Direct-use values of woodland resources consumed and traded in a South African village

SUMMARY

This paper examines the contribution of secondary resources harvested from a savanna ecosystem to household income in Thorndale village, South Africa. The valuation of these resources provides a key tool for adopting sustainable development practices. The study shows the relevance of the dependence of rural people on secondary resources and implications for social and economic equity. Fuelwood, edible herbs and thatch grass contributed 80.6% ($492.53) of the total gross direct-use value ($559.46) of all the resources per household per annum. The net direct-use value of eight directly harvested resources was $455.11 after accounting for the opportunity cost of labour. The value of secondary resources traded amounted to $126.62 per household, equivalent to 22.6% of values from direct consumption, suggesting a high degree of dependence of villagers on natural resources harvested for household consumption. There were high relative direct-use values for fuelwood (44%) and edible herbs (25.9%) reflecting the high energy requirement, and substitute for cultivated vegetables, respectively. It was generally perceived that resources were in short supply probably due to the level of dependence, and as a coping strategy.     

Assessing livelihood for improvement: Samanalawewa reservoir environs,Sri Lanka

This paper explores household (HH)-level livelihood dynamics and determinants since construction of the Samanalawewa Hydroelectricity Reservoir (SHER) in the Samanalawewa watershed, Sri Lanka. The research is based on data from a structured questionnaire survey of 201 randomly selected households (HHs) in upstream and downstream areas. Livelihood dynamics at two separate points in time (1988 and 2008) were assessed based on a sustainable livelihood framework (SLF). Impact of livelihood determinants on livelihood was analysed using factor and regression analysis techniques, followed by an optimisation procedure to suggest requirements in selected significant determinants to improve the livelihood of various categories of farm HH. In both upstream and downstream areas, livelihood assets, viz. physical, social and human capital, increased significantly, while access to natural and financial capital decreased significantly and slightly, respectively, during last two decades. The factor analysis extracted six factors in the upstream area and seven in the downstream area. The derived regression models show that nine variables in the upstream area and ten in the downstream area are major determinants of HH livelihood. Based on optimisation results, policy implications are discussed in relation to needed improvements in livelihood determinants to improve overall livelihood of HHs.     

Local adaptation for livelihood resilience in Albay,Philippines

Local adaptation to climate change is essential for vulnerable coastal communities faced with increasing threats to livelihood and safety. This paper seeks to understand the micro-level enabling conditions for climate change adaptation through a livelihood lens in a study of six coastal villages in Bacacay in the province of Albay, Philippines. Albay is a high-risk province due to hydro-meteorological and geophysical hazards. The analysis of livelihood resilience utilizing the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach shows that a soft adaptation strategy focusing on enhancing human and social capital needs to be undertaken to increase adaptive capacity and build resilience in the study area. Moreover, the micro-level variations in the villages suggest that the understanding of local conditions is indispensable in planning and formulation of appropriate adaptation strategies and actions at local level.     

Calamity,kastom, and modernity: local interpretations of vulnerability in the western Pacific

On 2 April 2007 a large tsunami struck the small island of Simbo in the western Solomon Islands. It obliterated two villages, killed 10 people, and provoked communities on the northern half of the island to permanently relocate their settlements. In this article I examine how the Simbo people experienced and perceived this catastrophic event. Local discourses about the tsunami, its aftermath, and its selective lethality reveal how Simboans do not employ spiritual or naturalistic rationales to conceptualize vulnerability. Rather it is described in terms of the anxieties and novel opportunities associated with encroaching modernity and other exogenous large-scale social and economic processes. The case exemplifies the tensions and contradictions that arise when communities actively negotiate and trade-off one set of vulnerabilities for others as social and ecological contexts transform. I argue that an improved understanding of local interpretations of vulnerability is critical if our interest is to better cope with inevitable future ecological disturbances.     

Resilience in the context of tsunami early warning systems and community disaster preparedness in the Indian Ocean Region

This paper discusses insights from post-tsunami early warning system (EWS) development in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia by analysing selected elements of resilience, based on the Coastal Community Resilience (CCR) framework, and by distinguishing between the cognitive, normative and procedural dimensions of EWSs. The findings indicate that (1) recent calls to develop participatory and people-centred EWSs as promoted by the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005—2015 have not been sufficiently translated into action in the implementation of national policies and strategies for early warning; (2) policy and guidance places significantly more emphasis on the procedural compared to the normative and cognitive dimensions of EWSs; (3) practitioners engaged in early warning and disaster risk reduction operate in contexts shaped by multiple stakeholder agendas and face considerable challenges in negotiating diverse needs and priorities; and (4) few platforms currently exist that enable stakeholders to coordinate and reconcile agendas, negotiate joint targets, share knowledge and critically reflect on lessons learnt, and to improve the integration of early warning with other priorities such as livelihoods improvement, natural resource management and community development.     

