The Community-Led Landscape Assessment (LCAT) is a facilitated, two-day exercise in which the people of a village assess the health of their own landscape across eight dimensions — from water and soil to culture and governance — and turn that shared reading into a practical, prioritised plan. Developed by Transform Rural India, it is adapted from Natural England’s Landscape Character Assessment framework and re-rooted in the rural Indian context. This section introduces the framework in three movements: why such an assessment is needed, what it reads and how it thinks, and how the exercise unfolds on the ground. No prior familiarity with climate science is assumed.
