Logo

The story

Over the past 8 years, Commonland and our landscape partners have been exploring what it means to develop long-term, large-scale holistic landscape restoration programmes based on the 4 Returns framework. Our landscape partners in Australia, The Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and India, have worked hard to unite stakeholders, develop a future vision, and put this vision into practice through restoration activities, business development, knowledge exchange, and inspirational initiatives.

This has led to an incredible boost of hope and connection in the landscapes, inspiring many farmers to make the transition to regenerative agriculture and an economic boost due to new businesses.

These milestones have brought the question to the surface: how do we bring this progress to the next level, and scale our impact in and beyond our landscape? We have a common ambition to make landscape restoration the new normal. An ambition that’s crucial to the system shift needed to reverse our planet’s massive degradation and species extinction.

To explore this question, we went on a 3-month (online) learning journey together. In these ‘Mountain Trails’, we prioritised time for learning and exchanging our experiences together. We dived into theories and matched them with first-hand experience.

In this series of stories, we highlight several of our learnings. We hope they provide you with inspiration for your scaling journeys.

  1. 4 Returns in Practice | Scaling the impact of holistic landscape restoration – recording & main takeaways from our Summit
  2. From scaling solutions to creating resilience at scale
  3. Five characteristics of a resilient system
  4. Scaling in a landscape partnership
  5. Scaling the impact of Landscape Restoration: The Role of Governance
  6. Reaching New Heights in Systemic Impact: A Story of my Mountain Trail | by Luis Leblanc, Mountain Trail participant

If you’d like to get introduced to the landscapes that participated in this learning journey, check out their landscape stories:

To learn more about the topic, check out the list of further reading and tools that we’ve found helpful in our learning process.

Theories, food for thought & examples

1876 members are now active on 4returns.earth, connecting, sharing their field experiences, and creating new opportunities and initiatives together.

Join us by signing up as a member, or follow our work in the newsletter

Related Stories

All stories

The art-cycle route for a healthy and co-creative landscape

stories

Netherlands

inspiring community, learning and impact, mobilising people

Self-help groups and collective learning in Shambhupipar

stories

India (Chhattisgarh)

inspiring community, learning and impact, mobilising people

La Junqera restoration story

stories

inspiring community, learning and impact, regenerating farms

More related resources

Ten steps for a successful Community of Practice

toolbox

guide

learning and impact, mobilising people, partnering

No reviews

The value of soil

toolbox

educational tool

learning and impact, restoring nature

No reviews

Tag a friend?