Satoyama Initiative

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Satoyama Initiative

Submitted by naomi.sleeper on Tue, 2011-02-08 14:11

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Tags: Satoyama community-based natural resource management Community-based Adaptation CBNRM biodiversity

Theme: Natural Resource Management

Summary:

Summary

Satoyoma is a place where people and nature exist in harmony, where people make a sustainable living from the land. In these areas, traditional and new resource use, including carefully managed forests, play an important role in enriching the environment in plant diversity and protection of animal life.

The Satoyama Initiative promotes activities that support community development through landscape level management of forests, agricultural land, coastal areas, wetlands and grasslands while focusing on communities' conservation of biodiversity and support of livelihoods through ecosystem services. The areas that will be targeted by the Satoyama Initiative are landscapes that have been formed through human habitation and activities such as agriculture and forestry over many years. Taking into consideration that ‘satoyama and satoumi landscapes’ have been defined as ‘dynamic mosaics of managed socio-ecological systems that produce a bundle of ecosystem services for human well-being,’ (Japan SGA, 2010), ‘socio-ecological production landscape’ is proposed to refer to the targeted areas of the Satoyama Initiative.

Such landscapes formed through harmonized human-nature relationships, including agroforestry and common lands, are widely found all over the world. Each country or region has a term for such landscapes that have been utilized and managed—muyong, uma and payoh in the Phillipines, mauel in Korea, and dehesa in Spain and terroirs in France. These are generally characterized by a wise use of biological resources in accordance with traditional cultural practices that are compatible with conservation and sustainable use.