Thinking ‘Outside the Boundaries’ for Land-Use Challenges

Authors

• Laura Ediger

  Former Associate Director, BSR

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.