Landscape Community Resilience

UNDP works at the local level with community organizations and networks to achieve inclusive, resilient and sustainable development and develop concerted local solutions for global environmental management. UNDP recognizes that smallholders and the rural poor are the primary agents of change at community and landscape levels, as well as for broader societal transformation. To support this transformational process, UNDP empowers communities to implement participatory landscape planning and adaptive management to enhance community and ecosystem resilience and sustainability.  

Communities, indigenous groups and other local peoples are stewards of ecosystem and landscapes. Local solutions involving communities are critical, ones that connect the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainable development challenges and responses. For UNDP, the landscape approach is an effective way of integrating land use with biodiversity and ecosystem functioning while enhancing community wellbeing and sustainable livelihoods in low carbon development that maximizes resilience to climate change. Enhancing social capital and promoting collective actions at the local level, UNDP applies the principle of long-term strategic engagement through a community-based, resilient landscape approach that moves beyond short-term projects in communities to a programmatic approach that encompasses the ecosystems and landscape with which communities have a symbiotic relationship.  UNDP landscape approach provides a basis for implementing the global Aichi Biodiversity Targets set out in the CBD Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 which were adopted at the Tenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10).


UNDP and the Production Landscape Approach

As part of this effort, through the Community Development and Knowledge Management for the Satoyama Initiative (COMDEKS) project, UNDP is piloting the Community-based Production Landscape Management Approach to enhance resilience of landscapes and communities.

COMDEKS is field-testing methodologies to empower community organizations to implement participatory landscape planning and enhance resilience at the community level.  The Community-based Production Landscape Management Approach aims to increase the adaptive capacity of the landscape and of communities to manage landscapes, resources and ecosystems through appropriate tools and methodologies, community initiatives and, eventually, upscaling.

COMDEKS operates in landscapes that have been selected through a participatory multi-stakeholders process involving the communities that inhabit, use, and protect them. Diverse landscapes require locally-adapted solutions to meet the needs of stakeholders and conserve the wealth of ecosystem services, biodiversity, cultures and knowledge found within socio-ecological production landscapes.

Once a landscape has been identified, community consultations are held to develop a landscape strategy to enhance resilience and sustainability. This process of social learning promotes the conditions for achieving long-term biodiversity conservation by building the capacity of communities to learn about the complexity of interactions in the landscape and promoting changes in behavior.

As part of the community consultation process, Indicators for Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS) are piloted enabling the development of participatory transformative strategies.  Landscape Strategies guide the selection and implementation of specific community initiatives in each country. Small grants are provided to local community organizations with the overall long term objective to enhance socio-ecological production landscape and seascape resilience. COMDEKS also focuses on reviewing, analyzing, and codifying results from on the ground activities to distill and disseminate lessons which can be replicated in other parts of the world and communicated to policy makers for coherent policy development.  

The figure below illustrates the COMDEKS Strategic Framework to enhance resilience and sustainability at the landscape level through adaptive management.

 

Landscape Approach and Community-Based Adaptation

Climate change has had an unequal impact on the poorest and most vulnerable communities in developing countries and is exacerbated by unrelenting biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation in the landscapes upon which communities depend. Reducing vulnerabilities and increasing resilience start with local, community-based adaptation initiatives that engage multiple stakeholders at various levels to design and pilot risk reduction measures and adaptation technologies and practices that increase long-term climate change resilience.   

UNDP spearheaded Community-based Adaptation (CBA) and tested community-based approaches and participatory tools and methodologies for enhancing and/or sustaining resilient communities.  UNDP developed and piloted the Vulnerability Risk Assessment tool to measure community perception of its vulnerability at the beginning, middle and end of each project. This tool allows communities to measure project progress and impact and modify management of their resources, as needed to respond to ongoing changes in climate.

Communities are key to creating and maintaining climate resilient landscapes but are the most vulnerable to the devastating effects of climate change. Poverty, inadequate policy frameworks, large-scale agriculture, logging and mining, infrastructure, industrial, and tourism development, and other factors may have compromised their stewardship. Yet, communities worldwide remain intimately bound to ecosystems and the good and services they provide for their economic and cultural survival. The concept of landscape resilience goes beyond community-based adaptation by strengthening the capacity of the overall system (ecosystems, communities, and institutions) not only to respond to climate change impacts, but also to preserve and maintain the integrity of the system to better support community sustainable livelihoods and lead to sustainable development.  UNDP is currently combining CBA methodologies and the Production Landscape Approach to enhance ecosystem and community resilience in priority landscapes in countries around the world.