Event driven adaptation, land use and human coping strategies: human-environment interaction in a smaller SWP island society

TY - ABST

T1 - Event driven adaptation, land use and human coping strategies

T2 - Land systems science: Handling complex series of natural and socioeconomic processes

AU - Reenberg, Anette

AU - Birch-Thomsen, Torben

AU - Fog, Bjarne

PY - 2007

Y1 - 2007

N2 - The paper focuses on assessing the wider perspectives of adaptive resource management strategies in former subsistence agriculture societies in the SW Pacific. Firstly, we will briefly introduce the theoretical context related to the livelihood framework, adaptation to socio-environmental change and the concept of coupled human-environmental timelines. Secondly, with point of departure in a baseline characterization of Bellona Island derived from a comprehensive survey in the late 1960s and resent fieldwork in late 2006, we present the case of Bellona Island. Key issues addressed concern climatic events, population, agricultural strategies, land use, livelihood strategies, non-agricultural activities, etc. Satellite imagery and aerial photos show relative stability in agricultural land despite an increase in de facto population (51% from 1966-2006). A questionnaire survey of 48 households provide data on the entire household livelihood portfolio and reveal that the natural resources remains a widespread activity, yet increasingly supplemented by other income generating activities( ex. shop keeping, private business, government employment). Group interviews have been employed to reveal how local farmers perceive cause-effect relationships between societal and environmental events and their individual and collective management of resources. The coupled human-environment timelines are used to discuss ways in which the local communities' adaptive resource management strategies have been employed in the face of main drivers of change, incl. climatic and socio-economic changes in the recent past.

AB - The paper focuses on assessing the wider perspectives of adaptive resource management strategies in former subsistence agriculture societies in the SW Pacific. Firstly, we will briefly introduce the theoretical context related to the livelihood framework, adaptation to socio-environmental change and the concept of coupled human-environmental timelines. Secondly, with point of departure in a baseline characterization of Bellona Island derived from a comprehensive survey in the late 1960s and resent fieldwork in late 2006, we present the case of Bellona Island. Key issues addressed concern climatic events, population, agricultural strategies, land use, livelihood strategies, non-agricultural activities, etc. Satellite imagery and aerial photos show relative stability in agricultural land despite an increase in de facto population (51% from 1966-2006). A questionnaire survey of 48 households provide data on the entire household livelihood portfolio and reveal that the natural resources remains a widespread activity, yet increasingly supplemented by other income generating activities( ex. shop keeping, private business, government employment). Group interviews have been employed to reveal how local farmers perceive cause-effect relationships between societal and environmental events and their individual and collective management of resources. The coupled human-environment timelines are used to discuss ways in which the local communities' adaptive resource management strategies have been employed in the face of main drivers of change, incl. climatic and socio-economic changes in the recent past.

KW - Faculty of Science

KW - Human-environment timelines

KW - adaptation

KW - land use

KW - livelihood

KW - SW Pacific

KW - Solomon Islands

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

Y2 - 25 October 2007 through 26 October 2007

ER -