Exploring the potential of long‐term agreements for achieving landscape‐scale environmental recovery

This systematic review examines existing literature on environmental long‐term agreements (LTAs), such as conservation covenants, to identify the enablers and barriers to adoption and thus their potential for use in new contexts such as across land boundaries. To achieve environmental and societal targets, there is a clear and urgent need for more ambitious, longer‐term agri‐environment funding mechanisms which operate at a large scale. This is, in part, due to the recognition by national governments that shifts in policy for long‐term sustainability are needed since many existing agri‐environment schemes have not had the desired outcomes. The recent inclusion of conservation covenants in the UK's Environment Act demonstrates one such attempt to address this issue. Through critically analyzing the use of LTAs across the world using a systematic rapid evidence assessment approach, this article assesses the potential of these agreements to deliver landscape‐scale environmental benefits and public goods that are increasingly being sought by national governments as they strive for transformative policies to prevent and mitigate environmental and climate catastrophes. Exploring the enablers and barriers to adoption, alongside examples of successful LTAs, we provide an overview from which interested parties—policymakers, land managers, and private enterprises, among others—can begin to understand the opportunities and barriers which surround these agreements. Overall, this literature review identifies several factors likely to affect the uptake of LTAs, including concerns around land managers' and stakeholders' real/perceived capacity to engage, a need for flexibility, finance structures, and how monitoring and evaluation are managed. This article is categorized under: Climate and Environment > Circular Economy Climate and Environment > Ecosystem Services Climate and Environment > Net Zero Planning and Decarbonization Policy and Economics > Regional and International Strategies