Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, 10024, USA.
Department of Environmental Studies and Science, Pace University, One Pace Plaza, New York, NY, 10038, USA.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2017 Dec;1(12):1798-1806. doi: 10.1038/s41559-017-0349-6. Epub 2017 Oct 23.
Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives - encompassing values, knowledges, and needs - and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts.
监测和评估对于确保创新性、多尺度和跨学科的可持续性方法的有效性至关重要。为地方可持续管理成果制定相关指标，以及将这些指标与更广泛的国家和国际政策目标联系起来的能力，是资源管理者、政策制定者和科学家面临的关键挑战。能够同时捕捉生态和社会文化因素及其相互反馈的指标集，可以为跨尺度联系提供支撑，有助于将地方和全球尺度的倡议联系起来，提高人类和生态系统的弹性。在这里，我们认为，生物文化方法与综合多种来源证据的方法相结合，对于开发促进跨尺度和维度联系的指标至关重要。生物文化方法明确地从当地文化视角出发，并以此为基础，包括价值观、知识和需求，并认识到生态系统和人类福祉之间的反馈。采用这些方法可以鼓励本地和全球参与者之间的交流，并有助于确定许多区域和国际可持续性框架中缺失的关键问题和解决方案。资源管理者、科学家和政策制定者不仅需要考虑要衡量哪些类型的指标，还需要考虑如何设计、实施、衡量和最终组合这些指标，以评估资源利用和福祉。最后，我们提供了在本地和全球指标工作之间进行转换的建议。
