🎙️Commonland's 4 Returns: A Path to Sustainable Landscapes, with Willem Ferwerda

🌎 Designing Nature’s Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast

Summary:

In this episode of Designing Nature's Half, hosts Rob Campellone and Tom Miewald engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Willem Ferwerda, founder of the international non-governmental organization Commonland. They dive deep into the innovative landscape restoration approach known as the 4 Returns framework, discussing its potential to inspire hope and drive sustainable change across large landscapes.

Key Points Discussed:

• Exploration of language nuances between landscape management and landscape conservation.

• The significance of timeframes in ecological projects versus traditional funding cycles.

• Insight into how words like “losses,” “risks,” and “returns” resonate across various stakeholder groups.

• Detailed explanation of the 4 Returns framework: Return on Inspiration (ROI), Social Returns, Natural Returns (biodiversity recovery), and Financial Returns (sustainable income generation).

• Understanding the importance of zoning within landscape restoration: Natural Zone (protected areas & wildlife corridors), Combined Zone (sustainable use areas including managed wildlife corridors), Economic Zone (gray infrastructure development areas).

• Discussion on implementing these concepts through collaborative visioning and planning processes involving local communities.

Episode Highlights:

1. Breaking Down Jargon: How terms like 'management' or 'conservation' might imply control over nature when we should be aiming at understanding it better to work alongside its systems.

2. A New Narrative: Addressing four types of loss—social, financial, and biodiversity loss; plus a crucial fourth loss often overlooked—the loss of hope—and how restoring inspiration is key in any successful landscape project.

3. Zoning for Success: Describing an accessible way to visualize landscapes by dividing them into three distinct zones each requiring different approaches but working together towards overall sustainability.

4. Time Is Of The Essence: Emphasizing that meaningful ecological progress requires long-term commitment far exceeding typical investment horizons, advocating for a minimum timeframe of 20 years for significant results.

5. On-the-Ground Application: Reflecting on real-life implementation challenges, such as engaging diverse stakeholders around common goals while respecting unique cultural perspectives and economic realities.

Conclusion:

Willem Ferwerda's insights provide listeners with an enriched perspective on approaching landscape conservation holistically by balancing human activity with natural ecosystems through strategic design principles rooted in collaboration and long-term thinking—a transformative model to address today’s most pressing environmental concerns while fostering resilience against future challenges.

Resources

• Commonland

• 4 Returns Framework

• Theory U

• 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People

For More Info:

• …or participation inquiries, visit www.designingnatureshalf.com

Credits:

• Research / Writing / Editing / Production by Rob Campellone & Tom Miewald;

• Cover Art / Logo by Lucas Ghilardi;

• Intro / Outro Voiceover by Tom Askin;

• Music Composed & Performed by Aleksey Chistilin via Pixabay

Transcription:

[00:03] Intro / Outro: Mind Matter Media presents Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast, where discussions center around the most current and innovative approaches to landscape conservation and design. This is the show for stakeholders who want to adapt to the climate crisis, halt biodiversity loss, and change the world by designing sustainable and resilient landscapes through collaborative conservation action.

[00:32] Rob: Hey, everyone, welcome to Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. I'm your co-host, Rob Campellone.

[00:42] Tom: …and I'm your other co-host, Tom Miewald. So, Rob, I'm really excited about this week's guest, Willem Ferwerda. He founded an international NGO focused on landscape restoration and management called Commonland. I've been long interested in landscape approaches outside of the United States. There are different approaches, methods, and frameworks that are outside of the U.S. So, I just found it really interesting what Commonland produced. They really impressed me when I heard about them two or three years ago. What really impressed me was their framework called 4 Returns, which provides a nice synthesis of the solution space of landscape management. I want to note something important here, too, Rob, that we talk a lot about landscape conservation, but as we talk with Commonland and 1000 Landscapes, it's more about landscape management or restoration that is the focus. And so, conservation being one component, again, that would be a good topic to explore, kind of the difference of those different terms.

