Opportunities and Constraints for Integrated Land-Sea Management
Integrated land-sea management (ILSM) is a type of resource management that targets threats and processes across land and sea ecosystems in order to maintain biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being. Since island peoples rely on natural sources for survival, a proactive, integrated management system across linked land and sea realms is essential for the continued provision of resources.
In order to gain a better understanding of the opportunities and constraints for implementing ILSMs on islands, the SNAPP Ridges to Reef Working Group developed indicators for assessing management principles, and evaluated the performance of planning and implementation on four ILSMs on islands throughout the tropical Pacific. Their findings are found in a recent Environmental Conservation publication.
The researchers developed ten indicators for assessing integrated management principles which include adopting a long-term, integrated approach to ecosystem management, incorporating all stakeholders, and ensuring management systems reflect local values. These indicators were applied to four selected case studies in the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Hawaiʻi.
Through indicator assessment they found that, in locations where customary governance is still strongly respected and enabled through national legislation, ILSM can be effective at restricting access and use according to resource availability, but that decision-making under customary governance may be vulnerable to mismanagement.
Government-led ILSM processes also have potential to effectively manage resources, but they may not capture all stakeholder interests, and implementation may be poorly coordinated across wide-spread island systems.
Based on these constraints, the authors identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness of project planning and evaluation through increasing local participation in decision-making, and mainstreaming ILSM into government and private-sector systems for durable and sustainable implementation.
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Opportunities and constraints for implementing integrated land–sea management on islands
Jupiter, S.D., Wenger, A., Klein, C.J., Albert, S., Mangubhai, S., Nelson, J., Teneva, L., Tulloch, V.J., White, A.T., Watson, J.E.M.
Environmental Conservation, January 2017, doi: 0.1017/S0376892917000091