LandScale assessment framework
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LandScale offers a standardized approach, delivered through its online platform, to assess and communicate the sustainability performance of landscapes. It provides the private sector, governments, and civil society with reliable information to guide and incentivize sustainability improvements at scale.
This section introduces the LandScale assessment framework, which is grounded in key international norms and methods for assessing sustainability, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The framework balances global consistency with local adaptability, featuring a hierarchical structure that encompasses four pillars of sustainability performance: ecosystems, human well-being, governance, and production. These pillars, along with their underlying goals, offer a holistic approach to sustainability assessment. Users can tailor the framework to different landscapes by selecting context-appropriate indicators and metrics.
Additionally, the LandScale platform allows users to create custom goals, indicators, and metrics within the framework to complement those provided by LandScale. The requirements outlined in this section apply to those seeking LandScale validation for their assessment and publication of results.
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The LandScale assessment framework incorporates several cross-cutting themes that transcend individual pillars or goals. These themes include climate change, gender, marginalized groups, human rights, and economic sustainability. They are woven through multiple sections of the framework, reflecting their connection to various social and ecological trends.
In addition to integrating these themes within several pillars, LandScale encourages assessment teams to analyze and interpret assessment results through the perspectives of these interconnected issues, ensuring a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of landscape sustainability.
The four pillars of the LandScale assessment framework represent broad sustainability themes: ecosystems, human well-being, governance, and production. These themes are particularly relevant in rural landscapes where agriculture, forestry, extractives, or other natural resource-based economic sectors are present. While the pillars are presented individually, they are deeply interconnected. For example, inadequate governance combined with unmet human needs can contribute to ecosystem degradation, which, in turn, may negatively impact human well-being and production.
Earth is home to a diverse set of natural ecosystems, including forests, savannas, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, and others. These ecosystems are repositories of biological diversity and provide critical ecosystem services that sustain human well-being, such as food provision, clean water and air, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, and cultural and aesthetic values.
However, the world’s natural ecosystems are disappearing at an alarming rate, with much of what remains facing significant degradation. This has led to accelerating biodiversity loss, substantial terrestrial greenhouse gas emissions contributing to the global climate crisis, and a declining capacity of ecosystems to deliver essential services like clean water.
This pillar covers sustainability elements related to healthy ecosystems, such as the conservation and restoration of natural ecosystems, the protection of biodiversity, and the maintenance or enhancement of key ecosystem services. Due to the inherent complexity of ecosystems, thoroughly assessing their sustainability would typically require an in-depth analysis of their composition, structure, and function. While such comprehensive evaluations are beyond the scope of most LandScale assessments, the assessment framework focuses on key indicators and proxies of ecosystem extent, health, and change that are usually assessable through secondary data.
Assessment teams are encouraged to leverage additional data and capacity when available to go beyond LandScale’s minimum requirements. This can include incorporating additional indicators, complementary metrics, and new primary data collection to supplement secondary data, allowing for more detailed and tailored assessments.
Human well-being is defined as a state of health, happiness, and prosperity. Sustainable landscape management is essential for achieving human well-being broadly across an area's human population. However, many landscapes face significant challenges, including high levels of poverty, food insecurity, poor health, and other social issues. These challenges are increasingly exacerbated by climate change, volatile and/or depressed markets, and political instability.
Such conditions are often linked to the unequal distribution of economic benefits derived from land-use activities. For example, workers and local communities, particularly in developing countries, often realize little value from their contributions, such as labor and land, while others benefit disproportionately.
Enhancing the equitable distribution of benefits, alongside sustainable landscape management, can improve human well-being. This includes ensuring a decent standard of living and safeguarding basic human rights, which are inalienable to all people. This pillar focuses on elements of sustainability that advance human well-being by improving living standards and respecting, protecting, and fulfilling basic human rights, particularly for vulnerable and marginalized groups.
Governance refers to the processes by which societies organize themselves to make and implement decisions. In the context of sustainable landscape management, good governance involves the decision-making and institutional processes necessary to achieve social, environmental, and economic development goals at the landscape level. Key attributes of good governance include minimizing corruption, ensuring the participation of all stakeholders—including vulnerable and marginalized groups—and responding effectively to current and future threats such as climate change, market volatility, political instability, and organized crime.
In commodity-producing landscapes, governance is particularly critical in areas related to land and resource use. In many regions, land and resource rights and tenure are unclear, resulting in rights abuses that disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalized groups. Additionally, land-use decisions and activities are often uncoordinated among government authorities and affected stakeholders, leading to poor resource use and management as well as resource depletion, degradation, and conflicts. These issues are compounded by external pressures such as climate change, unstable markets, and organized crime.