[01:38] Rob: Yeah, let me quickly provide my perspective on that, if I can, Tom, since you opened that door. What I hear you saying is that the broad term of landscape management incorporates a broader suite of activities, one of which is conservation, but it may also include restoration and resource extraction and potentially even include a larger suite of activities on the landscape, like development. If that's the case, I don't actually think there's much of a difference between landscape management and landscape conservation, except for the perceived notion that by using the term management, we're saying we know what we're doing in terms of sustainably managing the landscape, and I'm not convinced we actually do, at least in this age of the Anthropocene. And I say that as someone who has two degrees and a 30-year career in natural resources planning and management, there's a body of literature out there that suggests that that may have been the case during the relatively stable Holocene epoch, but that the assumptions that we use during the Holocene won't necessarily hold up in the age of the Anthropocene, and as such, an entirely new model must be developed. I think the idea of landscape conservation, and for me, that means conserving sustainable landscapes for people, planet, and prosperity, opens the door to a new transformational approach to how we perceive and live on the land. To this day, that transformational approach isn't fully realized, but we're getting there, and organizations like Commonland are proof that we're moving in the right direction. I'd love to hear Willem's perspective on that during our round of questions. Maybe that'll be my first question to Willem when the time comes.

[03:47] Tom: So, let's go ahead and introduce our guest, Willem Ferwerda. Willem is the founder of Commonland, a nonprofit foundation that supports local actors to develop long-term solutions at a landscape scale for biodiversity, carbon, regenerative agriculture, businesses, and communities. He lived and worked with poor farmers on the impact of agriculture and the recovery of natural vegetation. After finalizing his studies, he organized expeditions to remote natural areas in Latin America and Europe. In 1995, Ferwerda set up the Dutch-funded Rainforest grants program at IUCN Netherlands. From 2000 to 2012, he led IUCN Netherlands as executive director, set up ecosystem grants programs working on wetlands, rainforests, and grasslands in more than 40 countries and 1500 projects. In 2005, he founded, together with Eric Egon, Zender, and McKinsey, a business network to enable a dialogue between business CEOs and conservation leaders in four countries in the Netherlands. This resulted in an agreement on biodiversity between VNO NCW, or the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers, and 35 nature organizations in 2010. In 2012, he developed a practical way to restore large landscapes, the 4 Returns framework that was inspired by the ecosystem approach of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. IUCN published it. In 2013. He founded Commonland to build proof of that concept of on-the-ground work by using that framework. Ferwerda is an Executive Fellow at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, a team lead at the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management in Switzerland, an advisor and or board member of several organizations such as the Charles Darwin Foundation, the Princess Irene van Lippbeisterfeld Nature College Foundation, and the 1000 landscapes for a billion people initiative and Regen ten. So, Willem, did I miss anything from your bio you'd like to add?

[05:42] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah, thank you very much, gentlemen. Lovely to be here, and thanks for the invitation. Yeah, I'm just a normal human being, and I love nature. I'm very much inspired by nature and especially have been working with indigenous people in Latin America. You know, a bio is something, but yeah, I'm trying to be humbled, trying to spread the word about what, you know, what I'm doing as an ecologist and as a normal human being. That's basically what you sometimes miss when you read out a bio. That's me. Yeah, I was raised in Amsterdam, but I actually realized after a few years in my thirties and forties that the cities weren't a place for me to live. So, I don't live in the city anymore, but outside.

[06:30] Rob: Hey, will, and welcome to the podcast. I want to give you an opportunity to respond to my perspective on Tom's comment about landscape management versus landscape conservation, which was that, in both cases, I think we're trying to achieve landscape sustainability. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[06:51] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah, I think here again, wording and narrative is very important. I'm trained and have been working in the conservation world for many, many years in Latin America and Europe, and also doing projects in Africa and Asia. Conserving the soil and, let's say, taking good care of the ecosystems that surround us should be a logical thing to do. And I bid you that it's very difficult. If you talk about management, you increasingly also talk about having control. But we don't have a lot of control. What we can do is try to understand nature and work with nature as much as possible, and restore and conserve the ecological functionality of landscapes. And that means, yes, you need to have protected areas. You need to have ecological corridors between protected areas. Agriculture or other forms of land use should be, as much as possible, sustainable. Those logical things should be at the forefront of what I call the restoration industry, and someday, it will come. So maybe the three words regenerative, restoration, and conservation are part of a setting in a landscape. And I can talk a little bit more about it later if that's okay.

[08:14] Tom: Yeah, no, we'd love to hear more about that. I think you're right that one of the things that's important is kind of a shared sense of language and narrative when communicating about something as complex and long term is landscape management, landscape conservation, landscape restoration, whatever you want to call it. So, what lessons have you learned over the years in terms of the use of language in your experience? For example, maybe you learned at some point that, you know, this word doesn't work here, but maybe it works there, or it resonates with a different audience. So, what kind of work has Commonland done to synthesize or make the language more universal?

