Conservation practice has sometimes been criticized for relying on simplistic assumptions about social contexts in natural resource management. Despite recent advances conceptualizing the interface ...between human well-being and the environment, very few studies moving from theory to practice exist. We address this gap by providing one of the first careful examinations of local conceptualizations of well-being in a conservation context, using mixed methods to examine the multidimensionality and heterogeneity of well-being conceptualizations across three sites in northern Cambodia. Each site faced different levels of conservation activities and development pressures, the latter being mainly linked to the degree of impact from economic land concessions. Our results highlight village context as a key line of variation in individual well-being, rather than differences related to age, gender, or wealth. Our results suggest that conservation incentives that mirror people’s aspirations can balance out negative trade-offs linked to compliance and can contribute to well-being. We show that multifaceted values are attached to well-being components, highlighting the importance of subjective indicators and perceptions to capture fully the social changes and impacts of conservation in complex contexts. We conclude that enquiries into subjective well-being should become an integral part of participatory assessments and adaptive management of conservation interventions.
•Long-term and landscape-scale studies are necessary to capture social effects of conservation.•We present a multi-period evaluation involving 16 villages inside and outside PAs.•PAs have slightly ...limited the increase in socio-economic status.•Yet PAs have successfully protected tenure security for traditional livelihoods.•Participants in one of three PES recorded significantly higher status.
The success of conservation interventions often depends on the multifaceted and sometimes competing interests and motivations that lead local people to sustainably manage natural resources in the first place. Yet despite an extensive literature exploring the effects of conservation on human livelihoods, there is a lack of robust evidence about which type of conservation intervention works, for whom, and how. This is partly because the social impacts of conservation interventions often affect multiple aspects of human well-being, with changes taking place over long periods during which unintended feedbacks can occur. This paper assesses the medium-term impacts of Protected Areas (PAs) and of three Payment for Environmental Services (PES) projects on three socio-economic indicators across 16 villages in Northern Cambodia. We present a multi-period evaluation including three panel surveys over six years from villages inside and outside PAs to clarify the mechanisms through which social effects of conservation take place and how this translates into the development pathways adopted by households. While livelihood improvements were recorded across all villages, we found that PAs slightly reduce households’ socio-economic status, though does not impede their development. PAs also protect traditional livelihoods. Participants in one of the three PES projects recorded higher economic status and agricultural productivity than non-participants, suggesting that there can be important social co-benefits to conservation interventions when programs are well-designed to respond to local contexts.
•Spatial correlates of Economic Land Concession (ELC) placement and deforestation in northern Cambodia are modelled.•ELC placement does not respond to implementation criteria stated in policy ...documents.•Deforestation is more likely to occur in ELCs, and less likely in managed protected areas.•Results point to discrepancies in the implementation of the Land Law.•Development impacts may compromise long-term environmental sustainability.
Trade-offs between different land use outcomes are inevitable to meet both development and conservation agendas, especially in developing countries where aspirations for development take place within the world's most biodiversity-rich areas. Reports at the national or subnational levels about how trade-offs between conservation and development outcomes materialise once implemented are limited and regionalized analyses are required to understand how they materialise spatially once policies are executed. We take the case study of northern Cambodia, where both protected areas (PAs), as a conservation policy, and Economic Land Concessions (ELCs), as a developmental agricultural intensification strategy, have been implemented. We explore the influences on placement of ELCs and the extent to which they overlap with protected areas, using mixed effect models. We then determine the predictors of deforestation in the study area between 2008 and 2013, including presence of ELCs and PAs. ELC placement does not respond to expected socio-environmental factors related to implementation criteria in policy documents, and is not influenced by the presence of PAs. ELCs represent the most significant driver of deforestation of the factors considered. PAs limit deforestation but only if well-managed. This failure to achieve the balanced trade-off between conservation and development outcomes which policies intend points to development impacts compromising environmental sustainability in the long-run.
Resilience to climate shocks in the tropics Hirons, Mark; Beauchamp, Emilie; Whitfield, Stephen ...
