The Satoyama Initiative is a global initiative with the purpose of realizing "societies in harmony with nature" through the conservation and advancement of "socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS)" around the world. Based on the concept of Satoyama, a traditional rural landscape in Japan, the initiative promotes integration of conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity in production landscapes, outside of protected areas. The initiative has been supported and implemented by an international partnership of over 100 governments, civil society organizations, and indigenous peoples.
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Name
The name "Satoyama" comes from a Japanese term for landscapes that include both human production activities, such as agriculture, forestry and Animal husbandry, and natural habitats, where human influence is an essential aspect of the local ecosystem. The Satoyama Initiative is based on the principle that such landscapes, when properly managed, can benefit both biodiversity and human livelihoods, rather than these being in a state of opposition, thus leading to "society in harmony with nature".
It is important to note that the "satoyama" landscape per se is limited to a model landscape found in Japan, while landscapes with similar features are found in countries around the world. To avoid referring to landscapes around the world by an inappropriate Japanese term, documentation used in the context of the Satoyama Initiative uses the term "socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS)" to refer to all such landscapes, including Japanese satoyama.
History
The Satoyama Initiative was started through a joint collaboration between the Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MOEJ) and the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS). In January 2010, a "Global Workshop on the Satoyama Initiative" was held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The Global Workshop built on two preparatory workshops held in Asia, the first in Tokyo, Japan in July 2009, and the second in Penang, Malaysia in October 2009. The objectives of the Global Workshop were to discuss the Satoyama Initiative’s concept and define the elements of activities to be included in the Initiative. The “Paris Declaration on the Satoyama Initiative” was one of the major outcomes of the Paris workshop. It was subsequently submitted to the fourteenth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity's Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-14) as one of the official documents of the meeting, and became a fundamental document that led to the Initiative’s recognition during the tenth ordinary meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 10), held in Nagoya, Japan in 2010. Some resistance came from some who opposed the use of the word "Satoyama" since it is only used in Japanese and is not a common term throughout the world, and from some major agricultural exporting countries who "made the criticism that the Satoyama Initiative would augment local production for local consumption, and thus inhibit free trade in goods in the spirit of the GATT Uruguay Round" before it was finally included in the COP 10 decision.
Key concepts
The vision of the Satoyama Initiative is to realize societies in harmony with nature, comprising human communities where the maintenance and development of socio-economic activities including agriculture and forestry align with natural processes. The Initiative is based on the idea that by managing and using biological resources sustainably and thus properly maintaining biodiversity, humans will be able to enjoy a stable supply of various natural assets well into the future.
Landscapes-level approaches to resource management have created a variety of different terms in different countries and languages, including dehesa in Spain, ahupua’a in Hawaii, and satoyama in Japan. Such landscapes and seascapes vary widely due to their unique adaptations to local climatic, geographic, cultural, and socio-economic conditions, so, in response to the need for common terminology, the term "socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS)" is used in many of the documents related to the Satoyama Initiative.
The International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI)
The International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI), one of the major institutional components under the Satoyama Initiative, is a partnership established on 19 October 2010 "to promote the activities identified by the Satoyama Initiative". By 2014, the partnership had grown from its original 51 member organizations to more than 160, including national and local governmental organizations, non-governmental and civil society organizations, indigenous and local community organizations, academic, educational and research institutions, private-sector and industry organizations, United Nations and other international organizations, and others. IPSI holds annual Global Conferences and other events, sponsors collaborative activities carried out by its members, collects case studies of work done in production landscapes and seascapes, and promotes knowledge facilitation and research.
IPSI's Secretariat is hosted by UNU-IAS in Tokyo, which conducts research on various issues related to the Satoyama Initiative, in particular through its International Satoyama Initiative research project.