[08:53] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah. Yeah. Now, when I was working at IUCN with, you know, philanthropists and public funders, I realized that time was a critical element. Most of those funders had their own ideas, and they were forced to fund activities within a timeframe of less than five years. And, of course, when you live and make a living on the ground and work with farmers and protected area managers, five years is nothing. You cannot do a lot. Within five years, you can do something, but not a lot. So, this timeframe was a real issue. Another thing is that you can protect or restore a small area with some millions, but if the wider area is destroyed because of a change of land use methodologies, you may argue that the project you're doing at the end will fail because, within that wider ecosystem, it will not survive. That's why scale is important. The most important issue is, of course, that within the economic system that we are part of now, biodiversity is not valued, and ecosystem services are very limited. Until now, maybe with the exception of carbon that is coming up. So, my whole career at IUCN was trying to find the right wording and words to bring in other actors in the field of conservation and restoration or in the field of ecosystem management, as some people might call it. But here, of course, we have to deal with the word management, as I mentioned before, management and control, and so on. So, when I left IUCN in 2012, I decided to dedicate my time for a year in a kind of a sabbatical in between phases to look for what are words that resonate with as many as possible stakeholders, you know, the finance, industry, business people, public funders and, you know, the politicians as well as people on the ground like farmers, protected area managers, indigenous people and so on. And I realized that search for wording was beyond the jargon where I came from, the jargon of ecosystem biodiversity, ecosystem services, etcetera, payment, your pez ret, all these, all these words. And I realized that in the end, there were a few words that resonated with everybody. And those were three words, actually: losses, risks, and returns. And, of course, these words vary in the different languages, whether you talk in Spanish or in Dutch, in English, in French, in German, or whatever. But still, these three words resonated everywhere. And that's when I started to think, how can I translate the principles of the ecosystem approach that you mentioned, Tom, which was endorsed by the conventional biological diversity already 24 years ago. These are very good principles, but theoretical principles that are difficult to use. How to translate those principles of sustainable landscape management into an approach that could be attractive to create a vision and to do the right things in the future and to create a kind of a plan for how to restore a large landscape and what kind of steps are needed. And if you really look at the degraded large landscape, you know, a deforested or over-harvested or monocultural area where you have a lot of erosion. You know, those landscapes, it could be a wetland system that has been drained or a rainforest that has been depleted or a grassland system that has been overgrazed. All those things. If you look at the landscape and you translate that into terms of loss, normally we would say there will be a lot of biodiversity loss in that landscape, but there are more losses: there are social losses because quite often communities are depleted and people are leaving those places. There are financial losses, not just from the big corpses that are acting in those landscapes, but definitely, smallholders will have financial losses, and local communities will have biodiversity loss. But I also realized, when talking to many people in those landscapes, that there was something else. What that was missing, and that was another loss. And that was the loss of hope and purpose and pride. That loss actually became one of the central pillars of my thinking when I realized that if you want to bring stakeholders together with a new landscape vision to bring hope back, you need to identify and talk about the loss of hope and the loss of purpose and the loss of pride and so on. So, those four losses actually helped me to frame a new narrative that was more attractive for people to buy into. What is landscape restoration and conservation by talking about returns. And the first return then, was the return of hope, or the return of inspiration. I deliberately called it ROI, the return of inspiration, because you can use the ROI in different ways, of course. Normally, people will tell you that ROI is the Return On Investment. But if you talk to people from businesses and successful businesses, they understand that ROI is not only about return on investment. It starts actually with the return of inspiration because you create a product or something that is inspiring or that gives people a kind of sense of pride or whatever. So, the return of inspiration is number one; you need to return inspiration and hope if you want to restore a landscape. And the second thing is, of course, to complement the social losses by the return of the social returns, communities that you want to have back in those landscapes, and the sense of purpose with a sense of good, you know, new kind of jobs in those landscapes, which is all about the return of income, financial returns in a sustainable way. And the most normal, the most logical one that we know in this podcast as well is, of course, the return of biodiversity and the return of healthy soils, the return of a well-functioning aquifer, these kinds of things. So, we call those natural returns. So, a restored landscape is characterized by four returns, four values, or four benefits, whatever you call it. I prefer to use the word return because you can explain it easier when you talk about losses and returns. The restored landscape will also, over time, be more resilient and thus will have fewer risks for people, governments, and businesses who are dealing with such a restored landscape. So here the word risk is coming in. And that's how I built that storyline in 2012 and wrote it down and published it under IUCN at that time when I, you know, during my sabbatical, and yeah, that was the starting point of Commonland, basically.

