LAND ACCESS & ACQUISITION
Streamline land access negotiations and outreach activities with integrated GIS tools
Our Land Access and Acquisition module helps teams quickly identify and reach out to the right people at the right time. It centralizes and structures data to help project teams manage stakeholders, land parcels, corporate assets, communications, and related activities through a single interface. Borealis combines powerful GIS capabilities with all the information you need to assess, monitor, and engage with stakeholders proactively and strategically.
Use the Land Access and Acquisition module if you:
- Develop, construct, inspect, or maintain assets (wind or solar farms, highways, railways, pipelines, or electrical grids) that impact landholders across multiple jurisdictions.
- Negotiate right-of-way (ROW), conditions for access, and/or compensation agreements with landowners, track property tenure or easement status, and monitor progress in real time.
- Regularly communicate with stakeholders to manage document deliveries, conditions and agreements, and keep people informed about potential impacts of your activities.
- Document and track commitments you’ve made to landowners to ensure that you always comply with the agreed upon conditions.
- Need to create a transparent, detailed record of consultation to secure regulatory approvals and acquire necessary permits.
- Have multiple teams managing different aspects of a project whose efforts sometimes overlap, and want to optimize your processes to improve collaboration and minimize the risk of stakeholder fatigue.
The Land Access and Acquisition module makes it easy for organizations to:
Visualize stakeholders, issues, and land units on a map to understand how they relate to business operations and assets.
Retrieve contact information, land access conditions, and a complete history of interactions with key stakeholders on demand.
Track contacts, interactions, and commitments to ensure continuity of operations and address stakeholder concerns in a timely manner.
Link communications to land and landowners to provide a complete picture of your stakeholder engagement activities.
Measure initiatives using key performance indicators to better understand the impacts of activities on stakeholders.
Generate detailed reports for internal management, public hearings, or external auditors in just a few clicks.
How does Borealis help teams manage land-based projects efficiently and effectively?
Build a solid foundation to ensure project success
The Land Access and Acquisition module helps teams establish a clean, high-quality data set that serves as a foundation for managing outreach activities efficiently and effectively.
- Standardize terminology and naming conventions across your organization to simplify reporting, customise the information displayed in fields, menus, and dashboards to fit your needs, and eliminate duplicate records to minimize oversights and reduce stakeholder fatigue.
- Import and update shapefiles and cadastre geometries. (Use the Borealis API to ensure that this information remains synchronized with other business systems, like ArcGIS.)
- Overlay geographical data to identify protected regions, environmental justice areas, indigenous lands, Heritage sites, legal jurisdictions, municipal boundaries, electoral districts, land parcels, company assets, and any other GIS layers that are relevant to your project.
- Upload contact information for titleholders and occupants in bulk (Excel import templates) and link them to relevant land parcels.
- Link issues, communications and grievances to an asset or land parcel to get a real-time overview of engagement activities around your project infrastructure.
Easily identify who you need to talk to at any time
No need to comb through dozens of spreadsheets to manually identify stakeholders and weed out duplicate records. Borealis makes it easy to identify affected stakeholders so you can launch a consultation or get a maintenance team into the field quickly.
- Quickly pull up line lists, impacted parcels, landowners, occupants, relevant jurisdictions and authorities. Identify other stakeholders in the area using buffer zones to eliminate oversights.
- Directly select pre-defined land parcels, draw points, lines, or polygons on the map, or copy and paste a list of coordinates (typically supplied by an engineering team) to define a region.
- Choose existing company assets (or specify the relevant chainage range of a linear asset) and define a buffer zone around the affected area.
- Identify landowners and occupants, relevant jurisdictions and authorities based on the selected land assets. Add selected stakeholders to an engagement plan and assign tasks to your team to follow up with the right people at the right time.
Quickly communicate with affected stakeholders
Because your stakeholder data is already centralized in Borealis, you can communicate with stakeholders quickly and efficiently.
- Separate lists of stakeholders by communication channel. Create activities, tasks, and checklists to reach out to these stakeholders based on their preferred contact method, and assign them to members of the team who will contact the stakeholders accordingly.
- Use fully integrated communication tools reach out to groups of stakeholders by email, postal mail, or SMS and automatically document these communications in Borealis.
- Provide online portals to collect stakeholder concerns, grievances, contribution requests, and other feedback. These portals automatically create records in Borealis for easy follow-up and resolution.
Features that simplify your land management activities
Land agreements
Manage land access negotiations, communications, and conditions for access proactively, in a single location, to ensure compliance. Create detailed, easily accessible records for each agreement so you can be sure that all commitments you make are kept. Monitor the status of land agreements on a map to ensure that all parcels are properly accounted for, and all agreements are valid and up to date.
Heritage sites and chance finds
Create an inventory of heritage sites, discovered artifacts, and chance finds that can be easily shared with external experts. Establish a transparent record of work being done to preserve the site, related documents, and commitments that have been made, and link your conservation efforts to other CSR initiatives. Document important site assessment information in a lasting corporate memory.
Compensation and payments
Manage compensation according to industry standards. Calculate individual or group payments based on different parameters, and adjust them to reflect the current CPI index. Track details for each property and document evidence of payment (or non-payment) to gain a clearer picture of your relationship with each landowner. Generate payment invoices and receipts from templates.
Community resettlement
Implement a structured, transparent process to access land when no formal parcels or tenures exist. Efficiently manage resettlement activities, and maintain trust with affected communities by ensuring fair and timely compensation. Automate manual agreement preparation to improve productivity while also minimizing the risk of errors and fraud.
Properties Register
If your project involves land management, the new Properties register is a great time-saving feature. It allows you to group contiguous land parcels owned by the same stakeholder into a single property to streamline your outreach efforts.
Features that simplify your land management activities
Land agreements
Manage land access negotiations, communications, and conditions for access proactively, in a single location, to ensure compliance. Create detailed, easily accessible records for each agreement so you can be sure that all commitments you make are kept. Monitor the status of land agreements on a map to ensure that all parcels are properly accounted for, and all agreements are valid and up to date.
Core features of oil and gas land management software that can help companies make their own digital transformation in land management include:
Heritage sites and chance finds
Create an inventory of heritage sites, discovered artifacts, and chance finds that can be easily shared with external experts. Establish a transparent record of work being done to preserve the site, related documents, and commitments that have been made, and link your conservation efforts to other CSR initiatives. Document important site assessment information in a lasting corporate memory.
Compensation and payments
Manage compensation according to industry standards. Calculate individual or group payments based on different parameters, and adjust them to reflect the current CPI index. Track details for each property and document evidence of payment (or non-payment) to gain a clearer picture of your relationship with each landowner. Generate payment invoices and receipts from templates.
Community resettlement
Implement a structured, transparent process to access land when no formal parcels or tenures exist. Efficiently manage resettlement activities, and maintain trust with affected communities by ensuring fair and timely compensation. Automate manual agreement preparation to improve productivity while also minimizing the risk of errors and fraud.
Properties Register
If your project involves land management, the Properties register is a great time-saving feature. It allows you to group contiguous land parcels owned by the same stakeholder into a single property to streamline your outreach efforts.
Resources to improve stakeholder engagement in land-based projects
5 reasons Borealis is the perfect tool to manage stakeholders in asset-based projects
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