Why ‘blended finance’ could help transitions to sustainable landscapes: Lessons from the Unlocking Forest Finance project

International policy commitments highlight the importance of balancing agricultural development with conservation of tropical forest landscapes for climate change mitigation (UNFCCC, 2015), biodiversity conservation (CBD, 2010), and generally sustainable development trajectories (UN, 2015). The Amazon basin has over the last decades become one of the major producer and exporter regions of agricultural commodities (Macedo et al., 2012) at the expense of rampant deforestation (Nepstad et al., 2014; Soares-Filho et al., 2006).