Collective sustainability goals

For a landscape initiative to drive meaningful and lasting change, stakeholders must define clear, long-term sustainability goals. This sub-criterion evaluates whether the initiative has established measurable goals that reflect social, environmental, and economic priorities, and whether there is a process in place to regularly review and update these goals to adapt to evolving landscape conditions.

Good practice considerations for collective sustainability goals include:

• Being informed by a context analysis or similar assessment of current landscape conditions and stakeholder priorities (e.g., LandScale baseline performance assessments).

• Addressing social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability.

• Being accompanied by targets, measurable metrics with baseline data, and short- and medium-term milestones.

• Being regularly reviewed and updated as needed to reflect changing conditions in the landscape.

Requirements and validation criteria

To assess whether a landscape initiative has established long-term sustainability goals, LandScale requests specific information via tailored questions. Submitted materials are used to evaluate and validate the extent to which the collective sustainability goals sub-criterion is met.

Requirements	Validation criteria
Collective sustainability goals.	A list of the landscape initiative's long-term collective sustainability goals is provided, including start and end years for each goal. At least three goals should be identified and should cover social, environmental, and economic priorities.
Alignment with targets, metrics, and milestones.	The collective sustainability goals are clearly supported by targets, measurable metrics with baseline data, and short- and medium-term milestones.
Goal definition process.	A clear description of how the sustainability goals were defined is provided, including: Whether they were informed by a context analysis, baseline study, or other similar assessment. Whether they align with existing sustainability frameworks. Whether stakeholders were consulted in the goal definition process.
Goal review and update process.	A clear description of the process for reviewing and updating the goals over time is provided, including: The stakeholders responsible for the review process. The frequency of reviews. The decision-making process used to reach consensus on updates.

Once validation is complete, the collective sustainability goals sub-criterion on the wheel at the top of the initiative's profile will be filled to reflect the assigned maturity level, with validated information visible throughout the profile unless it is set to private.