Heather L. McMillen

Small islands, valuable insights: systems of customary resource use and resilience to climate change in the Pacific

Understanding how social-ecological systems are and can be resilient to climate change is one of the worlds most crucial problems today. It requires knowledge at local and global scales, the integration of natural and social sciences, and a focus on biocultural diversity. Small Pacific Islands and the knowledge-practice-belief systems of their peoples have a long history of resilience to environmental variability and unpredictability, including in areas with marginal habitats and with periodic, severe disturbance (e.g., drought, flood, storms, and tsunami). We review the state of research on these knowledge systems as it pertains to resilience and adaptation, and we highlight critical research needs to address the interrelated areas of: (1) local-scale expertise and observations of change with regard to weather, life-history cycles, and ecological processes; (2) customary resource management institutions and practices (i.e., with agroforests and the nearshore marine environment); and (3) the roles of leaders, social institutions, and social networks in the context of disturbance and change. We conclude that these knowledge systems can contribute high-resolution observations, benchmark data, and insights into practices that enhance resilience and adaptive capacity in integrated terrestrial and marine systems. Community-based and participatory approaches can complement and ground-truth climate models and direct culturally appropriate resource management, research, and adaptation measures. Although most islands in the Pacific are small, their knowledge systems include valuable insights on seasonal cycles, ecological processes, and the management of biocultural diversity that are relevant at a broad scale for understanding resilience and adaptability to the social-ecological effects of climate change.

The future is behind us: traditional ecological knowledge and resilience over time on Hawai‘i Island

Local and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems are thought to be particularly valuable for fostering adaptation and resilience to environmental and climate change. This paper investigates the role of TEK in adaptation to social–ecological change at the community level. It is unique because it takes a longitudinal perspective and draws on historical and contemporary data. We focus on a case study from Hawai‘i where TEK, cultural identity, and their relationships to environmental stewardship are locally seen as the basis for social resilience. We describe how coping strategies and indicators of social resilience have changed over time; the role of TEK in resilience; and the implications for climate change adaptation. Our results show the relative contributions of some strategies to cope with social–ecological change have decreased (e.g., forecasting, storage, and mobility), while others have maintained but adapted (e.g., livelihood diversification, knowledge transmission and storage, communal pooling, and cultural identity), underscoring the importance of considering multiple strategies together to promote community resilience. The article argues that understanding how people responded in the past can suggest relevant and culturally appropriate ways—through specific language, values, reference points, and indicators expressed in narratives, proverbs, and songs—of situating climate change and framing adaptation planning. This research also shows that TEK is vital for adaptation to environmental change broadly and climate change in particular, for subsistence-based, indigenous, rural communities, as well as place-based communities living in mixed economies. Thus, it is relevant for the larger Pacific Islands region and other areas that represent a continuum from rural-to-urban and traditional-to-global economies and lifeways.

Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales

Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives — encompassing values, knowledges, and needs — and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.Biocultural approaches combining local values, knowledge, and needs with global ecological factors provide a fruitful indicator framework for assessing local and global well-being and sustainability, and help bridge the divide between them.

Stories, Shrines, and Symbols: Recognizing Psycho-Social-Spiritual Benefits of Urban Parks and Natural Areas

Urban parklands are biological and social resources. While there is a growing recognition that park users interact with these resources to promote well-being, the diversity of these practices and benefits is not fully appreciated. Here we draw upon data from a social assessment of 40 New York City (NYC) parks spanning 11,200 acres and we focus on psycho-social-spiritual benefits that are co-produced by park users and parks. Our methods include interviews (n = 1,680), field observations, and photo documentation. Given our large and diverse sample, the data show that psycho-social-spiritual engagement with parkland is important across geographic, sociocultural, religious, and other identities throughout NYC. While specific practices may be culturally differentiated, we find that urban parks support psycho-social-spiritual well-being for a wide range of people who engage in practices that reflect personal desires to connect with nature and a larger reality, as well as via a broader set of practices focused on connecting with self and with others. Our approach is novel because it integrates data on park users from interviews, observations of activities, and material evidence of prior use of parklands. We describe our findings and present a typology of psycho-social-spiritual engagement with natural areas in NYC parklands. This study advances theoretical understandings of the psycho-social-spiritual as it manifests within the dynamic relationship between humans and the urban environment, raises questions about the implications of these findings for the management of social-ecological systems, and suggests future research that delves into the practices of specific cultural and park user groups.

