Study of the contribution of sustainability indicators to the development of sustainable coastal zones - a systems approach
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Coupled Natural and Human Systems, Natural Resource Management
- Keywords
- Social-ecological Systems, Sustainability indicators, Integrated Coastal Zone Management, Hypothetical Relationships, Satoumi, Causal Loop Diagrams, Systems approach, Omura Bay, Hard data
- Copyright
- © 2018 Uehara et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Study of the contribution of sustainability indicators to the development of sustainable coastal zones - a systems approach. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27240v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27240v1
Abstract
Sustainability indicators are an important management tool used to realize and sustain the desired state of coastal zones. They simplify, quantify, analyze, and communicate the complexity of coastal zones. However, because of such simplification, indicator selection needs to consider two primary issues, namely, the causal relationships between indicators and other components of the coastal zones as a complex social-ecological system, and the contribution of the selected indicators to management goals (e.g., sustainable coastal zones). Since the root cause of these issues is the “systemness” of coastal zones, which is difficult to capture with indicators, this study applied Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD) as a type of systems approach as a solution; As a case study, the sustainability indicators set in the action plan for Omura Bay, Western Japan, were translated into a CLD. The plan was aimed at realizing and sustaining “Satoumi,” a Japanese concept of desirable socio-ecological production landscapes. This study showed that the CLD 1) helped indicator selection by assessing current indicators and identifying those missing with regards to their contributions to Satoumi, and 2) identified research priorities to verify hypothetical relationships that lack hard data.
Author Comment
This article was presented at the 15th Congress of the International Society for Ecological Economics held in Mexico on 12th of Sept, 2018. The article is scheduled to be submitted for the conference proceedings.