[16:07] Rob: I agree completely with your return on inspiration and this feeling of loss, of hope that people are feeling there, their disconnection with the land, if you will, which leads to, I think, that feeling of loss, that lack of hope for a future, a better future for all. And I really like how you've thought about building a response to that concern into your framework. I'd like to hear your perspective or hear you speak a little bit more about what the natural return looks like on the ground. I tend to think that you're probably speaking to the idea of restoring biodiversity and building resilient landscapes, if you will, but I want to give you an opportunity to expand on that.

[17:08] Willem Ferwerda: The four returns were a starting point. And what I did, I also put it as a generic starting point. And you can put generic key performance indicators under each return so you can in fact, measure progress. But of course, what is happening on the ground is a different thing. And that means you need to think, do those people living in those areas, do they have a profound understanding of what a landscape is? And some of them, yes, they do, but others, they don't. Even farmers, quite often, don't. So, I thought, how can we, how can we help people within such a massive area of 100,000 ha, or even more, understand what the landscape is and what are the components of such a landscape? What I did is I brought down, again in a language, the issue of zoning. For ecologists, it is quite easy. Scientists or ecologists, they look at a landscape and they see different ecosystems within that landscape. You know, a wetland here, a montane forest over there. You might have a savannah system there. So, there are different zones in such a landscape. But for many people, this is not understandable. They cannot read landscapes. So, what I did is I brought in the idea of zoning but in a very different way. I actually said, you know, each landscape is composed of three zones. You have a natural zone, which is the place where nature thrives you if you're lucky, those areas are protected. You know, protected areas where those protected areas are quite often connected through ecological corridors. That is what you could call the natural zone. And also, the places where you still have nature, but those are not yet protected, or are hill slopes where you still have remnant forests and so on. So that is a natural zone, and you want to have a large amount or a substantial amount of natural protected areas or zones in your landscape. The second zone is the place where you have land use, mostly agriculture. Quite often, those forms of agriculture are intensive, industrial, or consist of monocultures with a lot of chemical input. And what you prefer is that zone, that monoculture zone is being turned into what I call, in my language, a zone where you combine agriculture, productivity, with biodiversity. So, I call that the combined zone to make sure that people understand that you combine two things: productivity and biodiversity. And if you bring that up, if you look into what that is, then in the current wording, most people will explain it by that. That is the place where you have regenerative agriculture, or you have Agri-Forestry systems there, or places where you combine things with rotational grazing, you know, the Ellen Savery method and so on. So, this is the place where you produce in as far as possible, sustainable way. And there are different forms of sustainability. I mean, this is not all organic agriculture. This zone is transitioning, moving away from agriculture or land use, which is working against nature, towards new forms of agriculture and land use, trying to work with nature. And then you have the third zone, which is, I call it, the economic zone, which is the place where people live, where you have the hard infrastructure, where you have fabrics, and where you have cities and roads so that people recognize that a city is part of a landscape and that you are not disconnected within a city from a landscape, whether that landscape is just around the corner, and quite often in big cities or places like where I live in the Netherlands, where you have, of course, a huge impact on landscapes on the other side of the planet because of import of goods and services. But in general, each landscape should deliver well balanced tree zones. And in those three zones, you have a lot of activities and projects, whether those are commercial or not commercial protected area management. It helps to understand that you must strive for a well-balanced three-zone approach to achieve those 4 Returns. And that brings you to the next thing. And that is, you need time to make that happen. And that is maybe the most difficult thing to explain, because we tend to think in years or quarters, especially business people or investors. 15 years is a hell of a lot of time. But we all know that 15 years, from an ecological standpoint, is nothing. You can restore or protect something, but planting a tree is easy. But growing a tree is very difficult, and that takes decades or centuries sometimes. So, time is a very important component. And that's why we said okay, four returns are delivered by a three-zone approach in a minimum timeframe of 20 years, with the minimum in bold.