Environmental research letters,
10/2020, Letnik:
15, Številka:
10
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This focus collection on resilience to climate shocks in the tropics draws together 16 papers that predominantly examine the impacts of, and responses to, the 2015/2016 El Niño-Southern Oscillation ...event, in a range of contexts. This introductory synthesis contextualises the collection of papers by reviewing important concepts and highlighting some important insights that emerge from the collection. The papers in this collection collectively highlight: the value of longitudinal and interdisciplinary research in understanding both the roots of, and responses to, resilience challenges; the critical interaction between climatic and land-use changes; and the ways in which governance arrangements underpin societal decision-making across a range of scales and contexts to shape resilience.
Faced with the global climate crisis and the inevitability of future climate shocks, enhancing social-ecological resilience has become an urgent area for research and policy internationally. Research ...to better understand the impacts of, and response to, climate shocks is critical to improve the resilience and well-being of affected people and places. This paper builds on the findings of a focus collection on this topic to provide a concluding and forward-looking perspective on the future of social-ecological research on climate resilience. Drawing on an expert workshop to identify research gaps, we distinguish 20 priorities for future research on climate resilience. These span four key themes: Systems and Scales, Governance and Knowledge, Climate Resilience and Development, and Sectoral Concerns. Given the need and urgency for evidence-based policies to address the climate crisis, the analysis considers the importance of understanding how findings on social-ecological resilience are used in policy, rather than solely focusing on how it is generated. Many of the priorities emphasise the governance systems within which climate research is produced, understood and used. We further reflect on the state of current evidence generation processes, emphasising that the involvement of a wider range of voices in the design, implementation and dissemination of climate resilience research is critical to developing the efficient and fair interventions it is meant to support.
Understanding direct deforestation drivers at a fine spatial and temporal scale is needed to design appropriate measures for forest management and monitoring. To achieve this, reference datasets with ...which to design Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches to classify direct deforestation drivers within areas experiencing forest loss in a detailed, comprehensive and locally-adapted way are needed. This is the case for Cameroon, in the Congo Basin, which has known increasing deforestation rates in recent years. Here, we created an Earth Observation dataset with associated labels to classify detailed direct deforestation drivers in Cameroon, which includes satellite imagery (Landsat and PlanetScope) and auxiliary data on infrastructure and biophysical properties. The dataset provides the following fifteen labels: oil palm, timber, fruit, rubber and other-large scale plantations; grassland/shrubland; small-scale oil palm or maize plantations and other small-scale agriculture; mining; selective logging; infrastructure; wildfires; hunting; and other.
Abstract This paper illustrates a methodology to measure the impact of resilience-building actions on the increased resilience of people and natural systems to face climate change, developed and ...field-tested around the Race to Resilience Campaign. Despite increasing acknowledgment of the need for robust methodologies and indicators to monitor and evaluate efforts across adaptation planning and implementation, and provide credibility, accountability and transparency to such actions, there is still a lack of sufficiently standardized and agreed upon metrics able to capture the effect of resilience-building actions. The proposal illustrated in this manuscript offers a pioneering approach for high-level tracking, monitoring and evaluation of resilience-building efforts of non-state actors, based on two complementing sets of metrics: depth metrics measure the degree to which an action is generating a change to fundamental conditions which can demonstrably be related to increasing resilience; while magnitude metrics offer a quantification of the beneficiaries that are affected by these changes. Underlying both stand the Resilience Attributes: properties which can be soundly associated with triggering resilience across different systems, and which can then be used to assess increased resilience ‘by proxy’: that is, by seeing how an action sets forth changes in properties commonly associated with resilience. These Attributes were identified based on updated scientific literature and co-construction exercises with global experts. The integration of Depth and Magnitude indices, adjusted by a Confidence Index evaluating data reliability, allows to estimate the overall contribution of a set of actions on increasing resilience against climate challenges. Based on the above, a possible Monitoring & Evaluation cycle is proposed, and an illustration is offered on two case studies from the Race to Resilience campaign. Key strengths, lessons learned and insights are summarized to stimulate the global discussion, in the context of the Global Stocktake and Global Goal on Adaptation.
