Understanding the interactions between human well-being and environmental outcomes through a community-led integrated landscape initiative

Holistic approaches can adequately address both environmental conservation and community development needs.
We evaluated the impact of a community-led Integrated Landscape Initiative themed project on both extractive environmental practices and well-being of local communities living across a protected area in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Our approach
While complex in implementation, these approaches can often be summarized through a simplified model.
We tested sites where the approach was implemented and control sites against eight major results chains.
Study site: 10 villages throughout the Gunung Nyiut Penrissen Forest, situated on the northwestern part of West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
A multi-method approach was used to evaluate the impacts. We sought to integrate a variety of qualitative and quantitative datasets to assess changes in participation, well being, and environmental changes.
Findings
The approach led to
Increased Participation
Improved Indicators of Household Well-being
Reduced Environmental Loss

Reduced Environmental Loss

SMART patrol results showed significant decrease in encounter rates of hunting (green), logging (blue), and land clearing (red) over time.
6 villages represented.
Deforestation in approach sites was significantly reduced compared to both before the intervention and in relation to control sites.
This figure shows the average % forest loss between control (orange) and treatment (green) areas after the intervention began (2017–2020) and before the intervention began (2001–2016).

Increased Human Well-Being

Smallholder farmers revealed that overall harvest rates across all crops increased.

Farmer interviews revealed a number of positive changes, the most significant being:

  • improved agricultural practices, including increased harvest rates,

  • a decrease in the use of harmful chemicals, pesticides, and fertilizers,

  • and new techniques to create their own organic or semi-organic fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides.

Farmers reported this, not only greatly reduced their reliance on middlemen providers, but also their overall spending as they shifted towards products that could be created with materials from their village landscape. 

Increased Participation

Over 4 years
community savings represented by group assets grew to
47.7703.724 Indonesian Rupiah or roughly USD $33,000
Participation grew throughout the project period.
*Group assets are an ideal proxy for participation as they indicate membership size, but also that members are actively saving money, registering assets, and taking out loans.
Loan data revealed that 30% of members had taken out a loan during the project period.
What loans were taken out for:
82%
Of the individuals who took out a loan for a business or livelihood-related need, 82% reported that the loan successfully turned into additional income through business development.
Loan data revealed that community members were utilizing low-interest loans for a variety of reasons to improve their well-being; from paying for their children’s education and medical bills, to investing in their basic daily needs. This suggests that the approach had wider impacts on human well-being beyond just livelihood-level indicators (e.g. income or harvest rates), but also extended impacts to household health, youth education, among others.

Understanding the Relationships Between Outcomes

A multivariate regression model was used to test for relationships between indicators of participation and human well-being with environmental change.
Results revealed that improvements in four aspects of human well-being and participation were negatively correlated with reductions in illegal logging, poaching and encroachment.
Upon review of the possible results chains hypothesized in this study, findings support that the intervention led to increased participation, improved indicators of household well-being, and is associated with reduced environmental loss. There is a clear relationship between the holistic community-level interventions and cross-sectoral outcomes.
SUMMARY

Here are the five major points of findings:

Community-led development programs and initiatives focused on human well-being often lead to reduced deforestation and poaching. By focusing on issues related to food security and household well-being it is possible to create positive environmental outcomes.

Project design based on local input, needs, opportunities, values, and community characteristics is a variable highly associated with project success.

Poaching, illegal logging, and encroachment encounter rates were negatively correlated with indicators of participation in the ILI and improvements in human well-being. Further analysis and monitoring of the socio-economic and environmental outcomes over time may provide stronger correlations and longer-term evidence for the adoption and refinement of ILI-themed projects.

Conservation initiatives should embrace wider, more complex views on the potential impacts on human well-being beyond basic economic impacts.

Conservation approaches must account for the complex socio-ecological systems in all aspects of programmatic strategy, from program design and implementation to evaluation and adaptive management.

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The term ‘integrated landscape initiative’ (ILI) has gained popularity as an ‘umbrella concept’ that describes projects that aim to explicitly improve food production, biodiversity conservation, and rural livelihoods on a landscape scale.

It describes approaches that consider the entire landscape, including its environmental, social, and economic aspects, by bringing together diverse stakeholders to manage land use in a way that balances competing needs, aiming for sustainable outcomes across the whole system, rather than focusing on isolated issues within the landscape.