By: Maria Laura Pinos, 2025 GLFx data and content intern
Community-led restoration practitioners looking for funding are often challenged by the metrics by which they track their work. While quantifiable data, such as the number of trees planted, is a tangible metric to report to donors, things like increased environmental education opportunities or capacity building and horticulture training are not.
Local organizations often rely on “proxy indicators”, such as participant numbers or community partnerships, to quantify their work, which leaves a gap between funders’ demand for quantitative environmental reporting and local organizations’ limited resources or different value systems.
Community-driven impact metrics could help bridge this gap and help locally-led organizations secure the funding they desire to grow.
This year, as a data and content intern with the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), I worked with the GLFx network – comprised of 52 GLF chapters hosted by locally-led organizations – to develop community-driven impact metrics.
Restoration is not only an outcome, it is also a social process made up of people’s lifestyle choices, livelihood opportunities and value systems. However, there are rarely indicators to capture non-numerical aspects of restoration work, and when things are not easily measured, they are rarely funded.
Typically, investors use criteria such as analyzing the number of acres restored or the number of trees planted to decide whether they will financially support projects. But for small-scale community-led work, their scale is often too small to meet this criterion, or they don’t have established systems to easily measure quantifiable data.
So, we ran a seven-month consultation process with 27 GLF chapters, asking them what resources and metrics they currently use, or want to use, to track their projects. To do this, we held two online focus group sessions to define measuring indicators. Following this, communities spent months collecting impact data from their restoration work.
We learned that communities want metrics that reflect efforts in community-building and education. People want a metric that shows the effort they make to make decision-making processes more inclusive of local people, farmers, women and young people.
Communities also want to dictate projects on their land, using holistic metrics based on their resources and values.
“Being trusted and listened to by the community and restoration practitioners from Indonesia and Asia has grown my confidence. For the first time in my life, I feel like what I know matters,” said Nia, GLFx Java, Indonesia.
Challenges in measuring restoration efforts
Smaller organizations are less likely to meet requirements for international funding, and they are also less likely to engage with external partners and networks such as the GLF. Data is key to bridging this gap.
The challenge with this is cyclical. Restoration practitioners need to invest money in monitoring methods, such as using drones to survey land, or downloading apps to track the species they plant. But in order to invest in these technologies and train people on how to use them, they need funding.
During our consultations, we heard how restoration practitioners want donors and investors to value broader indicators that truly reflect long-term stewardship, such as tracking climate adaptation strategies and building community learning programs.
Many indicators can assess the cultural, social and environmental dimensions of restoration impacts, such as looking at the level of women’s participation in restoration activities and their representation on boards and decision-making bodies. One can look at the number of initiatives and collaborations established with schools and educational centers.
Environmental indicators can also be refined to better reflect community needs and ecological outcomes better. These include measuring tree survival rates rather than only looking at the number of trees planted. This also entails monitoring the health and regeneration of native species, seed quality and monitoring the return of birds, insects and other wildlife to restored areas.
In addition, investors could assess community empowerment by noting when communities work to obtain legal ownership or stewardship of their land, an important indicator of long-term sustainability rather than meeting numerical targets in the short term.
“These indicators help us capture the deeper social, educational and cultural impacts of our work beyond environmental outputs,” said Godfrey Karema, GLFx Nyanza, Rwanda.
The same words kept coming back in the consultations: community, biodiversity, monitoring, learning, survival and youth. Restoration means thinking long term and building shared ownership and visions for the future, planning that requires social cohesion, creative livelihood options, youth volunteer opportunities and a strong sense of education to truly transform landscapes.
So, how can people adopt new indicators for landscape restoration reporting?
One can begin by adding clarity to the figures you want to report on. It is important to specify who owns the land and what type of landscape it is, such as a watershed project area, a village, a vast swath of drylands, etc. When counting restoration activities such as creating irrigation systems or planting community gardens, one must mark whether multiple activities are overlapping in the same area.
Here are a few more metric reporting tips: always state your currency and any necessary exchange rate and date, the reporting period and what each figure represents. Add a short governance note about who manages the funds and how priorities are decided, especially when communities are involved in decision-making.
A great example of a GLF chapter integrating socio-economic factors metrics into their reporting was done in 2023 by GLFx Siargao’s Impact Report. The chapter is managed by the youth-led organization Lokal Lab on Siargao Island, Philippines. Through its activities, the chapter functions as a community-building program aimed at supporting local communities in addressing socio-economic and environmental challenges, as clearly illustrated in their annual impact report.
The report highlights Lokal Lab’s mission and goals as well as listing many interesting metrics to track their progress such as listing the various workshops they hosted, how many local artisans they supported and worked with and how many NGO roundtables they participated in. These statistics show both their environmental and cultural impacts.
Another strong example is LOAH’s impact report, which presents its mission, vision and programs in an innovative social media format. The LOAH report highlights many events and accomplishments, including hosting art initiatives, sharing talks on menstrual health and putting a roof on their classroom. By sharing these metrics, they invite us all be curious about the plentiful indicators of great work that we can showcase.
Communities are best positioned to highlight their stories and therefore showcase how restoration can be more effective with a deeper analysis, centered on people and their growth. I hope that in the years to come, more community-led projects highlight diverse restoration metrics and that more and more donors take these into account.
In the meantime, there are some great platforms such as Restor, that can increase visibility and expand your network. Check out websites such as Climate Justice Resilience Funds and Youth Climate Justice Funds to find other grant opportunities tied to socio-environmental justice.
Stay tuned as we create a community-driven report based on these consultations that includes qualitative and quantitative monitoring and impact metrics that we hope can be a helpful tool for anyone looking to expand their funding opportunities.
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