COMDEKS

The vision of the Satoyama Initiative is to realize societies in harmony with nature. To achieve this vision, COMDEKS will support activities in the field in developing countries through small grants and knowledge facilitation to attain the following objective:

“to develop sound biodiversity management and sustainable livelihood activities with local communities to maintain, rebuild and revitalize socio-ecological production landscapes”, in accordance with the following five perspectives of the Satoyama Initiative:

– Resource use within the carrying capacity and resilience of the environment
– Cyclic use of natural resources
– Recognition of the value and importance of local traditions and cultures
– Natural resource management by various participating and cooperating entities
– Contributions to local socio-economies

The COMDEKS, in pursuing its objectives, will give due consideration to building climate resilient ecosystems. These objectives would be met through a network of country-level programmes in the areas of mutual strength and interest of the Partners, as well as at a global level through institutional collaboration. The Project will focus primarily on supporting and coordinating concrete actions at the grassroots by providing small-scale finance for local community-led projects within given priority landscapes, to achieve landscape-scale impacts in developing countries. The Project will review, analyze, and codify results of these on-the-ground actions to distill and disseminate lessons which can be used for replication in other parts of the world.

As such the COMDEKS project will consist of two main components:

Community Development through small grant-making by using the UNDP’s small grants delievery mechanisms, including the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) and other alternatives schemes.

COMDEKS will leverage existing experiences, resources, and networks to support sustainable landscape level management approaches by using UNDP small grants delivery mechanisms, including the SGP, to provide financing and technical assistance to community organizations. COMDEKS will support identification and replication of practices to support sustainable socio-ecological production activities across the existing mosaic of land uses within selected production landscapes in participating countries. COMDEKS will work to enhance traditional knowledge and governance systems, and their integration with modern science in community projects aimed at achieving resilient socio-ecological production landscapes.

COMDEKS will also assist local communities to develop enterprises and access new forms of innovative financing such as payment for ecosystem services (PES). It is imperative that economic incentives are created locally for communities to conserve biodiversity, minimize land degradation and develop resilient landscapes and sustainable livelihoods.

Knowledge Management for capacity building, replication, and up-scaling

Successful practices, methods and systems of landscape management will be identified by COMDEKS for the purpose of replication, up-scaling and mainstreaming. Collecting, analyzing and managing information collected from the implementation of community projects, as well as from other sources, is essential to identify best practices and lessons for dissemination to other communities, other programmes and other organizations and institutions. COMDEKS will produce a variety of knowledge products as well as feed the lessons and best practices it has identified to its partners, United Nations University-IAS, CBD Secretariat, and the Government of Japan.

Knowledge products from COMDEKS will also feed into and assist the project of Knowledge Facilitation for the Satoyama Initiative – knowledge facilitation activities implemented by SCBD and UNU – in capacity building, replication and up-scaling through the regional workshops organized by the SCBD. The outputs are also expected to be shared through peer-to-peer active learning, training courses, horizontal and vertical exchange seminars between practitioners and policy makers from a variety of sectors, which are organized by the Satoyama Initiative Partners. This exchange of information and knowledge will be an invaluable input towards policy formulation and processes at the national and sub-national levels.