From Insetting to Collective Action: New Models for Integrated Landscape Financing

Corporate action on nature has evolved rapidly over the past decade: from offsetting impacts elsewhere, to insetting nature-based interventions directly within a company’s own value chain. Yet even well-designed insetting projects run into a structural limit – water, soil and ecosystem risks operate at the scale of a river basin or landscape, not at the scale of a single company’s supply chain. A company that solves its own water problem can inadvertently create one for its neighbours, its suppliers, or the public utilities it depends on.

This session traces that evolution in practice, using two live examples from Italy: the emerging Lombardy Water Resilience Initiative in the Lombardy Region and the Arno Basin Water Resilience Lab, a public–private collective action bringing together global brands, local institutions and land consortia to manage water risk at basin scale. Etifor | Valuing Nature coordinates the initiative, promoted by Kering, with the scientific support of Conservation International and the DAGRI Department of the Università degli Studi di Firenze.

Building on a real bottleneck encountered by a luxury group’s tannery – where a single-site water-recycling effort was blocked because it would have overloaded the local treatment plant – the session will show why landscape-scale, multi-stakeholder financing models are becoming necessary, not optional, and how public capital, private investment and community actors can be structured together to unlock them.

The session will conclude with an interactive discussion on what integrated landscape financing requires in practice – governance, trust, shared metrics and blended finance – and what would help such models scale beyond Italy to other basins represented at COP17.