Species, functional groups, and thresholds in ecological resilience

The cross-scale resilience model states that ecological resilience is generated in part from the distribution of functions within and across scales in a system. Resilience is a measure of a system's ability to remain organized around a particular set of mutually reinforcing processes and structures, known as a regime. We define scale as the geographic extent over which a process operates and the frequency with which a process occurs. Species can be categorized into functional groups that are a link between ecosystem processes and structures and ecological resilience. We applied the cross-scale resilience model to avian species in a grassland ecosystem. A species' morphology is shaped in part by its interaction with ecological structure and pattern, so animal body mass reflects the spatial and temporal distribution of resources. We used the log-transformed rank-ordered body masses of breeding birds associated with grasslands to identify aggregations and discontinuities in the distribution of those body masses. We assessed cross-scale resilience on the basis of 3 metrics: overall number of functional groups, number of functional groups within an aggregation, and the redundancy of functional groups across aggregations. We assessed how the loss of threatened species would affect cross-scale resilience by removing threatened species from the data set and recalculating values of the 3 metrics. We also determined whether more function was retained than expected after the loss of threatened species by comparing observed loss with simulated random loss in a Monte Carlo process. The observed distribution of function compared with the random simulated loss of function indicated that more functionality in the observed data set was retained than expected. On the basis of our results, we believe an ecosystem with a full complement of species can sustain considerable species losses without affecting the distribution of functions within and across aggregations, although ecological resilience is reduced. We propose that the mechanisms responsible for shaping discontinuous distributions of body mass and the nonrandom distribution of functions may also shape species losses such that local extinctions will be nonrandom with respect to the retention and distribution of functions and that the distribution of function within and across aggregations will be conserved despite extinctions.     

Foundations of Resilience Thinking

Through 3 broad and interconnected streams of thought, resilience thinking has influenced the science of ecology and natural resource management by generating new multidisciplinary approaches to environmental problem solving. Resilience science, adaptive management (AM), and ecological policy design (EPD) contributed to an internationally unified paradigm built around the realization that change is inevitable and that science and management must approach the world with this assumption, rather than one of stability. Resilience thinking treats actions as experiments to be learned from, rather than intellectual propositions to be defended or mistakes to be ignored. It asks what is novel and innovative and strives to capture the overall behavior of a system, rather than seeking static, precise outcomes from discrete action steps. Understanding the foundations of resilience thinking is an important building block for developing more holistic and adaptive approaches to conservation. We conducted a comprehensive review of the history of resilience thinking because resilience thinking provides a working context upon which more effective, synergistic, and systems‐based conservation action can be taken in light of rapid and unpredictable change. Together, resilience science, AM, and EPD bridge the gaps between systems analysis, ecology, and resource management to provide an interdisciplinary approach to solving wicked problems. Fundamentos del Pensamiento sobre Resiliencia     

社会-生态系统弹性概念分析及评价综述

社会-生态系统如何响应全球环境变化已经被认为是当今自然资源管理中重点关注的方面之一,弹性理论为科学分析社会-生态系统中扰动和适应性的相互作用提供重要理论基础。在人地矛盾日益突出的今天,弹性作为自然界和人类系统一个有价值的特性,对其概念内涵进行分析并总结其评价的研究进展,具有重要的意义。在介绍弹性起源基础上,对弹性定义进行了剖析,对工程弹性、生态系统弹性以及社会-生态系统弹性进行解释。在此基础上,着重分析了弹性分别与脆弱性、适应性和可持续发展之间的区别与联系,并从评价框架、评价指标和评价工具等方面对弹性的定量评价与应用进行回顾。最后,从弹性内涵、定量评价和退化的社会-生态系统弹性修复实践3个方面对未来的发展趋势进行展望。     

Trust via disasters: the case of Chile's 2010 earthquake

Chile has a long‐standing history of natural disasters and, in particular, earthquakes. The latest big earthquake hit Chile on 27 February 2010 with a magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale. As an event that had a profound impact on significant portions of the population, the earthquake could theoretically have served to build trust by promoting new trust networks through the enhancement of distant family ties and the interaction between affected neighbours. This study offers an empirical analysis of this theory in the Chilean case. It finds that if initial social capital is very low (thus allowing for post‐disaster looting and violence), then the impact of the trust‐increasing effect is smaller. It also shows that the effect of the disaster was not transitory, but that it persisted and actually increased over time.