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Thinking ‘Outside the Boundaries’ for Land-Use Challenges
As competing uses for productive land multiply, with space needed for forests, farmland, and now biofuels, companies are becoming increasingly aware of land as a scarce resource. Not surprisingly, resource scarcity often drives innovation.
I spent a recent afternoon with employees of an integrated pulp and paper company, discussing their sustainability challenges as well as their innovative approach to expanding forest plantations on a tropical Chinese island where land resources are tangibly finite.
They took us on a long, winding drive through a landscape packed with lush green vegetation, to a small plot with multiple layers: eucalyptus trees leafing out on top, and spiky pineapple plants hugging the ground.
Our guide explained that this was both a physical and social experiment. Not only was this plot a combination of different plants, staggered in rows to maximize the available sun and soil, but it was also a joint management effort between the company and local farmers. The company owned the trees, the farmers owned the pineapples, and they had worked out a mutually beneficial system for sharing the work and the profits.
This approach, with its multiple competing interests and agendas, certainly introduces its own challenges, and it’s not nearly as clean-cut for a company as purchasing land and building a fence to mark the clear border between where the company ends and the community begins. But in a world where resources are increasingly limited and must serve multiple needs, it was intriguing to see a company adapting to those constraints by operating outside of traditional boundaries.
About the Author(s)
Laura Ediger , Associate Director, Advisory Services
Laura works with companies in Asia to address corporate responsibility issues primarily in connection with localized strategies for sustainable sourcing, supplier assessment and development, and stakeholder and community engagement... Read more →
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