The landscape infrastructure footprint of oil development: Venezuela's heavy oil belt

LIF methods provide four important benefits. First, they can help to reduce surface disturbances by informing planning practices in current as well as in new projects. Second, they fortify environmental reporting by providing objective measures of environmental performance tied to extractive activities. Third, by including LIF in their sustainability practices, extractive industries can improve their competitive advantage. Finally, the LIF helps create a set of transparent environmental performance standards that industry and regulators can adopt in order to measure and monitor landscape alterations resulting from extractive activities.