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[24:07] Rob: As a conservation biologist, I think in terms of protected areas, buffer zones and corridors, and then the larger matrix. And I think, you know, your three-zone approach fits in very nicely with the basic tenets of conservation biology, where protected areas fall within your protection zone. The combined zone is clearly what conservation biologists think of as buffer zones. Your economic zone is the larger matrix. You don't speak specifically to corridors, but they're probably folded into the combined zones because even in corridors, we could manage those for diverse uses. So, I think your three-zone approach is a sound one. And I like how you've thought through the framework within each of those three zones, Willem, so thank you for sharing that.

[25:17] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah, most welcome. And you are so right. I mean, you know, when I was working at IOCN, I was funding many projects in the tropics, the tropics, rainforest conservation, and many of those projects had buffer zones. So, you know, money was needed to, you know, pay park guards, protected area managers. But on the other hand, you wanted to develop a kind of, yeah, alternative industry or tourism industry around a protected area or national park in the buffer zone. But there was also a problem with the buffer zones. And you might know that if national parks became successful, buffer zones tended to be crowded. That means they were attracting people as a magnet to that protected area, with the result, at a certain stage, that because there were not enough jobs in those buffer zones, they were entering the park at night or started poaching or working in legal deforestation. I like the concept of buffer zone a lot, but I realized that within a landscape approach, you can make conservation only successful if you start to work on new regenerative businesses within that combined zone. And quite often, the combined zone or the buffer zone is much bigger than a protected area, as we talk about large landscapes. So, what I'm proposing, actually, is that many of the very intensive agricultural lands starting to think about how to move away from very intensive practices towards regenerative agriculture practices that are still very attractive from a commercial point of view because you will work with risk in a situation where climate change is increasingly influencing production. So, you need to build resilience into those agricultural landscapes. And that's why, indeed, the ecological corridors, while they are part of the natural zone, are lying physically, of course, in the combined zone because they're connecting areas.

[27:22] Tom: As you talk about this framework, this podcast focuses on landscape design and planning. I think these elements that you bring up are very relevant to how Rob and I have thought about landscape design and planning. I'm curious about what this looks like on the ground. Is there a mapping process? I see that in your five elements, there's this collaborative vision and planning step. So, in that step, is that where you would assess the zones within the landscape and where they are? And then, do you think about what a future scenario for those zones might look like? I'm just curious, like, how does that. It's not maybe particularly mapping per se that's happening, or maybe it is. How does that play out?

[28:08] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah, Tom, that's exactly how it goes. Imagine that in most of those landscapes, there are a lot of actors already working: local NGOs, protected area managers, local city councils that think about sustainability, and so on. Farmers that are already working on organic or regenerative ag farming, but most of them are quite isolated, and some of them like to work more together. And so, what happened when we started Commonland is that we were invited to some places to see. Can we help with this approach to create a better understanding among all those stakeholders? That was number one. And the second was, can we co create a landscape vision together? And that's what we did when we started to work with our local colleagues in South Africa and Spain, and later also in Australia and India; and even in our very dense, populated country, the Netherlands, we started to co-create a landscape vision. And within that process of co-creation, we use an approach called Theory U, which was developed by MIT, Otto Shermer, and the processing institute, which is a very effective approach to bringing stakeholders together and, with the portrait framework, helping them to understand and give them some guidance or give them a kind of a landscape lens, how they could see where the three zones were now and how they should evolve, let's say, the coming 2030 or 40 years. So, from a narrative and a language tool, it really helped. But in the end, you're right. You're just sitting around with a whole group of people around the map of an area. Identify where is the combined zone and you will probably realize it. They will probably realize that the combined zone does not exist. But you have a lot of agriculture, and you want to change those forms of agriculture over time or transform them into more regional EC practicalities. And that takes time. But the fact that people, farmers, conventional farmers, that they see from more, from a helicopter view what's going on in their landscape through the zoning and start to get it, that they need to change some of the practices and strengthen the connectivity through corridors and strengthen protected area management or park management, and on the other hand, transform the land use system. That zoning way of thinking helps a lot. While it may not be scientifically the right wording, it helps to bring people on board to create a landscape vision around the map at a certain stage. And that process, that is what we help to enable and to guide.

