Lessons Learned from Application of the “Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS)” Under the Satoyama Initiative

Abstract

Socio-ecological resilience is vital for the long-term sustainability of communities in production landscapes and seascapes, but community members often find it difficult to understand and assess their own resilience in the face of changes that affect them over time due to economic and natural drivers, demographic changes, and market forces among others, due to the complexity of the concept of resilience and the many factors influencing the landscape or seascape. This chapter provides an overview of a project and its resilience assessment process using an indicator-based approach, which has been implemented under the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI). In this project, a set of 20 indicators were identified to capture different aspects of resilience in SEPLS, and examples are included from various contexts around the world, with the purpose of identifying lessons learned and good practices for resilience assessment. These indicators have now been used by communities in many countries, often with the guidance of project implementers, with the goal of assessing, considering, and monitoring their landscape or seascape's circumstances, identifying important issues, and ultimately improving their resilience. While this particular approach is limited in that it cannot be used for comparison of different landscapes and seascapes, as it relies on community members' individual perceptions, it is found useful to understand multiple aspects of resilience and changes over time within a landscape or seascape.

Harnessing Insights from Indicators-Based Resilience Assessment for Enhancing Sustainability in the Gurage Socio-Ecological Production Landscape of Ethiopia

“…By helping policymakers better understand how resilient the landscape is, indicators can play an essential part in giving legitimacy to community-level interventions (Dunbar et al 2020 ). Applying the resilience indicators makes it possible for policymakers to accept better management actions designed to re-establish and sustain resilience (Sterling et al 2017 ).…”

“…Creating legitimate, functional, and vibrant resilience measures in a socio-ecological system usually requires indicators co-created by local stakeholders, practitioners, and knowledge-holders (UNU-IAS, Bioversity International, IGES and UNDP 2014 ). The development, testing, and implementation of the toolkit of indicators in SEPLS took nearly 10 years of experience and generated a great deal of knowledge on this kind of indicator methodology (Dunbar et al 2020 ). The SEPLS resilience assessment utilizing community-based indicator scores can bring about the idea of landscape resilience and provide information to policymakers (Sterling et al 2017 ).…”

“…The SEPLS resilience assessment utilizing community-based indicator scores can bring about the idea of landscape resilience and provide information to policymakers (Sterling et al 2017 ). However, these resilience indicators are limited in some aspects by the subjective nature of perceptions and the difficulty in comparing them over time or among various groups (UNDP 2018 ; Dunbar et al 2020 ). They emphasize the importance of exercising caution when utilizing indicator scores as quantitative measures and the benefit of triangulating indicator findings with information from other objective data sources and other participatory tools.…”

“…The toolkit for indicators of resilience in SEPLS has been used in more than 40 countries to assess SEPLS resilience and to monitor and evaluate project interventions on resilience and biodiversity conservation (Dublin and Natori 2020 ; Dunbar et al 2020 ). In order to examine the use of resilience assessment workshops as a biocultural strategy for conservation management in Xinshe SEPLS (Taiwan), Lee et al ( 2020 ) took into consideration this indicator.…”

Safeguarding the Biodiversity Associated with Local Foodways in Traditionally Managed Socio-Ecological Production Landscapes in Kenya

“…However, rural people who earn most of their livelihood from their immediate natural environment have been impacted much less by the pandemic than those in urban areas. This is a further demonstration that SEPLs can serve as the basis of resilience in local communities in the event of catastrophes and especially those affecting human health (Morimoto et al, 2015;Bedmar Villanueva et al, 2018;Dunbar et al, 2020). While this enhanced protection may be a result of plants providing a physical barrier and low population density, it could also be due to the healthy and diverse foods and herbal medicines in the environment, which the local people ingest daily, as well as their psychological status (Matsuda & Morimoto, 2020).…”