Climate shocks are predicted to increase in magnitude and frequency as the climate changes, notably impacting poor and vulnerable communities across the Tropics. The urgency to better understand and ...improve communities' resilience is reflected in international agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the multiplication of adaptation research and action programs. In turn, the need for collecting and communicating evidence on the climate resilience of communities has increasingly drawn questions concerning how to assess resilience. While empirical case studies are often used to delve into the context-specific nature of resilience, synthesizing results is essential to produce generalizable findings at the scale at which policies are designed. Yet datasets, methods and modalities that enable cross-case analyses that draw from individual local studies are still rare in climate resilience literature. We use empirical case studies on the impacts of El Niño on smallholder households from five countries to test the application of quantitative data aggregation for policy recommendation. We standardized data into an aggregated dataset to explore how key demographic factors affected the impact of climate shocks, modeled as crop loss. We find that while cross-study results partially align with the findings from the individual projects and with theory, several challenges associated with quantitative aggregation remain when examining complex, contextual and multi-dimensional concepts such as resilience. We conclude that future exercises synthesizing cross-site empirical evidence in climate resilience could accelerate research to policy impact by using mixed methods, focusing on specific landscapes or regional scales, and facilitating research through the use of shared frameworks and learning exercises.
Agroecological researchers and advocates often make assumptions about the social impact and dissemination of their work: researchers may assume that their work has impact through postresearch ...dissemination, while advocates may assume that new agroecological practices can be effectively spread through existing social networks.
Here, we test these assumptions by quantifying the effects of an agroecological research project on farming practices and the social network in a village community in Papua New Guinea. The project aimed to test the effect of applying banana peel compost, chicken manure and NPK fertiliser on sweet potato yields. Local farmers were involved in the research as project garden owners or research assistants. Using stochastic actor‐oriented modelling, we tracked changes in farming practices and the social network.
Over the course of the research project, more people started to use food waste on their farms, while animal manure and NPK fertiliser were not frequently adopted. Farmers also took up practices that were not directly researched, such as mulching and planting the specific variety of sweet potato that was used in the project. This suggests that local farmers created meaning from the project, despite the researchers not intending to give advice until the end of the project.
The research project also affected the community's social network. Research assistants became more often sought‐after for advice, while knowledge about the project did not flow far from those directly involved. These results indicate that who gets involved in a project may have social consequences, and show the importance of understanding existing social networks before they are relied upon for spreading farming practices.
Overall, this work challenges often‐held assumptions about the social impact and dissemination of agroecological research, provides insights into the types of agricultural innovations more likely to be accepted among farmers, and explores how new practices may most effectively be promoted within a community.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
IntroductionOur project follows community requests for health service incorporation into conservation collaborations in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea (PNG). This protocol is for health needs ...assessments, our first step in coplanning medical provision in communities with no existing health data.Methods and analysisThe study includes clinical assessments and rapid anthropological assessment procedures (RAP) exploring the health needs and perspectives of partner communities in two areas, conducted over 6 weeks fieldwork. First, in Wanang village (population c.200), which is set in lowland rainforest. Second, in six communities (population c.3000) along an altitudinal transect up the highest mountain in PNG, Mount Wilhelm. Individual primary care assessments incorporate physical examinations and questioning (providing qualitative and quantitative data) while RAP includes focus groups, interviews and field observations (providing qualitative data). Given absence of in-community primary care, treatments are offered alongside research activity but will not form part of the study. Data are collected by a research fellow, primary care clinician and two PNG research technicians. After quantitative and qualitative analyses, we will report: ethnoclassifications of disease, causes, symptoms and perceived appropriate treatment; community rankings of disease importance and service needs; attitudes regarding health service provision; disease burdens and associations with altitudinal-related variables and cultural practices. To aid wider use study tools are in online supplemental file, and paper and ODK versions are available free from the corresponding author.Ethics and disseminationChallenges include supporting informed consent in communities with low literacy and diverse cultures, moral duties to provide treatment alongside research in medically underserved areas while minimising risks of therapeutic misconception and inappropriate inducement, and PNG research capacity building. Brighton and Sussex Medical School (UK), PNG Institute of Medical Research and PNG Medical Research Advisory Committee have approved the study. Dissemination will be via journals, village meetings and plain language summaries.
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