Across Asia, landscape and jurisdictional approaches (LJAs) are gaining traction beyond deforestation, and are now increasingly recognised for their role in supporting smallholder inclusion and improving livelihoods. In turn, these approaches are helping to address income insecurity – often a root cause driving unsustainable land use.

Putting livelihoods at the centre

Landscape approaches respond to the need for complex sustainability issues to be addressed systematically, with a holistic focus on interconnected root causes. To prevent deforestation, a key priority is improving smallholder livelihoods. In many regions, farmers still face unstable markets, weak tenure systems, climate shocks, and rising production costs.

In regions like Riau in Indonesia, more than half of forest cover has been lost since 2001, and situation is not uncommon across Southeast Asia. It's clear that in places with significant deforestation, farmers cannot earn a decent living from the land they have and pressure on forests will continue.

This reality is helping to shape landscape thinking. ISEAL’s Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives makes it clear that landscape initiatives can only succeed when environmental goals are combined with social and economic outcomes, supported by strong governance structures. In practice, this means creating conditions for:

• stable and diversified incomes
• secure land and tenure rights
• access to services, markets, and social protection
• opportunities for long-term resilience

In 2025 ISEAL identified 112 landscape initiatives worldwide with publicly declared targets related to livelihoods. Many Indonesian initiatives already focus on economic resilience, sustainable land management, and tenure, demonstrating clear momentum in this direction.

However, challenges remain. Data on livelihoods is often inconsistent and does not fully capture how rural households earn and manage income, highlighting the need for better measurement based on a shared understanding of a decent standard of living.

Landscapes create the conditions for inclusion

Inclusion is a core component of effective smallholder support and resilience in landscapes, and LJAs provide a platform to bring governments, companies, communities, and civil society together. But inclusion does not happen automatically.

ISEAL recently joined two linked events in Jakarta, Indonesia: The Pathways for Income Improvement workshop hosted by the Living Income Community of Practice, and the Landscape Practitioner Workshop hosted by ISEAL and LTKL. These events brought together governments, NGOs, research institutions, and businesses to explore how landscape collaboration can create better conditions for rural communities. Together, they demonstrated how landscape efforts can support both resilient ecosystems and thriving local economies.

Indonesia provided an ideal backdrop. With complex challenges ranging from deforestation and biodiversity loss to land rights and rural poverty, the country has become a global reference for landscape action. It is also a place where multi-stakeholder partnerships are showing what is possible when environmental, social and economic goals come together. Participants highlighted several essentials for inclusive landscape work:

• Government commitment from planning to implementation, with realistic and inclusive goal setting
• Strong facilitation and multi-stakeholder governance, particularly at the district and village levels
• Intentional strategies to ensure indigenous communities, women, youth, and marginalised groups are not only consulted but actively shape decisions
• Reliable baseline data to understand needs and track progress

Across sessions, land tenure and legalisation emerged as a foundation for improving livelihoods. Without secure rights, smallholders cannot plan, invest, or benefit fully from landscape efforts.

The role of living income in landscape approaches

While landscape initiatives increasingly recognise the importance of economic well-being, the workshops highlighted living income as a practical way to put this into practice. Benchmarks from across Indonesia show that many rural households earn far less than what is needed for a decent standard of living. No single intervention will close this gap, but a living income approach gives landscapes:

• a shared economic goal alongside environmental targets
• a common measurement framework for tracking income improvements
• a clearer understanding of how much different factors contribute to the living income gap, helping to prioritise interventions such as crop diversification, access to finance, fairer prices, or land legality
• a foundation for aligning public and private investment

During the workshops, we heard promising examples. In Aceh (one of the provinces hardest hit by the recent devastating floods in Indonesia), introducing living income benchmarks and income assessments is helping shape a roadmap for smallholder income improvement. Participants emphasised the importance of diversified livelihoods, supportive public policies, and non-financial incentives.

At the same time, they noted challenges. Indicators vary widely across landscapes and often miss important income sources. A landscape-wide living income framework could help create consistency, better target actions, and demonstrate credible progress toward closing the income gap.

Ultimately, integrating living income into LJAs could strengthen their potential to drive socioeconomic transformation, ensuring that landscape efforts lead to real improvements in people’s lives.

A new era for landscape collaboration

Across both workshops, one message stood out: landscapes are becoming platforms for rural prosperity, where environmental and economic outcomes are interconnected. 

For landscape initiatives to deliver on this promise, three priorities stand out:

1. Strengthening inclusive governance and land rights, so communities shape and benefit from landscape decisions.
2. Aligning investments, policies, and private-sector action around shared goals supported by reliable data.
3. Embedding living income as a core objective, giving landscapes a measurable economic foundation.

There are still hurdles: uneven livelihood data, limited capacity, and financing gaps, but the shift in direction is clear.

As landscape initiatives mature across Asia and beyond, success will be measured not only by the forests they protect but by the opportunities they create for the people who steward them. Sustainable landscapes require sustainable livelihoods and living income approaches have the potential to help make this future a reality.

To support this shift ISEAL, alongside leading landscape practitioners, have developed the Core Criteria for Mature Landscape Initiatives to provide a simple and consistent understanding of the core elements needed for effective and inclusive landscape initiatives. The Core Criteria is available in English, Bahasa Indonesian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.