move from intent to credible action.
Read on for Heather’s practical lens on resilience, collective action and why mature landscape initiatives need more than ambition - they need governance, patience, and shared responsibility.
Heather: “There is no business without functioning, solvent landscapes.”
Q: Why landscapes?
Heather: The global challenges we face – climate change, ecological breakdown, rampant poverty – are complex, interconnected, and accelerating. Tackling them through siloed, single-issue approaches simply won’t cut it. These crises often stem from systems we’ve built – supply chains, production models, financial structures – without fully considering their broader impacts on the places they touch, and are often exacerbated by lack of joined-up-thinking and worsening environmental pressures.
Landscapes offer a systems lens. They reveal the complex interplay of ecological, social, political and economic dynamics. Take deforestation: its root causes may not be limited to logging or agriculture. They might involve education, land tenure or insurance – all deeply contextual. Without understanding the full system of a place, we risk treating symptoms rather than causes.
At its heart, the landscape approach is about breaking through siloes and addressing these persistent challenges through multi-stakeholder partnership and collective action – grounded in place.
Q: Why do we need to think like a landscape?
Heather: I like the provocation to ‘think like a landscape’. It invites us to give landscapes agency – or at the very least, to respect and consider their unique – ancient yet ever-changing – contexts in our decisions. Where this feels foreign, this gets to the heart of our crises: a fundamental disconnect with nature, and a failure of ecological (or systems) thinking.
Q: What does resilience mean in a landscape context?
Heather: In an increasingly vulnerable world, businesses are increasingly focused on resilience. A business won’t secure resilient agricultural supply, for example, just by focusing on farmers: the enabling conditions – like sufficient, quality water and healthy soils – need to be secured at a landscape level.
The landscape approach is rooted in decades of ecological science. From landscape ecology, we know that reversing the nature crisis isn’t about incremental gains in, for example, tree cover, but restoring and then securing healthy ecosystem function. In simple terms, a natural system is either healthy, struggling (on the edge), transforming, or broken - perhaps irreversibly. Beyond restoring a system to health, we then need to build its resilience, through core concepts like (bio)diversity, (bio)abundance, feedback loops and connectivity. These ecological principles apply to human systems too: just as nature needs diversity, connectivity and ‘functional redundancy’ (think: living wage or safety nets), so do our communities and economies.
Resilience is not about teetering on the edge of survival. It’s about thriving. Hyper-efficient systems are vulnerable to shocks. Resilient systems can absorb disruption, adapt and evolve.
Q: How did you get into landscapes?
Heather: I’ve always cared deeply about how business can be a force for good. After several years working in supply chain sustainability data reporting, I became increasingly frustrated at the increasingly technocratic approach to ESG – and the apparent magic of getting ESG into neat spreadsheets as a way of internalising sustainability issues into economic decision making. Increasingly I felt that logic just didn’t fly, especially where data wasn’t grounded in context and missed the bigger picture.
I shifted from global ESG to working (and rooting myself) on an organic farm, to then leading a landscape partnership in the UK, where I worked with government, business and civil society to align on one of the first Nature Recovery Network strategies in the UK. I’ve subsequently worked in policy roles at the Woodland Trust, where I focused on aligning business, finance and policy to support landscape action, and in sustainability at Clarks.
Now I lead LandScale, an initiative led by the Rainforest Alliance and Conservation International. LandScale is a globally applicable framework and tool to credibly assess the health of landscapes (as complex socio-ecological systems) and landscape initiatives (as the backbone behind successful landscape action). We’re ultimately working to strengthen landscape initiatives, while building confidence of business and investors to engage in effective landscape action. We work with other key movements in this space – like the ISEAL Landscape Practitioner Network and 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People – on alignment to mainstream the landscape approach.
Q: Why are you involved with the Gerana Initiative?
Heather: We often hear that there is no business on a dead planet. Similarly, there is no business without functioning, solvent landscapes. Today’s production landscapes are increasingly in crisis. Cocoa may be the poster child for landscape action (climate-related scarcity and rising prices have even changed what qualifies as chocolate), the same pressures will apply, in time, across commodities. Diversification and divestment may be an option for a while, but if the whole economy keeps divesting from degraded landscapes, there’ll be nothing left. It is a strategic imperative for any business that cares not only about its impact and legacy, but also its own viability, to play its part in securing the resilience of the landscapes it depends on.
Despite a clear macro business case, corporate engagement in landscapes remains niche. Barriers include lack of understanding, data, financing and policy – but also culture and norms. Shifting from vertical value chains to intersecting with horizontal, place-based approaches is a paradigm shift. We need safe spaces for Sustainability professionals to learn, test and build literacy about effective landscape action. I’m excited about Gerana Initiative’s role in bringing diverse actors and experience together to help make these paths – both old and emerging – better trodden and mapped.
Q: What do you think is most needed to shift the dial on corporate action in landscapes?
Heather: Acceptance that landscape action does not happen overnight. It’s potentially transformational, but multi-stakeholder partnerships take time, trust and grit. The importance of good governance cannot be overstated, and desperately needs funding. ISEAL has done fantastic work convening the landscape sector around the core components of successful landscapes through its ‘Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives’.
Supply chain resilience may suggest diversification and divestment. Farmer resilience means staying by increasingly vulnerable producers, by engaging more deeply, as a partner in the landscape. Choosing to partner rather than transact takes leadership.
Accepting uncertainty. A corporate engaging in landscapes is not guaranteed certain results or carved-out claims. A corporate engaging in landscapes does so for the bigger, collective aim of securing resilient landscapes – towards more resilient assets or supply for themselves, while securing resiliency returns to all in the wider landscape.
Finally, starting somewhere. Having confidence to understand what landscape action looks like in your sourcing. Start in one landscape if needed. There are many entry points and ways to engage.