This pillar covers elements of sustainability related to good governance, including land and resource tenure as well as the processes for developing and implementing land-use policies and management practices. By ensuring robust governance structures, landscapes can better navigate complex challenges and foster sustainable, equitable development.
This pillar focuses on the need to provide natural resource-based commodities—including food crops, livestock, fiber, and minerals—and other economic activities, such as tourism, in ways that support local populations with economic benefits without compromising ecological values and services or harming human well-being. With finite supplies of suitable land, water, and other resources, producers must prioritize increased productivity, resource use efficiency, and positive impacts of these production systems. Achieving this is critical to reducing the pressure to convert new land for production—thereby preventing deforestation and habitat loss—while maintaining ecosystem services and ensuring the long-term economic sustainability of production systems.
The production pillar covers elements of sustainability related to sustainable and regenerative production practices, particularly in cultivated commodity sectors such as agriculture, agroforestry, and plantation forestry. However, it also allows flexibility for users to develop indicators and metrics for other sectors, such as non-renewable resource extraction (e.g., minerals) and extraction from natural ecosystems (e.g., timber harvesting from natural forests or fishery management in water bodies). Additional sectors, such as natural resource-based tourism, may also be included. If user demand grows for standardized measures in these other sectors, LandScale will work in consultation with recognized organizations focused on the sustainability of such sectors to develop and incorporate appropriate indicators and metrics.
It is important to note that this pillar addresses the practices, productivity, and input use efficiency of production sectors. The environmental and social impacts of these activities are captured separately in Pillar 1 (ecosystems) and Pillar 2 (human well-being), respectively. For example, the effects of crop production, mineral extraction, and logging activities on water quality would be reflected in the additional indicator 1.3.2 (water quality).
Goals represent the desired sustainability outcomes within each pillar. They are based on key sustainability concerns as defined and understood by scientific research and elaborated in major international conventions, frameworks, and commitments, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the New York Declaration on Forests, the Bonn Challenge, and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, among others.
Core indicators: These represent topics essential to holistic landscape sustainability and are applicable in all contexts. They are mandatory for all Validated by LandScale assessments and cannot be modified.
Additional (LandScale): These represent sustainability topics that may pose significant risks or opportunities in some landscapes but not others. While optional, they are strongly recommended in landscapes where they are relevant to the assessment’s goals. These indicators are included at the discretion of the assessment team and cannot be modified.
Additional (user-added): These are custom indicators outside the LandScale assessment framework, chosen to reflect specific interests or objectives of the assessment owner and/or landscape stakeholders. They are defined and included at the discretion of the assessment team.
For detailed definitions and justifications of each indicator and metric, download the Rationale for Indicators and Performance Metrics Table below:
For guidance on assessing the applicability of additional indicators, download the Landscape-dependent Indicators Criteria Table below:
Metrics are quantitative or qualitative measures that evaluate the status or trends of each indicator. When users set performance targets, metrics can quantify progress towards these targets through reassessments over time.
Essential metrics: These metrics are typically the best-fit measures for the indicator and are often based on reliable global data. Essential metrics are required for all core indicators. To complete an indicator, all essential metrics must be measured, with at least one essential metric per indicator.
Complementary metrics: These metrics provide additional information to assess the relevant indicator and are not substitutes for essential metrics. They may be included at the discretion of the assessment team.
User-added metrics: These are custom metrics created by the assessment team to meet specific measurement needs for either existing indicators or user-added indicators. User-added metrics can be categorized as either essential or complementary.
For additional indicators, assessment teams have more flexibility in selecting metrics. While the framework offers recommended metrics for some additional indicators, others rely on user-added metrics.
For detailed measurement descriptions of each metric included in the LandScale assessment framework, download the Performance Metrics Descriptions Table below:
Indicators represent the conditions and processes within the landscape that are indicative of performance related to the goals. They are defined based on their ability to provide meaningful information about sustainability performance and trends at the landscape scale. Indicator performance is assessed through the metrics outlined in the .
The LandScale assessment framework includes two categories of indicators: core and additional. Users can also define custom indicators, tagged as 'user-added,' to supplement the LandScale-defined indicators within the framework. Detailed definitions of each indicator type are provided in the section.
The LandScale assessment framework includes two categories of metrics: essential and complementary. Users can also define custom metrics, tagged as 'user-added,' to supplement the LandScale-defined metrics within the framework. Detailed definitions of each metric type are provided in the section.