Multifunctional Landscapes

Across the world, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, land and water degradation, climate risks, and inequality are deeply interconnected. Yet responses have often been fragmented, advancing single objectives in isolation and creating trade-offs elsewhere. MFL responds to this challenge by treating landscapes as the unit of transformation, enabling integrated approaches that deliver food production, ecosystem restoration, biodiversity conservation, climate resilience, livelihoods, nutrition, and social inclusion simultaneously. 

The Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program operates across diverse regions and agroecological contexts, focusing on areas where pressures on food systems, ecosystems, and livelihoods are most acute and where integrated approaches can deliver high impact. 

Food systems and land use sit at the center of multiple global crises. Agriculture and food systems are major drivers of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions, while ecosystem degradation undermines food production, water regulation, and climate resilience. At the same time, nearly three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, and heat stress, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Despite decades of investment, many responses remain sector-based and fragmented, focusing on productivity, conservation, or climate mitigation in isolation. This has often led to unintended trade-offs, where gains in one area undermine progress in others. The core challenge is not a lack of solutions, but the absence of approaches that can manage trade-offs and unlock synergies at the scale where these challenges intersect: the landscape.

Landscapes are where ecological processes, production systems, governance arrangements, markets, and social relations converge.  These dynamics play out across interconnected scales, from individual farms and plots to forests, rangelands, wetlands, and aquatic systems. Decisions about land use, water management, food production, and conservation are negotiated in real places, linking farm-level practices with broader landscape processes. 

Working at landscape scale allows the Program to address multiple objectives simultaneously, align local action with national and global goals, and generate solutions that are context-specific yet transferable. 

The Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program works through Multifunctional Living Landscapes, place-based territories for integrated landscape transformation. These are  operational landscapes where research, policy, investment, and local action intersect. 

Within Living Landscapes, CGIAR researchers work with partners to: 

• co-design context-specific solution bundles 
• align land, water, food, and ecosystem management 
• improve landscape governance and institutional arrangements 
• Engage in policy processes and developing enabling environment 
• Strengthen agency and inclusive participation (GEYSI) 
• mobilize and align finance mechanisms 
• generate evidence for scaling and transfer across similar systems 

MFL brings together multidisciplinary expertise across CGIAR centers and partners, combining biophysical, social, economic, and policy sciences to address complex landscape challenges. This includes expertise in agroecology and restoration science, spatial analysis and landscape modelling, markets and sustainable finance, governance gender, youth and social inclusion, and integrated monitoring and learning systems. 

The Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program is designed and delivered with partners. Governments, communities, Indigenous Peoples, producer organizations, NGOs, private sector actors, and financiers co-lead landscape visioning, solution design, governance, and implementation. CGIAR contributes integrated science, convening power, and evidence systems, while partners provide local knowledge, legitimacy, delivery pathways, and scaling leverage.