Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives: A Collective Position Paper

Landscape initiatives bring stakeholders together in a defined geographic area to address prioritised sustainability challenges, such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, and livelihoods, through a collaborative approach. The power of landscape initiatives lies in aligning interests and priorities of key stakeholders, including local communities, practitioners, market actors, and local governments around collective goals, actions, and investment so that they are better able to finance and address systemic conditions that will deliver long-term sustainability impacts at a landscape scale.

With increasing interest and engagement in landscape initiatives, it is critical that all stakeholders have a simple and consistent understanding of the core elements of a mature landscape initiative. Twenty leading landscape practitioner organisations have come together to align on four core criteria and accompanying sub-criteria, and to define six applications for the criteria. The criteria present both a roadmap for new and existing landscape initiatives to improve their effectiveness and a means by which to assess the maturity of these initiatives for different purposes or use cases. While landscape initiatives will take different pathways to build out these criteria and sub-criteria over time, mature initiatives that have these criteria in place are likely to be more resilient, more attractive to investors, and better placed to deliver more durable sustainability impacts in the landscape.