LandScale

Description

Current efforts to reverse declines in ecosystem health while improving a growing population’s well-being are not advancing at the pace or scale needed. To succeed, we need to think bigger and collaborate.

LandScale – developed by the Rainforest Alliance, Verra, and Conservation International with support from a growing coalition of partners – is a new approach to drive improvements in sustainability at scales beyond a single community, farm, or project. It provides an impartial, holistic, and globally recognized system for assessing the cumulative impact of activities within landscapes dominated by natural resource-based industries.

NGOs, the private sector, donors, and governments working at the landscape level can use LandScale to track trends, make effective decisions, and credibly communicate impact. By making reliable information about landscape performance widely available, LandScale helps link financial and market incentives to improvements in sustainability at landscape scale.

There are several components of LandScale. These include:

• Assessment framework: A set of goals related to improvements in ecosystem health, human well-being, governance, and production of key agricultural and forestry crops; indicators; and performance metrics to measure critical aspects of landscape sustainability status and trends.
• Assessment guidelines: Step-by-step guidance for conducting a LandScale assessment, including direction on defining the boundary of a landscape, selecting relevant indicators and performance metrics, and collecting data and reporting results.
• Verification mechanism: A process for evaluation of LandScale assessments, which includes checking that users have adhered to the assessment guidelines and have used suitable data.
• Claims guidelines: Guidance on the type of claims users can make based on a LandScale assessment, including eligibility criteria for making claims.
• Reporting platform: An online tool (available from mid-2021) that facilitates the assessment process for users and publicizes assessment results for decision-makers such as commodity buyers, investors, and governments.

For more information, visit the LandScale website.