About the SDM

Vision and mission

“Satoyama” is a Japanese term representing “socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes” or SEPLS, which are dynamic mosaics of habitats and land/sea uses providing the goods and services needed for human life while being managed to maintain biodiversity. The Satoyama Initiative, advocated by the Government of Japan and United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), and endorsed at the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) in 2010 in Aichi, Japan, is a global effort to realise "societies in harmony with nature" through landscape approaches to biodiversity conservation and human well-being, particularly in SEPLS. The International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI) facilitates a broad range of activities to implement the concepts of the Satoyama Initiative by diverse stakeholders. The Satoyama Development Mechanism (SDM) is a financing mechanism to promote actions under IPSI towards the vision of the Satoyama Initiative: societies in harmony with nature.

Through seed funding, the SDM encourages IPSI members to: i) create innovations and best practices; ii) integrate governance and knowledge particularly indigenous and local knowledge; and/or iii) mobilise people, partnerships and resources.

Figure 1. Vision and mission of the SDM

Scope

The SDM provides funding for convincing projects that enhance actions towards the IPSI Strategic Objectives, and thereby the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). The IPSI Strategy and Plan of Action for 2023-2030 contains the following five strategic objectives: i) knowledge co-production, management and uptake; ii) institutional frameworks and capacity development; iii) area-based conservation measures; iv) ecosystem restoration; and v) sustainable value chain development. Relating to these objectives, the SDM focuses specifically on supporting the development of other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs); landscape or seascape restoration; conservation and collaboration with indigenous peoples and local communities; resilience enhancement; and sustainable food or material production.

Further, the SDM facilitates collective contributions of the funded projects to IPSI and the global goals (e.g. KMGBF, Sustainable Development Goals) by sharing experience among projects and generating meta-knowledge on SEPLS.

Figure 2. Scope of the SDM

There are four types of projects in the SDM as seen below. The recipients select one of them in line with their project objectives:

• On-site actions: e.g. community-based conservation; sustainable practices; alternative livelihoods; technology application; and tree planting
• Partnership building: e.g., institutionalisation; scaling-up or out; multi-stakeholder platforms; community of practitioners; and experience sharing
• Research: e.g. Satoyama Initiative Thematic Review (SITR); baseline or evidence base for project appraisal; peer-reviewed papers; and books
• Education: e.g. textbooks; picturebooks; e-learning; field schooling; alternative education programmes; and youth-elderly knowledge exchange

Governance

The SDM organisation is composed of three entities, the Executive Board, the Advisory Group, and the SDM Secretariat.