[31:05] Rob: I want to bring you back to the 4 Returns framework one more time because there's one more aspect of it that I find very intriguing, and that's regarding the financial return. You've alluded to it a number of times during our conversation already, how important it is to bring people that are living on the landscape, they're living, working, and playing on the landscape, the importance of bringing them into the process to ensure their own survival, their own sustainability on the landscape, while at the same time doing so in a sustainable manner as it relates to the critters that we care about. So how do you do that? What does that conversation look like with people not necessarily of a conservation mindset? Or maybe they are, but their own survival has to come first before they can begin to care about the landscape and the critters that live in it. How do you have that conversation? What does it look like? And how do you begin to build a sustainable economy, not only for the people who live on the landscape but for the landscape itself?

[32:34] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, Rob. I mean, this is, of course, very, very difficult because you come from a situation where most of the activities in those landscapes are, I tend to say, fueled by the degradation economy, intensive agriculture, clear-cutting, deforestation, you name it, pollution, it's all there. So, what happens first is that you enable people to look through a lens they haven't looked through before, the landscape lens, and therefore, we used the 4 Returns and the zoning, the timeframe, and so on. They very much welcomed that. We haven't been in sessions where they didn't like it; they loved it. And many of them, whether you were in South Africa or in Spain or other places, where we started to do this, and we are still active there, we opened up a new way of thinking for them, and that was exactly what we wanted to achieve. That is, they would have a better understanding of how ecology is enabling many of the processes that they are part of in such huge areas. The next step is, and then again, time comes in. If you want to help farmers move from “A” to “B,” from, let's say, non-sustainable to sustainable practices, there are many strings attached, and there are many barriers that you need to overcome. One of the first barriers is time. You cannot do this overnight because people have their income, and their income quite often is because of unsustainable agriculture. So, what are the first things you can do to help them move from A to B? First of all, is step-by-step learning from each other. There are some farmers out there quite often that already made that transition. So, we organize cafes or meetings where they exchange and where they can learn from each other. We also have set up in some of those places’ small regenerative ag companies, where we try to bring the right principles of regenerative ag into that country or into the landscape with protocols and guidance and help them to give access to markets, which is difficult. We have a regenerative almond company, Almond Renessa, in Spain. We set it up and olive oil and wine and so on; and that is moving in a good direction, but it really takes time. You need to have the right people on board that drive those processes. You need to work with farmers' associations that are out there already. You need to convince them to change and help them and enable them with funding to cover the value of debt that those farmers might have if they move from A to B. So that really takes time. But you also need to think about the bigger story. And the bigger story is again about risks and returns. What if you don't restore that landscape when the climate will change? There will be a huge risk from an infrastructure perspective. So, we recently came out with a publication and published a report on large-scale holistic landscape restoration and the finance of this in Europe. We used the example of large infrastructural investments, for instance, high-speed trains between two big cities, and the cost associated with that, and the stakeholder management processes you need to do to make sure that this high-speed train can run. And why it is easier to find funding for these large infrastructure projects, billions of dollars or euros. It is almost impossible to do the same thing for a large landscape while there are many people living in those places. So we are at the beginning, I think, of this process. We tested several companies. We set up several companies in the landscapes where we have been working, and we are looking into the payment for ecosystem services. We are also testing now in Zambia how we can work with carbon finance and carbon farming and cook stoves and all that comes together in what we call a landscape finance model or a blended landscape finance model of a landscape. And that is what we see there is that at least you need to have philanthropy available for a few decades to fund the process of people coming together, designing new ways of companies working on project activities in those three zones as a local engine. And it is very difficult to find funding for that local people engine at a landscape scale to move forward. But as soon as you have that in place, and there is a situation where you have a landscape partnership evolved and popping up with farmers, conservationists and local city councils working together to make this happen, and entrepreneurs, you create a new dynamic. And within that new dynamic, at first impact, investors started to become interested. Later, public funding and other investors started to look into what was happening here. And can we invest in regenerative ag companies or in carbon funding of a protected area and corridors? So, it is learning by doing, but it is super difficult because we are moving against the mainstream of our current economic model, which is still based on, if I may summarize it, degrading our ecosystems.

