Towards an International Landscape Convention - Rethinking Land Use

We are all aware of the challenges we face. But are we doing enough to meet them?

Disquiet about current development practices raised by UN Agencies at WUF 2022 was confirmation that business as usual is clearly not an option and that more radical change is needed. We need to be braver, more ambitious, and more determined to deal with the global challenges we face. Less comfortable. An International Landscape Convention (ILC) will give a voice to the everyday landscape, raising the profile of landscape to address these challenges and giving us the impetus to use the land more wisely as a matter of urgency.

Through expert witnesses and active engagement, this cross-disciplinary, collaborative and silo-busting networking event will aim to convene policymakers, UN representatives and representatives of the built environment professions to understand how best to provoke, challenge and inspire different behaviours and attitudes towards the land and to enable us to better deal with the global challenges in cities and regions. This networking event aims to establish the foundation for future partnerships and relationships, share ideas and make global connections with others, focusing on the infrastructure upon which we depend for everything.

It is set in the context of growing recognition of the cultural, economic and ecological significance of the landscape and its immense restorative capacity, our dependency on landscape for everything we need - clean air, soil, food, water, biodiversity, identity economy and culture and the contribution the infrastructure of landscape can make to meet social, environmental and spatial justice across all seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

It builds on the outputs of a growing number of initiatives working towards the development of an international landscape convention, including the UN-Habitat Urban Thinkers Campus, Birmingham, 2024; World Council of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) in Nairobi, 2023; and the WUF11, Poland, 2022.

The initial 2010 ILC proposal, the outcome of a multidisciplinary UNESCO expert seminar, gained support from several UN Agencies and institutions, including ICOMOS, FOA, UIA, ICCROM, IUCN, ISOCARP, UNCCD and CBD and was supported by the UNESCO Florence Declaration on Landscape (2012), the UNESCO Matera Resolution and the Montreal World Design Declaration in 2017. It has been taken by professional organisations to create regional versions in place in North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa (2019), the latter of which formed the basis of the African Landscape Network, subsequently awarded a UNESCO Participle Programmer Grant.