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ABSTRACT. The terms "landscape" and "landscape approach" have been increasingly applied within the international environmental realm, with many international organizations and nongovernmental organizations using landscapes as an area of focus for addressing multiple objectives, usually related to both environmental and social goals. However, despite a wealth of literature on landscapes and landscape approaches, ideas relating to landscape approaches are diverse and often vague, resulting in ambiguous use of the terms. Our aim, therefore, was to examine some of the main characteristics of different landscape approaches, focusing on how these might be applied in the process of taking a landscape approach. Drawing on a review of the literature, we identify and discuss three different kinds of landscape approaches: using the landscape scale, a sectoral landscape approach, and an integrated landscape approach. Focusing on an integrated landscape approach, we examine five concepts to help characterize landscape approaches: multifunctionality, transdisciplinarity, participation, complexity, and sustainability. For each term, a continuum of application exists. To help improve and move the integrated landscape approach more toward operationalization, more focus needs to be placed on the process of taking the approach. Although the process can be implemented in a range of ways, in a more integrated approach it will require explicitly defined objectives as well as a clear understanding of what is meant by multifunctionality and sustainability. It will also require collaborative participation, transdisciplinarity/cross-sectoral approaches, managing for adaptive capacity, and applying an iterative process to address the inherent complexity within the system. Although these concepts are not new, we present continuums on which they can exist, allowing for clarification and distinctions to be made regarding what it means to take a landscape approach.

Policy relevance Policy makers, researchers and analysts helping to plan and implement REDD+, environmental services and climate change would find this paper potentially helpful. The paper explores progress on REDD+ Readiness across four countries (Cameroon, Indonesia, Peru and Vietnam) and provides broad lessons, recommendations and examples across these countries for further improving REDD+. The paper also suggests an innovative, credible and universally applicable set of criteria and indicators derived through a systematic review that could serve further global comparative analysis of readiness for REDD+ and relevant national environmental services delivery systems, including climate change mitigation.

Currently, mitigation and adaptation measures are handled separately, due to differences in priorities for the measures and segregated planning and implementation policies at international and national levels. There is a growing argument that synergistic approaches to adaptation and mitigation could bring substantial benefits at multiple scales in the land use sector. Nonetheless, efforts to implement synergies between adaptation and mitigation measures are rare due to the weak conceptual framing of the approach and constraining policy issues. In this paper, we explore the attributes of synergy and the necessary enabling conditions and discuss, as an example, experience with the Ngitili system in Tanzania that serves both adaptation and mitigation functions. An in-depth look into the current practices suggests that more emphasis is laid on complementarity—i.e., mitigation projects providing adaptation co-benefits and vice versa rather than on synergy. Unlike complementarity, synergy should emphasize functionally sustainable landscape systems in which adaptation and mitigation are optimized as part of multiple functions. We argue that the current practice of seeking co-benefits (complementarity) is a necessary but insufficient step toward addressing synergy. Moving forward from complementarity will require a paradigm shift from current compartmentalization between mitigation and adaptation to systems thinking at landscape scale. However, enabling policy, institutional, and investment conditions need to be developed at global, national, and local levels to achieve synergistic goals.

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