Learning from resilient landscapes

Socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes are areas of mixed land-use patterns, including villages and farmland adjacent to forests, grasslands, wetlands or coastal areas. Shaped over centuries by human-nature interactions, these landscapes have proven they are sustainable, maintaining their biodiversity while providing humans with goods and services needed for their well-being.

To understand what makes these landscapes resilient and to help communities continue to adapt to new changes, Bioversity International and the United Nations University-Institute of Advanced Study of Sustainability developed a set of 20 indicators of resilience as a collaborative activity under the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative.

These indicators help measure a landscape's capacity to adapt to change by providing a tool for local communities to plan strategies to strengthen their resilience. The indicators are spread over five broad categories:

• landscape/seascape diversity and ecosystem protection
• biodiversity (including agricultural biodiversity)
• knowledge and innovation
• landscape/seascape governance and social equity
• livelihoods and well-being.

"One unusual thing about our indicators is that rather than focusing on eco-biological traits – species, habitats, etc. – they are more holistic, and emphasize the need for strong institutions to support communities and enhance resilience," says Pablo Eyzaguirre, lead scientist of the Bioversity International research team.

Because they also include social and economic aspects, the indicators are better accepted by communities. “They find the link between conservation and socio-economic issues more relevant for them,” says Diana Salvemini, coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme’s ‘Community Development and Knowledge Management for the Satoyama Initiative’ (COMDEKS) project.

COMDEKS has been piloting the indicators in 20 countries since 2011, and Bioversity International has conducted its own field tests in Bolivia, Cuba, Kenya and Nepal with the help of local NGOs such as Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD) and Fundación para la Promoción e Investigación de Productos Andinos (PROINPA). New insights on how to make communities and landscapes more resilient have already come out of the trials.

The indicators have been well received by participants, but their success is clearly dependent on external factors: for instance, good facilitators and translators are essential, and the language must be tailored to the community’s context.

The indicators are being refined in the field to develop a user-friendly toolkit that will be launched later in 2014, and a forthcoming paper by Bioversity International will compare results from the different field test sites.

This work is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems.

Read the entire Annual Report 2013 here.