The iCASS Platform:
Nine Principles for Landscape Conservation Design
Highlights
Design can be an adaptation pathway for landscape conservation.
Landscape conservation design is a collaborative approach to decision-making.
The iCASS Platform is a set of attributes and principles.
The iCASS Platform can facilitate landscape conservation design.
Transformation
Sustainability is a crucial concern for the global community. It refers to a state of low vulnerability and high resilience (Wu, 2013). Landscape conservation is an adaptation strategy that holds the potential to achieve environmental sustainability.
What is landscape conservation? Jump over to The Network for Landscape Conservation to learn more.
Achieving a trajectory toward sustainability requires transformation: a shift from traditional decision-making models and a move toward novel approaches designed for the challenges of the Anthropocene’s triple planetary crisis: pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss.
Landscape Conservation
Our intention is to ignite transformation from single-institution, siloed assessment and planning to stakeholder-driven, participatory design, leading to collaborative decision-making and extensive landscape conservation.
Approaches that bring transformation, like ecosystem management (Lackey, 1998) and adaptive co-management (Jacobson & Robertson, 2012), are gaining more acceptance now. Additionally, over the past 25 years, there has been an increase in the popularity of approaches that are "large-scale," "landscape," or "large landscape" (with or without the term "conservation" included).
Landscape Conservation Design
The design discipline includes the people, processes, and products that facilitate people’s intention (or purpose) to transform their environment into a more desirable one. We refer to people, purpose, process, and product as the four cornerstones of innovation.
Within the context of landscape conservation, design can be an adaptation pathway - a transformative decision-making approach that challenges, if not contributes to, the body of existing strategic frameworks. Our intention is to further landscape conservation through stakeholder-driven design processes, undertaken at regional scales, which identify desired landscape configurations and adaptation strategies that promote sustainability.
A Definition
Landscape conservation design (LCD) is a stakeholder-driven, participatory process that:
1) integrates societal values and cross-jurisdiction, multisector interests with the best available interdisciplinary science and indigenous knowledge (the people);
2) assess spatial and temporal patterns, vulnerabilities, risks, and opportunities for landscape elements valued by stakeholders (the process);
3) results in a set of spatially explicit products and multi-objective adaptation strategies (the products); and,
4) which protects biodiversity, conserves ecosystem services, and promotes social-ecological systems (e.g., landscapes) that are sustainable for current and future generations (its purpose).
The Goal
The overarching aim of LCD is twofold. To:
1) collaboratively develop innovative, coordinated strategies (a strategic plan) that facilitate adaptation across jurisdictions and sectors; and,
2) identify landscape configurations (blueprints) that allow ecological systems to resist, recover, and adapt to changing conditions, typically by encouraging ecologically representative, redundant networks that work to restore or maintain ecosystem integrity, strengthen connectivity, and appropriately scale responses to disturbances.
The Approach: The iCASS Platform
The iCASS Platform is a synthesis of adaptation planning concepts and methodologies presented as a set of attributes and principles organized around four cornerstones of innovation: people, purpose, process, and product. It emphasizes a design process that is inclusive, interdisciplinary, interactive, and informative. The iCASS Platform can facilitate LCD via processes that create and empower social networks, foster stakeholder involvement, engender co-production and cross-pollination of knowledge, and provide multiple opportunities for deliberation, transparency, learning, and collaborative decision-making.
