Restoration 
Plantations and tree crop commodities 
Enhanced nutrition and food security 
Biodiversity, safeguarding and conservation 
Nationally determined contributions 
Bioenergy and biomaterials 
Blue carbon and peatlands 
Climate change adaptation 
Landscape governance 
Gender 
Silvopastoral systems 
Market-based agroforestry-forestry 
Farm-forest policy interface 
Agroecology 
Livelihood trajectory modelling and assessment 
Inclusive finance and business models 
Innovating finance for sustainable landscapes 
Public and private commitments to zero deforestation 
Orphan tree crops 
Effectiveness of approaches to sustainable supply 
Quality of FTA research for development 
Sentinel landscapes 
Foresight 
Seeds and seedlings delivery systems 
Smallholder tree-crop commodities 
Scaling through responsible finance and investments
Finance service providers (FSPs), such as private banks, development finance institutions and institutional investors, could potentially play an important role in augmenting corporate social and environmental performance in forest and tree-crop value chains through the adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. However, more responsible FSPs do not necessarily lead to increased finance for smallholders.
One challenge is to identify mechanisms that both promote more widespread adoption of ESG among a greater number of FSPs and increase their capacity to effectively leverage their potential influence over corporate strategy and practice. Another challenge is to find more effective ways to link progress in responsible finance by FSPs with improvements in smallholder and SME access to finance for forest and agroforestry-related investments, which could also make a positive contribution to improved land use and enable restoration in forest landscapes. FTA’s work will examine ways to address these two challenges.
| Current and planned key research activities on responsible finance are: | |
| • | Analyzing the conditions and mechanisms that incentivize FSPs to more explicitly integrate ESG or similar criteria into their products in different institutional and economic contexts; |
| • | Assessing the impacts of ESG-conditional finance on the social and environmental performance of different types of corporate value chain actors across disparate socioecological contexts; |
| • | Identifying metrics and tools that enable FSPs to better screen prospective corporate clients and evaluate the social and environmental performance of their financial portfolios; |
| • | Analyzing innovative financial mechanisms implemented by FSPs to make financial goods and services more accessible to smallholders and SMEs in timber and tree-crop value chains. |