Coastal SEES Collaborative Research: Understanding Coupled Biological and Cultural Resilience across Coastal Pacific Island Systems

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Coastal systems are changing rapidly across the globe, resulting in the need for human societies to adapt. Given the combination of environmental changes, population growth, and climate impacts, projections suggest that subsistence agriculture and coastal fisheries will fail to support the food needs of many Pacific countries by 2030. The Solomon Islands in the Western Pacific, with their unique cultural, agricultural, and biological diversity could constitute models for how systems adapt to recurrent change. Although Solomon Island communities have a long history of effectively addressing major unpredictable environmental and social changes, traditional strategies such as reef closures or fisheries restrictions are now faltering in many areas in response to outside forces such as emerging markets for marine resources that were previously unexploited by local people. This project will study the relationship among pressures such as climate change and increasing human population size, the health of inter-related human-natural systems, and benefits derived from these systems such as food security, clean water, and biodiversity in order to better inform effective management of people and the land and seascapes that support them. The project will inform future scenarios and resource management planning across a community-driven conservation network developed over the last decade in partnership with the principle investigators. This project will also contribute to recommendations for incorporating resilience thinking into policy development for climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and natural resource management in the Pacific and globally. The researchers will also engage in innovative ways to evaluate and broaden who is participating in the research and management process, in part by exploring technologies that embrace and use local knowledge and cultural identity. The project will improve the ability of social and biological scientists and of decision makers to manage community landscapes for sustainability at local levels. Additional broader impacts include training postdoctoral researchers and master's students from the United States and undergraduates from the Solomon Islands. This project is supported as part of the National Science Foundation's Coastal Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability program - Coastal SEES.Across Pacific Island human and natural communities, recent social and ecological pressures may be changing "biocultural" states, defined by coupled and interwoven sets of feedbacks among social, ecological, and evolutionary processes that shape land- and seascape mosaics, communities, and resource values. Resource use may be shifting due to underlying pressures from demographic, market, and climate changes. Use of the term biocultural emphasizes that resource management cannot be fully understood from social or biological standpoints alone. This project will uncover relationships among changing pressures, biocultural states, and socio-ecological benefits. Researchers will use a pressure-state-benefit-response framework to describe and inform reef-to-ridge management across Solomon Island communities in a multivariate analysis of biocultural state and potential system resilience to ongoing or future shocks. This project will: 1) evaluate the impact of contemporary landscape mosaic transformation on biocultural state, as defined by indicators of local ecological knowledge, biocultural connectivity, and governance; and 2) assess relationships between the current biocultural state and the state of well-being, both human (as measured by food security and access to sufficient freshwater resources) and ecological (as measured by biodiversity values at the ecosystem scale). Researchers will analytically relate landscape transformation, biocultural state and well-being benefits to inform future scenario planning. Researchers will model future shifts with an emphasis on the influence of climate change, market forces, and resource use scenarios to understand how components of a given biocultural state foster resilience potential. The co-creation of empirical, culturally relevant indicators of biocultural state, combined with participatory scenario planning, will serve as a model for effective integration across western scientific and local knowledge. This project represents a key advance for the broader scenario planning community by integrating cultural, economic and ecological considerations in a spatially explicit, transparent, and dynamic manner.