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Learning Outcome:
• Understand how to develop and test environ-mental indicators with communities, and use them to monitor degradation/sustainability
Environmental Indicators
• What are they?
• Signs and symptoms
• “A physical, chemical, biological or socio-economic measurement, statistic or value that can be used to assess natural resources and environmental quality”
• Rapid, cheap and easy to use
• Can point to potential solutions
• Put a jacket on/ land management
• Guess the story behind these 3 photos…
Yr 1
Yr 10
Yr 20
1 10 20 yrs
What information did you use to tell this story?
• How do you identify and evaluate indicators of degradation/sustainability that can effectively detect change and point to solutions?
• Participatory indicator development
Semi-structured Interview
Focus Groups
Multi-Criteria
Evaluation
Focus Groups
Oral Histories
Above plus:
Participatory Mapping
Ecological sampling
Decision Support System
• Vast quantity of indicators: including socio-economic & livestock indicators, less on soil
• Generation of indicators not found in the literature
• Rejection or adaptation of indicators not relevant to local conditions or that require specialist training and equipment
Benefits of Participatory Indicator Devpt
• Easily used by land managers themselves
• No need for trade-off between meaningful participation and scientific rigour: empirical basis for most indicators
• Significant overlap between indicators elicited from communities and literature
• Majority of indicators tested were validated
0
5
10
15
20
25In
dica
tors
cite
d
Community only
Both
Literature only
Facilitating more sustainable land management through SIs
• Integrate indicators with management options
• Decision support system: ID problems & potential solutions
• Different options for different land users
• Kalahari: photographic manuals in local languages
• Distribute, evaluate and optimise in January
Dissemination
• Farmers can monitor and record rangeland degradation indicators qualitatively using “wheel charts”
• And respond appropriately…
Summary
You should now:
• Understand how to develop and test environ-mental indicators with communities, and use them to monitor degradation/sustainability
Reading
Reed MS (2003) Call of the Kalahari: Finding a future for a fragile landscape, Explorers Journal, Fall 2003: 30-33
http://www.env.leeds.ac.uk/~mreed/explorers.html
