Our Approach (original) (raw)

​The Rainforest Alliance is creating a more sustainable world by using social and market forces to protect nature and improve the lives of farmers and forest communities.

Instead of protecting nature from people, our alliance works to restore the balance between people and nature so they both thrive in harmony.

We are an alliance of people who pledge to take action. We do this because we want to shift markets toward being net positive for people and nature.

Why work with markets and companies?

Markets need to change. They need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

The Rainforest Alliance supports the communities that care for our most critical landscapes to thrive together with nature. We do this by accelerating and scaling up the social and market forces that protect, restore, and regenerate these ecosystems.

We want agricultural, food, and forestry supply chains to internalize different values; to not degrade—but restore, to not displace—but include, to work in harmony with people and nature—not against them.

We want markets to become the fastest and most scalable solution to the collapse of the Earth’s most critical ecosystems. We work in collaboration with millions of farmers and farmworkers to shift market incentives toward rewarding positive social, economic, and environmental impacts. By doing that, local communities become both the stewards and the primary beneficiaries of thriving landscapes.

We use a ‘continuous improvement’ approach. We partner with people and organizations to move from harmful and degrading practices to sustainable and regenerative ones. In short: We go where we’re needed.

Why form an alliance?

Global crises need a joint and systemic approach. We are an alliance of people who pledge to take action.

We need to move beyond the current mindset of fragmented, incremental, project-centric efforts which are holding us back.

Our alliance of more than four million farmers and farmworkers, as well as forest communities, companies, governments, civil society partners, and millions of individuals are committed to creating a world where people and nature thrive together.

Together we work to protect forests and biodiversity, take action on climate, and promote the rights and improve the livelihoods of rural people.

What’s the strategy?

Our strategy is to accelerate the speed and scale of impact through a virtuous cycle; where more sustainable farmers lead to more committed companies and consumers, leading to more investment and support for farmers, and so on. Everyone benefits from this cycle.

This shift in value creation is rooted in regenerative production systems that create a net-positive impact for people and nature—a win-win-win model:

• Rural Producers have more economic wellbeing, and are able to adapt and build resiliency, by implementing our sustainability standards. This in turn helps
• Global Citizens to build trust in our brand, and confidently use their choices responsibly, which inspires
• Companies to build stronger supply chains, greater stakeholder trust, shareholder confidence, consumer loyalty, and achieve their sustainability goals. This mobilizes
• Investors to support our market-based impact model, because governments, philanthropists, and institutions see a higher return on investment by protecting and restoring nature than by degrading it.

What are our interventions?

To shift markets to being regenerative and net positive, we must work with both sides of market forces.

Therefore, we use reinforcing offerings to shift both ‘supply’ and ‘demand’:

SUPPLY: Thriving Farm and Forest Communities

We work at the Supply level by developing:

DEMAND: Thriving Markets

We work at the Demand level with:

We support these interventions with our other strengths:

• Advocacy and government engagement
• Public communications
• Stakeholder engagement
• Thought and action leadership