The 4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration

Published on:
  • Climate and disaster risks
  • Climate mitigation and adaptation
  • Coastal resilience
  • Coastal wetland conservation
  • Community resilience
  • Natural infrastructure solutions
  • Species
  • Sustainable land use
  • Wetland values, status and trends

Scaling up large-scale landscape restoration initiatives requires a common language and a practical systemic approach for actors to come together and generate lasting benefits. 

Concern about the environment has moved decisively from niche to mainstream. Although carbon markets are coming up to speed, shareholders are asking business to become carbon neutral, massive tree planting campaigns have started, and circular economic thinking is taking off, the current attempts to address the biodiversity and climate crisis continue to fail. We need a common language and new approaches, that inspire optimism, long-term solutions and systemic change at scale. All are inherent in rebuilding resilient living landscapes, our global life support system. 

The 4 Returns Framework for landscape restoration is a practical tested system-change framework used by stakeholders to undertake a landscape approach. 

It seeks to balance competing stakeholder demands in a mosaic of different management approaches, to supply a full range of natural, social and economic returns. 

Please download the publication below.

4 Returns Framework for Landscape Restoration

The publication is the result of a close collaboration between Commonland, the WWF Landscape Finance Lab and Wetlands International, with support from the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management.