The Mediterranean ecoregion plays a critical role in the sustainability of Chile's development. It hosts essential social and cultural values, strategic economic assets and environmental values of global importance. Nevertheless, the pressure exerted by productive activities on the landscape places all of these values, and especially those associated with the global environment, at increasing risk. The sustainability of this region's ecosystem services, its biodiversity and its economic productivity requires an approach that provides the opportunities, the means and the motivation to community organizations to develop, acquire and/or exercise the financing, knowledge and capacities needed to develop and manage their resources for global environmental and local development benefits. To trigger a change process in the ecoregion that increases the sustainability of land use and ecosystem services, uses biodiversity sustainably and sequesters and stores carbon, the project proposes to directly engage around one hundred community-based organizations and local governments in carrying out projects that address local sustainable development issues and contribute to global environmental benefits. These projects will be nested in and aligned with the ecological, economic and social outcomes of landscape-level initiatives, which will be achieved through synergies among the projects leading to greater and more lasting impacts and resiliency. Landscape-level initiatives will themselves be supported by ecoregional and national level institutional mechanisms aimed at providing them with effective knowledge management, monitoring and policy incidence frameworks. These mechanisms will ensure longer term funding and greater coordination of the array of institutional development instruments, both of which will enhance sustainability of the landscape initiatives and their constituent projects. This project will cover eight pilot landscapes in the Mediterranean ecoregion comprising two million hectares out of a total of approximately 20 million ha of rural land in the ecoregion (10%). This demonstration will provide sufficient variety and scale to this landscape approach for credible learning and knowledge generation and the production of inputs to policy discussions. Partners in implementation of this project are the main public institutions addressing land and resource use in the ecoregion.