Get started with LandScale assessments

Our guidelines provide detailed instructions on how to conduct a holistic assessment of your landscape boundary using LandScale. Planning ahead and understanding each step will help ensure an efficient process and high-quality results.

Introduction to LandScale

LandScale offers a powerful platform for conducting holistic landscape assessments, helping you capture the essential dynamics of ecosystems, human well-being, governance, and production within your landscape. With LandScale, you can develop meaningful baselines, track progress, and showcase the sustainability impact of your actions over time.

These assessments are more than a tool for measurement—they are a catalyst for collaboration. They engage stakeholders to build a shared vision for the landscape’s future, ensuring that everyone works toward common sustainability goals.

Introducing LandScale: A user-friendly assessment tool developed by the Rainforest Alliance, Verra, and Conservation International.

Understanding landscape assessments

A landscape-level performance baseline is crucial for tracking sustainability progress. Capturing the initial state of your landscape—encompassing ecosystems, human well-being, governance, and production—provides valuable insights into its overall health and highlights areas for improvement. This approach allows you to measure the effectiveness of sustainability efforts over time through baseline assessments and future reassessments, while also engaging relevant stakeholders in shaping a shared vision for the future.

Conducting a landscape assessment with LandScale offers multiple benefits. For instance, it establishes a data-driven foundation for monitoring progress and unlocks performance-based financing opportunities. Further, LandScale’s validation and local review processes enhance the credibility of your results, ensuring they are reliable and trusted by stakeholders.

Conducting an assessment with LandScale

LandScale simplifies the assessment process with a step-by-step workflow, thorough guidelines, and a library of field-tested indicators and metrics. The platform’s resources—including technical support and customization options—empower you to collect relevant data and tailor the assessment to your landscape’s needs. By leveraging these tools, you can efficiently establish a robust baseline for your landscape and ensure your assessment is both accurate and impactful.

To get started with your assessment, follow these core steps:

• Step A (overview): Assemble your team and define the scope of your landscape.
• Step B (indicator and data selection): Select relevant metrics and determine the necessary data for your assessment.
• Step C (results): Review and analyze your data, validate the results, and prepare to present your findings.

Detailed instructions for each step are provided throughout these guidelines, ensuring you have the information needed to conduct a thorough and effective assessment.

Landscape assessments from around the world

Explore landscape assessments completed with LandScale by initiatives from around the world to inspire your own efforts. These examples showcase diverse approaches and outcomes:

Latin America: Sierra de Tapalpa, Mexico

Sierra de Tapalpa in Jalisco, Mexico provides sanctuary for a wide variety of plants and animals, productive land for farming, and diverse livelihoods for the 48,000 people who call it home. But unsustainable practices threaten this fragile landscape, with implications for both people and nature. Since 2020, the Rainforest Alliance has been working with local communities to improve sustainability, and they’ve used LandScale to guide their actions.

Visit Sierra de Tapalpa’s LandScale profile to learn more.

Image © Rainforest Alliance.

Africa: Kunzila Watershed, Ethiopia

The Kunzila watershed in Ethiopia's Amhara Regional State supports the livelihoods of over 36,000 people but faces sustainability challenges due to significant land use changes. To address these issues, the Water and Land Resource Center (WLRC) and the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV) conducted a LandScale assessment, evaluating the landscape’s ecosystem health, human well-being, governance, and production. The assessment established a crucial baseline for sustainability efforts, highlighting the need for improved land governance and sustainable land use practices.

Visit Kunzila Watershed's LandScale profile to learn more.

Image © WLRC.

Asia: Sacred Himalayan Landscape, Nepal

Spanning the eastern Himalayas from Nepal through India and into Bhutan, the Sacred Himalayan Landscape stands out globally for its unique habitats, ecosystem, and biodiversity. Recognizing its significance, RECOFTC has identified a section of this landscape in Nepal as one of its 10 focal landscapes. RECOFTC’s LandScale baseline study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the area’s ecological and socio-economic systems, aiming to understand their interconnectedness and to establish a baseline against which future sustainability efforts can be measured.

Visit Sacred Himalayan Landscape’s LandScale profile to learn more.

Image © RECOFTC. Members of the Shree Chhap Deurali Community Forest in Sindhupalchok, Nepal, collaborate to create a resource map, illustrating their participatory approach to sustainable forest management.