Land Directly Controlled: Sustainably Managed (OI6912)

The IRIS catalog differentiates between land that the organization directly controls and land that the organization indirectly controls. This metric is intended to capture the area of land that is under the organization's direct control.

Direct control refers to land for which the organization controls land use through direct operation or management, including situations in which the organization's employees cultivate the land directly. Note that land ownership is not always equivalent to control. For example, where land is leased to another entity or individual to cultivate (e.g., a third-party manager), land is only directly controlled if the lease is accompanied by exhaustive criteria for land use.

Such land-use criteria are often included in management plans and legal agreements that also incorporate sustainability principles and typically include termination provisions in the event of poor performance. To the extent that the third-party manager must make minimal, ad-hoc, and discretionary land-use decisions that fall outside the scope of the land-use criteria, the land may still be considered directly controlled by the organization.

Sustainability, in a broad sense, includes sustainable working conditions for employees responsible for land management, resource exploitation that guarantees the continuous delivery of ecosystem services for current and future generations, and even land that has been put under strict no-deforestation requirements. If, for example, a third party manages land under a lease contract, contract conditions and clauses should specify required management, exploitation, ethics, techniques, and conditions of contract termination. The organization should footnote details of these contracts and monitor whether the third party meets the requirements.