LANDSCOPE
Landscope is a geospatial system TMP developed that helps businesses and other stakeholders to assess the financial risks associated with local opposition to a project or investment. These “social risks” are influenced by aspects of the local and national context that Landscope assesses and scores, providing users with a rapid and unique insight into the kinds of pressures that drive conflict and tension between people and private investments.
Landscope helps its users with assess and respond to social risks in a reliable, repeatable, data-driven way. The system is being used by hundreds of companies, investors, and government agencies in sectors like agriculture, infrastructure, forestry, and mining, including Unilever, ABN Amro, Bloomberg, Schroders and many others. It has also been supported and endorsed by leading NGOs and civil society groups, including Oxfam, Landesa, Solidaridad, IIED and several others.
According to its users, Landscope is most valuable as a rapid screening tool in the management of complex portfolios and supply chains. It is also useful at an asset-level to pick out areas for further due diligence and opportunities for risk mitigation. As such, it is useful as an early step in a broader assessment process, delivering value by enabling much more efficient allocation of capital and expert resources.
Users can access Landscope via its website, using a map or coordinates to select several areas at a time. Landscope then takes less than a minute to produce a standardized report on social risk, including:
• A financial model that visitors can use to assess net present value (NPV) exposure to social risk.
• A quantitative and locally specific breakdown of the factors that drive social risk, including via map visualizations.
• Recommendations on how to mitigate and avoid social risk, complete with references to useful guidance and supporting material.
To receive a preview of Landscope or better understand the system, please contact Ben Bowie at
Understanding social risk
In places where social risk is high, it is more likely that local opposition will drive delays, production disruptions, increased costs and/or legal challenges. These impacts can derail a project, with several examples of multi-billion-dollar investments in mines, wind farms, plantations and railways abandoned because of entrenched disputes with local stakeholders.
Managing this sort of local opposition poses real challenges for businesses and other stakeholders in part because it is extremely common (particularly in countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America). At the same time, the risk is hard to assess in these places, where data is scarce or unreliable. For example, land ownership and access rights in many emerging markets are unclear and disputed, exposing businesses to disputes even where they are operating legally and with government approval.
Landscope works by analyzing an area that a user selects (specifically 50KM around a point of interest) using fourteen indicators that we have identified as having a statistically significant relationship with increased risk of local dispute.
These indicators were identified through a process (described here) that involved assessment of a proprietary database of over 800 geo-coded incidents worldwide. All indicators are drawn from reliable and reputable datasets (e.g. Oxford University, WRI, NASA etc), with the TMP team vetting each dataset for accuracy and integrity.