Enabling Systems-Oriented Reasoning of Landscape Resilience
Session Description
Most landscape and jurisdictional monitoring efforts assess ecosystems, human wellbeing, governance, and production as separate indicators rather than as an interconnected system, which makes it hard for the resulting data to reveal root causes or support durable resilience. LandScale, Rainforest Alliance's participatory monitoring framework for landscape-scale initiatives, set out to explore that gap directly: how do you move from tracking dozens of discrete indicators to reasoning about the interdependencies, trade-offs, and leverage points between them, without losing accessibility for the people who actually need to use the data?
The session opened by grounding attendees in what a landscape is and how LandScale's assessment framework works, then introduced landscape resilience through two lenses that don't always agree: a landscape initiative's interest in interconnected socioecological and economic systems, and a corporate or supply chain manager's interest in the stability of sourcing. Attendees then worked through a live case study from the Sierra Volcánica Biocultural Landscape in Mexico, split into corporate roles (a berry buyer and investor) and local initiative roles (an avocado growers' cooperative), reasoning through what the data showed, what was missing, and where corporate and community interests aligned or pulled apart.
Speakers
Alice Gottesman, Technical & Research Manager, LandScale
Kudzai Mpakairi, Technical Officer, LandScale
Edita Chavez, Sr Product Manager, LandScale
Watch the Session Recording
Key Takeaways
Landscape resilience metrics face the same core tension found in other ecosystem data: local initiatives and corporate funders want different things from the same numbers, and no group arrived at a single framework that served both.
Averaged statistics can hide more than they show. A rising mean for poverty reduction, for instance, could reflect a few major winners and a larger group left behind, and several groups flagged this as a priority gap.
Standard four to five year project cycles may be too short to detect real landscape-level change. Some participants argued that meaningful ecological and social shifts need 15 to 20 year horizons to show up at all.
A corporate funder's underlying motivation, whether profit, reputation, or long-term license to operate, fundamentally changes which metrics are useful to them, and that motivation is rarely made explicit up front.
Groups repeatedly landed on the need to set baselines and targets at project inception, not retrofit them later, since without agreed targets it's nearly impossible to say whether a project succeeded or failed.
Data collaboratives and pseudonymized data-sharing came up as a practical way past the standoff between corporates wanting to protect proprietary data and communities needing shared visibility into outcomes.
Participatory, community-led monitoring, using citizen video and locally built sensors, was raised as a valuable complement to formal indicator frameworks, but it remains structurally underfunded, especially where funder priorities like carbon don't match what communities actually want to track.
