The climate crisis, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and entrenched poverty affect us all. Yet, no individual, community, business, or government can tackle these challenges alone.

LandScale is a new initiative to help address these challenges by providing a standardized approach for assessing and communicating the sustainability performance of landscapes where key commodities are produced. LandScale’s lead partners⁠—the Rainforest Alliance, Verra, and the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance⁠—are pleased to announce the first LandScale public consultation. We invite you to provide your input and help ensure that this initiative brings the greatest possible benefit for landscape sustainability.

Why Is LandScale Needed?

LandScale responds to the urgent need to think bigger and collaborate across sectors, landscapes, and jurisdictions to solve complex environmental and social challenges. By distilling the complexity of landscapes into reliable information on sustainability performance and trends, LandScale helps drive decisions and incentives that contribute to improving landscape sustainability over time. Commodity buyers, investors, governments, and those involved in landscape initiatives can use LandScale to help identify landscape risks, inform management interventions, monitor progress, and credibly demonstrate results.

Dr. Christopher Stewart, Head of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability at Olam International and member of the LandScale Advisory Group, said: “Conversion and over-exploitation of forests and other natural habitats for food, fuel, and fiber threatens our natural life support systems and the global climate, with serious implications for future generations. We need to farm better, in a way that contributes to thriving communities and regenerates the living world, and in a way that secures long-term supply of the commodities we need to feed a growing population. Current responses are insufficient. We must look beyond our own supply chains to strive for net positive impact at scale.”

Join our Consultation

The LandScale assessment framework is open for public consultation until October 15. We invite participation from anyone involved in jurisdictional or landscape approaches, or interested in innovative solutions to address today’s far-reaching sustainability challenges. Your feedback on LandScale is critical to ensure that it is practical, robust, and helps to drive improvements in landscape-scale sustainability.

To participate in the consultation, or learn more about LandScale, please visit www.landscale.org.

 

 


 

LandScale is being developed and field tested by a growing coalition of global partners, led by Rainforest Alliance, Verra, and the Climate Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA), who form the Secretariat. To date, partners include EcoAgriculture Partners, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Nature Conservation Research Centre (NCRC), ProForest, and Solidaridad.

A global advisory group, representing both subject matter experts and potential LandScale users, provides strategic input and guidance on the development of the LandScale initiative to help ensure it makes a significant contribution to driving improvements in landscape sustainability.

The initiative is enabled through support from the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and the BHP Foundation’s Environmental Resilience Global Signature Program.