Measuring progress

Track enough to know whether the work is succeeding, and keep it honest. There are two layers, and they serve different purposes.

The project

Plain, countable things: funding raised, site secured, entity formed, plantings done, people reached. These belong in the project's state and drive the public progress view. Targets help here.

The land

The ecological recovery is the real goal, and it resists being flattened into a single number. A single number can hide exactly what matters: in West Africa, satellite forest cover showed stable sites where most residents reported degradation (satellites and local knowledge ✓, study). Measure it to understand whether what you did worked, not to decorate a dashboard. Look at structure and layers, species returning, signs in the soil and water, enough to test your methods (see method and the learning loop). Citizen-science monitoring extends reach at low cost (citizens monitoring the global biodiversity framework, study). A simple, permanent presence on site is what makes long-term monitoring real, and it can double as training and local work (the case for field stations, study). A count of stems or a carbon figure on its own tells you little about whether the place is coming alive; twenty million trees densely planted row on row is not a recipe for a resilient forest (thriving forest, not tree cover ✓, news).

Set targets where they sharpen thinking and accept uncertainty where they would only mislead. Record failures as carefully as successes; they are where the learning is.