United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability

The purpose of this guide is to introduce the concept of landscape and seascape approaches (henceforth, “landscape approaches” for ease of reading), and how they can be applied to national biodiversity strategy and planning. Although it is written from the point of view of biodiversity conservation, it is aimed at all the many sectors that affect...

Efforts in Aya over the past half century to coexist with nature have been based on collaboration with a diverse range of people and organizations, not only locally but also from all over Japan and abroad. Activities leading up to the present day were triggered by opposition to a deforestation plan in a state-owned forest, but since then, the...

The 1637 Shimabara-Amakusa Rebellion occurred in the early Edo period of Japan. This was an uprising against harsh regime enforced in the Shimabara domain, including heavy taxation and the violent prohibition of Christianity. The rebels fought against the shogunate forces, but the uprising was suppressed and the rebels executed. The “Minami...

Larch forestry has thrived in Atsuma town under a relatively mild climate and clear-cutting operations have been carried out with well-developed forest roads. Besides, a new trend is emerging. It is a trial-and-error process to find diversity in the way people relate to the forest and reflect it in the way they make a living. The horse logging...

At 14:46 on March 11, 2011, the largest earthquake ever recorded, with a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale, occurred, and together with the subsequent tsunami, caused extensive damage along the Pacific coast of the Tohoku region in Japan. The human casualties, as reported by the National Police Agency on April 10, 2015, were 15,891 dead and 2...

At the end of World War II, the Battle of Okinawa was fought between Allied and Japanese forces on the Okinawa islands. The Battle of Okinawa was a ground war directly involving the people of the prefecture, and 120,000 of the then population of approximately 490,000 were killed. Of these, 94,000 were civilian casualties. After the war, Okinawa was...

This open access book is a compilation of case studies that provide useful knowledge and lessons that derive from on-the-ground activities and contribute to policy recommendations, focusing on the relevance of social-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS) to “transformative change.” The concept of “transformative change” has been...

This report is an output of the Expert Thematic Workshop on Landscape Approaches for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework held 3-6 September 2019 in Kumamoto, Japan, which was organized by the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS) in cooperation with the Secretariat of the Convention on...

This booklet has been prepared for IPSI member organisations, as well as for others who are engaged in SEPLS, to introduce the SDM and to provide snapshots of the projects implemented by our sub-grant recipients. The booklet starts with an introduction to the SDM, followed by a list and a global map of the sub-grant projects. The third section...