Small islands are vulnerable to the synergistic effects of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances due to the fact of their small area, geographical isolation, responsive ecologies, rapidly growing and developing populations and exposure to sea level and climate change. These changes exert pressures on ecosystem services, such as the provisioning of resources, and therefore threaten the sustainability of livelihoods. We reviewed key sustainability and livelihoods literature to bring together concepts of environmental livelihood resilience and stability across temporal and spatial scales and integrated them to produce a new conceptual framework for dynamic environmental livelihood sustainability (DESL). This framework aims to facilitate the incorporation of local community perspectives into water, energy and food nexus thinking about sustainable land use to support local livelihoods. Finally, we provide insights from this case study to evaluate the effectiveness of the DESL framework in addressing gaps in existing frameworks. We suggest this framing provides a mechanism for enhancing the agency of communities to produce more cohesive and inclusive land use management plans that can lead to enhanced environmental sustainability pathways.
Small developing islands face a number of environmental and social pressures which impact resource security. This study uses a people-centred framework to investigate social-ecological interactions for water, energy and food security. Ten semi-structured focus group discussions were conducted in Pemba and Unguja islands with village elders and leaders. Results demonstrate that shocks and stresses affecting resource security are attributed to land use and resource competition, deforestation, climate change and insufficient resource infrastructure. The scale and strength of such pressures are heightened in dry seasons and also correspond with spatial characteristics such as remoteness, intensity of land use and amount of natural resource capital. Whilst a number of adaptive responses are identified, these appear to be incremental and do not address the scale of the challenge. Maladaptive responses are also identified; most concerning is the use of poor quality water when piped water was disrupted, reduced nutritional intake during dry season and using unsustainable supplies or methods of obtaining of fuelwood. Findings illustrate the importance of using people-centred approaches for understanding the complexity of social-ecological interactions for resource security. They also demonstrate that interventions for resource management need to consider spatial heterogeneity and temporality in terms of how specific land cover uses connect to differential pressures and adaptation capacity over time.
Seaweed farming is an important alternative livelihood activity that has been heralded as a development success story. It has advanced women’s empowerment and economic liberation in coastal communities in Zanzibar, despite recent declines in its production. Using data from 36 semistructured interviews, we explore the impacts of climate change on seaweed farming in Zanzibar and the coping and adaptation strategies available to farmers. Interviews reveal that climatic changes observed in Zanzibar are characterized by increased temperatures, increased winds, and irregular rainfall, and these changes have negatively affected coastal seaweed farming yields and quality. Combined with economic challenges, these environmental stressors are threatening the sustainability of seaweed farming and the wider development impacts that have been gained over the past decades. Establishing seaweed farms in deeper water, using new technologies, could be an adaptation method to overcome rising temperatures; however, there are significant socioeconomic barriers for this to happen. For example, women lack access to boats and the ability to swim. Adaptation options to the increasing impacts of climate change will be possible only with institutional support, significant investment, and through the empowerment of women and the participation local communities.
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