Addressing Systems-Level Threats to Nature
Walmart encourages suppliers to join other stakeholders in collective actions to address systems-level challenges from commodity production that are leading to nature loss in many of the most vulnerable and biodiverse regions of the world. Suppliers can do this by engaging in, investing in, and sourcing from credible place-based initiatives. Place-based initiatives include landscape, seascape and jurisdictional sustainability initiatives.
What Are Place-Based Initiatives?
Commodity production from the agriculture, forestry and seafood sectors supports economic growth and food systems around the world, but unsustainable production can drive negative ecosystem impacts (e.g., on forests, biodiversity, water quality), undermining productivity and exacerbating the climate crisis. Supplier efforts to adopt regenerative practices in their supply chains are a critical step, but no company can resolve nature loss alone, nor can individual governments or other stakeholders. Innovative collaborations among companies, governments and civil society, however, show increasing potential to tackle underlying challenges like land use planning or lack of opportunities for sustainable livelihoods. And collaboration is essential to meet climate and nature goals set by the world’s leading companies, including Walmart and many of its suppliers.
Place-based initiatives bring together diverse stakeholders in productive landscapes and seascapes for these exact reasons – to identify shared goals, strategies, and resources to achieve sustainability at large geographic scales, like a state, province, or eco-region. These strategies may include pre-competitive actions like mapping high-conservation value areas across an entire jurisdiction or delivering capacity and incentives to farmers to use more productive and sustainable practices. Landscape, jurisdictional approaches and jurisdictional REDD+ programs1 are all types of place-based initiatives that share this common DNA, and they touch down in dozens of places around the world that need teamwork to succeed.
Walmart seeks to connect suppliers with place-based initiatives that show potential to deliver positive nature impacts at the landscape and seascape levels. Importantly, all of the projects listed on this page have been vetted for alignment with landscape, seascape, or jurisdictional strategies and may provide opportunities to drive protection, sustainable management and/or restoration at meaningful scales. We encourage suppliers to learn more about these initiatives and to get involved.
Currently, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation are focusing our efforts on emerging initiatives that are already showing positive impact to natural ecosystems and livelihoods. We will continue to expand the list of priority landscapes and seascapes and encourage suppliers to engage in credible place-based and jurisdictional initiatives anywhere they source from.
Walmart encourages suppliers to engage in jurisdictional and place-based projects that more sustainably manage, restore, and/or protect nature aligned to landscape/seascape needs, and linked to positive environmental, social and economic impacts. To provide visibility to some of these projects, Walmart worked with leading environmental non-profits and asked them to submit jurisdictional and place-based initiatives they believe are on a path to credibility, as defined by the core criteria developed with leading environmental nonprofits. This project map is not exhaustive and Walmart is not endorsing the projects featured, but rather providing visibility for consideration. View the project map.
If you are a nonprofit organization participating in a place-based initiative and would like to feature your initiative here, please submit the project information through this intake form.
If you feel that we have missed projects that meet the core criteria, which can be found on page 1 of the intake form, please have the implementing organization submit them for review.
In addition to sourcing from and investing in place-based initiatives, we encourage suppliers to report their goals and progress through the Nature Pillar of the Project Gigaton™ platform. A new Nature Pillar and simplified questionnaires will be available for the 2021 reporting season, and you can learn more about them here. For seafood, please report through Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) Metrics.
For detailed knowledge resources on place-based initiatives and ways that companies can get involved, please refer to this short reading list or the Jurisdictional Resources Hub on the Tropical Forest Alliance Webpage.
The Walmart Foundation supports and invests in enabling conditions for jurisdictional programs worldwide. To learn more about those investments and strategy, visit Walmart.org.
1 Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is described in Article 5 of the Paris Agreement and recognizes the outsized importance of forests in combatting climate change.