[38:25] Tom: Right. That is such an innovative approach to thinking about financing these landscape efforts. I think I look forward to watching how some of these efforts evolve. Really impressed. One of the things that I've always struggled with when talking about landscape conservation or management is the concept of time. Like, we talk about these large spaces or these large landscapes. But when I try to tell, I remember working for the government and trying to tell my supervisor, well, it takes 1020 years for this effort to really play out. And they kind of look at me a little strange, like we do four or five years here. So, what I found really refreshing about 4 Returns is that it articulates this number of years, 20 to 30 or a generation, before you can really start to see some of these Returns you're talking about. I guess the question what does that number represent, how did you get to that number, and how does that number resonate with various stakeholders, whether it be funders or whether it be people in the landscape?

[39:25] Willem Ferwerda: Yeah, yeah. This is so difficult. You're so right now, the number 20. You know, when I started thinking about this whole thing, you know, I was like you. I was always frustrated. You know, you need, you need decades and so on, or even longer. But when I was talking with investors and with family businesses, I realized that the number 20 had something magical because you could explain 20 with one generation. 20 years, more or less, is one generation. And especially family companies understand that very well. I'm not talking about listed companies because they have a very different dynamic. But family companies understand that you must think in generations, and 20 years stands for one generation. So that's why I started with a minimum of 20 years, 20 plus. And I could explain that. I could explain it to many of those family businesses, and some of them have, you know, they also have their own philanthropic foundation. So, when I started Commonland, I needed to look for funding for at least 20 years because this was the time you could do something right. And that was difficult at the beginning. It still is very difficult, to be honest, because many of the philanthropic foundations, as well as the public funders, still think in five years and have the, their, you know, have their own criteria. But I also learned that, and this is, again, something that has to do with the narrative, and it has to do with, I call it a reality, the reality of what is happening on the ground. And if you, you know, we all know what is happening on the ground, and we all know that that is really taking a lot of time. And that reality is not very well received in the reality of the vast moving world of economic and investments and all the money world, the Wall Street and the money world. But I learned also to talk to funders and to big corps. If they approached me and told me that I was working in a very idealistic way, I challenged them and said, listen, I think that if you really see what's happening on the ground, your way of working is idealistic, and my way of working is realistic. So, I changed that conversation. And that was good because then you finally had a better and more profound conversation with each other. Because many people in cities don't understand the reality of what it is to be a farmer, what it is to be working on the ground with your boots on, planting trees, or whatever you do there. The reality of indigenous people, protected area managers, foresters, and farmers is not well understood. And that reality is about decades and not about five years or three years. It is actually about seven generations.

[42:30] Rob: Speaking of time, Willem, afraid we're running out of it. But this has been a great conversation, and we're very thankful for having you as a guest today. We appreciate your time and the information you provided. Do you have any parting thoughts before we end our podcast?

[42:50] Willem Ferwerda: Oh, thank you. No, it's wonderful to have this conversation. It's always too short, I know, because there's so many things going on. You know, I think what is super important is that more people start to work together on these topics. Whether they come from the business world, the finance world, or the farmers' world, we all need to restore our lives, to restore and conserve the essence of our life support system. And I'm optimistic that whatever timeframe we are now, with all the polarization and the wars and whatever, this message will land well, especially with the next generation, and that there is no alternative than working on a restorative or regenerative economy. So, it will come one day or another, and it would be wonderful to continue this quest together with you and others.

[43:42] Rob: Yes, I think it's safe to say that Tom and I would love to have your back, Willem, and explore more deeply some of the different aspects of your 4 Returns framework. Tom, do you have any parting thoughts to share?

[43:57] Tom: I would love to have Wilma on again at some point. We could dive into some of these questions later, but no. Thank you so much for this great conversation.

[44:04] Willem Ferwerda: Lovely. Yeah, I would love to come back. Thank you very much for having me here.

[44:09] Rob: Okay, well, thanks again to our guest, Willem Ferreira. And thank you, our listeners, for tuning in, too. Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. I've been your co-host, Rob Campellone.

[44:24] Tom: I've been your other co-host, Tom Miewald. Join us every two weeks for another informative episode of Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast. Thank you.

[44:34] Intro / Outro: Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast is researched, written, edited, and produced by Rob Campellone and Tom Mee Wald. Lucas Gallardi created the Designing Nature's Half cover art and logo design. Tom Askin is the voice behind the intro and outro, and the music was written and performed by composer Aleksey Chistilin via Pixabay. Designing Nature's Half: The Landscape Conservation Podcast is a proud member of Mind Matter Media, a startup multimedia network whose mission is to change the world by designing sustainable and resilient landscapes for people, planet, and prosperity.

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