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The Landscape Assessment Framework

CLIMATE

Implementing a landscape approach addresses our dual need to protect ecosystems and catalyze more sustainable agricultural production. But how do we assess a landscape’s progress toward these objectives?

The landscape approach has emerged as a method for holistically managing various land uses and stakeholder needs within a region, simultaneously addressing multiple objectives by seeking synergies and minimizing tradeoffs.

Conservation International’s Landscape Assessment Framework (LAF) was a structure for measuring, monitoring and communicating the sustainability of a landscape to guide local activities, inform policy and advise investments.

The LAF was not a system for monitoring and evaluation of project outcomes, but rather of indicators that collectively characterize the sustainability of a landscape against broader management objectives. LAF application enabled stakeholders to answer questions about a landscape like: What is driving ecosystem degradation? How sustainable is the level of agricultural productivity? Are people benefiting from interventions?

Why is it important?

Application of the LAF can help provide stakeholders with a holistic view of landscape sustainability, credible data to inform decision-makers and consistent information to support adaptive management.

Key features

Holistic assessment by using relevant indicators across all four dimensions of landscape sustainability — natural capital, sustainable production, human well-being and governance
High level of adaptability for various features and contexts
Reliance on existing sources of credible, low-cost data
Regular updates to monitor trends in the landscape
Production of dashboards and user-friendly summaries to maximize accessibility and communicability

Communicating results

The LAF provides three unique outputs to support effective decision-making and communications:

A framework summary card to capture overlying trends at the landscape level, including the Sustainable Landscape Index which displays progress of indicators against targets as an axis of a radar graph
An interactive online dashboard for monitoring and communicating
Web maps allowing stakeholders to perform simple analysis and interpret the spatial dynamic of the landscape

Landscape Assessment Framework Concept and Guidelines (Executive Summary)Landscape Assessment Framework Concept and Guidelines Landscape Assessment Framework Concept and Guidelines (Spanish)Sustainable Landscape Approach: Implementation Guidebook Sustainable Landscape Approach: Implementation Guidebook (Spanish)