Abstract
Small islands are vulnerable to the synergistic effects of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances due to the fact of their small area, geographical isolation, responsive ecologies, rapidly growing and developing populations and exposure to sea level and climate change. These changes exert pressures on ecosystem services, such as the provisioning of resources, and therefore threaten the sustainability of livelihoods. We reviewed key sustainability and livelihoods literature to bring together concepts of environmental livelihood resilience and stability across temporal and spatial scales and integrated them to produce a new conceptual framework for dynamic environmental livelihood sustainability (DESL). This framework aims to facilitate the incorporation of local community perspectives into water, energy and food nexus thinking about sustainable land use to support local livelihoods. Finally, we provide insights from this case study to evaluate the effectiveness of the DESL framework in addressing gaps in existing frameworks. We suggest this framing provides a mechanism for enhancing the agency of communities to produce more cohesive and inclusive land use management plans that can lead to enhanced environmental sustainability pathways.
Highlights
Communities living on small islands tend to be reliant on ecosystem services for meeting their basic needs and sustaining their livelihoods [1]
Nexus thinking is needed to understand multiple types of change and their impacts on sustainable livelihoods on small islands, due to the unique conditions they face
Energy and food nexus approaches fail to integrate community perspectives into narratives around sustainability, we introduce an integrative conceptual framework which links social-ecological and environmental sustainability thinking to explore livelihood outcomes under changing conditions on small islands
Summary
Communities living on small islands tend to be reliant on ecosystem services for meeting their basic needs and sustaining their livelihoods [1]. We introduce a new integrative conceptual framework, incorporating a participatory approach that combines biophysical and social components of environmental change to evaluate the sustainability of livelihoods This framework addresses the lack of emphasis on social-ecological relationships in existing approaches to sustainable land use planning. We suggest that the application of this conceptual framework can facilitate a greater understanding of how people interact with their environments across temporal and spatial scales to meet their basic needs in order to gain insights into how social-ecological interactions might evolve This framework has been developed with a focus on terrestrial landscapes on small islands and archipelagos in the Indian ocean of equatorial Eastern Africa, considering the specific water, energy and food challenges being faced on these islands. Using a synthesis of findings from Zanzibar, we evaluate the effectiveness of the new framework in addressing the gaps highlighted in previous examples
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