In the south basin of Lake Biwa, Shiga, Japan, overgrown aquatic weeds (submerged macrophytes) impede cruising boats and cause unpleasant odors and undesirable waste when washed ashore. To address this socio-ecological problem, Shiga Prefectural Government implemented a public program to remove overgrown weeds and compost them ashore to conserve the lake environment, while coastal inhabitants and occasional volunteers remove weeds from the beaches to maintain the quality of the living environment. However, these effects are limited because of disjointed social networks. We applied an adaptive and abductive approach to develop community capability to jointly address this problem by sharing academic knowledge with local actors and empowering them. The initial multifaceted reviews, including interviews and postal questionnaire surveys, revealed that the agro-economic value of composted weeds declined in historical and socio-psychological contexts and that most of the unengaged public relied on local governments to address environmental problems. These findings were synthesized and assessed with workshop participants, including local inhabitants, governmental agents, businesspeople, social entrepreneurs, and research experts, to unearth the best solution. The workshops resulted in the development of an e-point system, called Biwa Point, to promote and acknowledge voluntary environmental conservation activities, including beach cleaning. It may contribute to enhancing the socio-ecological capability of communities. Additionally, ethical issues, such as publication of inconvenient truths, undesired interpretation by the researchers, and social constraints in research methods, arose through our research practice.
This article investigates the shadow value of resilience in complex natural lands acting as wild pollinator habitats. We capture the linkage between pollination services in crop production and habitat conditions in the surrounding natural land with a bioeconomic model. Our case study is buckwheat, which is produced in the hilly and mountainous region of central Japan and is greatly dependent on diverse fauna for pollination services. We model the mechanism of regime shifts in ecosystems consisting of buckwheat fields and the surrounding natural land with a threshold estimation model. We then find that the forest around the crop fields, which serves as a habitat for wild pollinators, is a determinant of an ecological threshold that causes regime shifts. We calculate the shadow value of resilience provided by forest habitat around a unit of buckwheat field to be $9,796, implying that the total value of resilience in complex natural land amounts to half of the stock price of buckwheat land. This overlooked value gives us useful insights on the sustainable use of ecosystems, including both pollinator‐mediated crop fields and habitats for pollinators.
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