2014•11•18     Sydney

Photo: Prasanth Chandran Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 (cropped)

UNU-IAS is pleased to announce the launch of a publication titled Toolkit for the Indicators of Resilience in Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS), at a side event of the IUCN World Parks Congress 2014 held on 17 November 2014 in Sydney, Australia.

The toolkit contains information on the concepts of resilience and SEPLs, and introduces a set of 20 qualitative and quantitative indicators designed to capture key dimensions of a system – ecological, agricultural, cultural and socio-economic – based on observations of communities.

It also contains practical advice for holding resilience assessment workshops in local communities, to assist community members in measuring, understanding and evaluating the resilience of their own landscapes and seascapes, with practical tips for organizers and facilitators of workshops to assess resilience. The toolkit illustrates this approach through examples from the field featuring Fiji, Kenya, Namibia and Turkey.

The toolkit was created as part of a collaborative initiative under the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI), carried out by the UNU-IAS International Satoyama Initiative project, with partners Bioversity International, Community Development and Knowledge Management for the Satoyama Initiative (UNDP-COMDEKS), and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies. This collaboration is a continuation of previous work by UNU-IAS and Biodiversity International to produce the first set of Indicators of Resilience in SEPLS, and included a revision of the indicators based on field-testing and application around the world over the last two years.

For more information on the Indicators of Resilience project, the development of the toolkit, and collaborative activities of IPSI, please visit the IPSI website, or contact William Dunbar (dunbar@unu.edu).