24th March – The High Carbon Stock Approach is pleased to announce that its 2021 – 2025 Strategic Business Plan (SBP) was launched today at its bi-annual Steering Group virtual meeting. The plan will work towards fulfilling HCSA’s Mission and Vision:
Mission: End commodity-driven tropical deforestation by providing land managers with practical, credible, and inclusive tools for land use planning.
Vision: Natural forests linked to commodity production and consumption are conserved and restored throughout the tropics in cooperation with indigenous peoples and local communities.
By working with HCSA members, land use managers, communities, partners, and other stakeholders the HCSA aims to achieve its 2025 goal of conserving 5 million hectares of forests through scaling up the use of the HCS Approach methodologies. These efforts will be employed through three main strategies:
- Strategi 1: Ensuring successful implementation within commodity certification and verification schemes, and support initiatives, using the palm oil sector as a springboard for other commodities.
- Strategi 2: Integrating HCSA with landscape and jurisdictional approaches and independent smallholder/farmer support initiatives that present the greatest impact potential.
- Strategi 3: Advocating and facilitating the connection of active and prospective HCSA Toolkit users (supply chain actors: growers, smallholders, mills, commodity users etc.) to technical partners with comprehensive HCS-HCV (High Conservation Value) and community rights mapping capabilities.
In pursuit of these three strategies, HCSA will evolve into a centre of excellence for halting tropical deforestation supported by a significant scaling up of the HCSA Secretariat’s technical, outreach, and awareness building capabilities. This will be done in conjunction with HCSA technology, revenue, and member benefit enhancements amongst other advancements.
In addition to the 2025 goal of achieving 5 million hectares of forest conservation through scaling up the use of the HCS Approach methodologies, the SBP contains ten-core metrics linked to financial, organisation, HCSA Toolkit users, and Toolkit impacts/performance targets that will be used to also track and report the success of the implementation of the SBP.
The 2021 – 2025 Strategic Business Plan, and the ambitious growth targets detailed within it, was developed based on input from a performance assessment of the HCSA conducted in 2020, and feedback provided by HCSA Steering Group members, secretariat staff, and external stakeholders at each stage of the development process. HCSA’s SBP ambition is aligned with the critical need for urgent and accelerated action to end commodity-driven deforestation and achieve tropical forest conservation. The implementation of the plan will further position the High Carbon Stock Approach as a credible multi-stakeholder initiative with a leading role in driving forward nature-based solutions to mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity and advance actions in cooperation with indigenous peoples and local communities to uphold their rights and livelihoods.