Bringing multiple values to the table: assessing future land-use and climate change in North Kona, Hawaiʻi

As ecosystem service assessments increasingly contribute to decisions about managing Earth’s lands and waters, there is a growing need to understand the diverse ways that people use and value landscapes. However, these assessments rarely incorporate the value of landscapes to communities with strong cultural and generational ties to place, precluding inclusion of these values— alongside others—into planning processes. We developed a process to evaluate trade-offs and synergies in ecosystem services across land-use scenarios and under climate change in North Kona, Hawaiʻi, a tropical dry ecosystem where water, fire, biodiversity, and cultural values are all critical considerations for land management decisions. Specifically, we combined participatory deliberative methods, ecosystem service models, vegetation surveys, and document analysis to evaluate how cultural services, regulating services (groundwater recharge, landscape flammability reduction), biodiversity, and revenue: (1) vary across four land-use scenarios (pasture, coffee, agroforestry, and native forest restoration) and (2) are expected to vary with climate change (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 mid-century scenario). The native forest restoration scenario provided high cultural, biodiversity, and ecosystem service value, whereas coffees strongest benefit was monetary return. The agroforestry scenario offered the greatest potential in terms of maximizing multiple services. Pasture had relatively low ecological and economic value but, as with native forest and agroforestry, held high value in terms of local knowledge and cultural connection to place. Climate change amplified existing vulnerabilities for groundwater recharge and landscape flammability, but resulted in few shifts in the ranking of land-use scenarios. Our results demonstrate that cultural services need not be sacrificed at the expense of other management objectives if they are deliberately included in land-use planning from the start. Meaningfully representing what matters most to diverse groups of people, now and under a changing climate, requires greater integration of participatory methods into ecosystem service analyses.

Co-Creators of Memory, Metaphors for Resilience, and Mechanisms for Recovery: Flora in Living Memorials to 9/11

Planting trees to mark the passing of events and people is a longstanding tradition around the world. To better understand the contemporary practices of memorialization through planting, we examine living memorials created in response to the events of September 11, 2001. As an extension of the U.S. Forest Service Living Memorials Project, we reviewed existing data (n = 787 sites) and identified 223 sites where stewards mentioned planting 102 kinds of flora. Oaks (Quercus spp.) were most commonly mentioned (17% of sites), while 75% of plants/trees were named at only 1% or fewer sites, underscoring their diversity. We also visited 21 sites to document their flora and conduct interviews with stewards (n  =  34 stewards from 33 sites; 13 interviews were conducted by phone). We find that the symbolism of flora plays a role in continuing to keep memories alive at living memorial sites through flora traditionally used in death and memorial contexts; through more localized symbols particular to the sites as conveyed through the meanings of color, habit, and number; and through a newer symbol we identify, the callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) survivor tree. We also find that the community-based planting practices in public space are meaningful themselves, as they can serve as a mechanism to promote healing and recovery for communities and sometimes also promote the co-recovery of social-ecological systems.

Social-ecological research in urban natural areas: an emergent process for integration

Understanding the structure and function of urban landscapes requires integrating social and ecological research. Here, we integrate parallel social and ecological assessments of natural areas within New York City. We examined social data (from a rapid assessment of park use and meaning, collected at a park zone level) alongside ecological data (from a plot-based assessment of forest structure and diversity). In-depth interviews with researchers and managers (n = 11) involved with the social and ecological assessments revealed commonly-held values considered critical for integration, including clear communication, openness, trust, and shared goals and also identified barriers to the integration process, including the scales at which each dataset was collected. We applied an informed, shared problem framing to investigate the relationships between visitor use and ecological condition in urban natural areas. We began with fuzzy cognitive modeling, where researchers developed models of defining a “healthy urban forest.” We then developed two social-ecological typologies to examine the integrated dataset in relation to how visitors may affect or perceive ecological health and threat. Typologies identify NYC natural areas where social indicators (number of visitors, diversity of park use motivations) are either high or low and ecological condition is either high or low. Examination of these typologies led to exploring correlations between social and ecological variables, to team discussions, and to developing new research questions. We conclude this paper with a discussion of tradeoffs of this type of emergent, integrative approach to social-ecological synthesis research.