What's a "landscape partnership"? Like a bioregion, or a CAN, it uses technology to bring humans and nature into alignment

We were impressed by this initiative on creating “1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion people”, as advocated by Landscapes.global, with a significant set of partners on board (including the UN). They’re developing these projects as examples of “landscape partnership”, defined on their site this way:

All across the world—in response to immediate and looming challenges—local actors are forming multi-stakeholder Landscape Partnerships to collectively take on previously overwhelming challenges. By coordinating their efforts, landscape partners manage sustainable ‘landscapes’ to generate multiple benefits including human well-being, healthy nature, regenerative economies and inspiration for the next generation.

[Their definition of a landscape: ‘We use the term ‘landscape’ to describe a place defined by ecosystem boundaries (a watershed, a forest) and/or political boundaries (province, state, county). It includes the full range of human and natural activities”.]

In our A/UK role as network conveners, we are interested to bring this approach into a conversation and mutual overlap with other novel arrangements of resource, voice and power - like bioregions, or CANs, or restless cities. But there were a few particular points of interest in the Landscapes.global project.

One is that a major partner for them is the technology charity Tech Matters. They were asked to “curate” a range of services and functions, that would work together as an effective network, that could manage and develop each landscape partnership. The name for it is Terraso.

As they relate below:

SOCIAL PROBLEM ADDRESSED

Reaching many of the Sustainable Development Goals requires a holistic approach to catalyzing and coordinating the necessary behavioral and economic changes in our society.

Existing single-focus (“targeted” or “siloed”) interventions can have unintended side effects, leading to improvement in one area, but degradation in others.

Only by planning and implementing a coordinated set of changes at the ecosystem level can we make the tradeoffs (and compromises) required to maximize the benefits to all, and the best group to make these critical decisions is the community itself.

HERE'S WHAT WE'RE DOING

In the design phase of this decade-long project, we first interviewed leaders from twenty-five local initiatives all over the globe. Based on their input and continued participation, we are beginning to create the Terraso platform to meet their needs.

As we synthesize their data and software needs, we will be making and adapting tools to make critical information and simulations far more accessible to communities themselves.

We will preserve the decisions that are made by the communities as they generate them. We’ll ensure that data collected about an area stays available to the people who live there, rather than being taken away or privatized.

And finally, once a community has settled on its top priorities for creating a sustainable future, we will provide tested methodologies for finding the funding for those ideas from mainstream investors, impact investors, banks, development banks, foundations and governments.

More here. Our eyes light up here because it shows that new kinds of resource- and land-based communities can be precisely served by appropriate software and networks. If Terraso walk their talk, they could create a platform that customises for local needs, but could also connect up localities globally - our cosmolocal vision. We’re watching this space, and would be happy to talk with anyone at Terraso.

The other point of note: the idea of “landscape partnerships” isn’t new to the UK - they were fundable categories over recent years in Heritage Fund applications - see here for how they were evaluated, and see here for a 2011 research summary paper.