Many individuals and organizations have proposed a variety of definitions for the concept of the satoyama and satoumi based on their respective standpoints or fields of specialty. The Japan Satoyama Satoumi Assessment (JSSA） carried out between 2007 and 2010 reviewed and examined various existing definitions to establish a uniform definition in cooperation with more than 200 authors, involved people, and reviewers including international researchers. Based on the concept of ecosystem services that has been developed in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the JSSA defined the satoyama and satoumi as follows: Satoyama and satoumi landscapes are dynamic spatial mosaics of managed socio-ecological systems that bring about various ecosystem services for human well-being (Duraiappah et al., 2012).

The current globalized society has become more aware of the risks of the impact of global changes, including climate change, food crises, and financial crises. In this society, there are many different conflicting viewpoints, such as those critical of the history of exploitation of nature by humans, others having nostalgia for the good old days, and others expressing optimism for a bright future. In order to overcome these conflicts and explore a nature-harmonious society, it is important to make a scientific and objective assessment of ecosystem services produced by the satoyama and satoumi to propose a political method for managing the satoyama and satoumi as a new commons. To achieve this goal, basically, this special edition has developed discussions according to the definition of “satoyama” and “satoumi” examined in the JSSA as a comprehensive definition incorporating viewpoints from various fields based on the concept of ecosystem services. (There are several variations depending on the authors.)

This special edition has been compiled with the following objectives: to add political standpoints and international viewpoints to the research results of the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund of the Ministry of the Environment (E-0902) “Assessment of Satoyama/Satoumi/Satochi Ecosystem Services and Reconstruction of a Nature-Harmonious Society by a New Commons” and to reevaluate ecosystem services produced by the satoyama and satoumi in Japan to deepen discussion regarding how to manage and utilize these ecosystem services in a sustainable manner. This project was carried out for three years from FY2009. The objectives of the project were to assess ecosystem services provided by the satoyama and satoumi in Japan and to suggest political options for establishing a nature-harmonious society by proposing a method for sustainably using ecosystem services while conserving biodiversity as a new commons.

Specifically, this project has adopted the conceptual framework of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) to evaluate various elements comprehensively such as changes in ecosystem services produced by the satoyama, satoumi and satochi in Japan, the direct and indirect drivers of these changes, and the impact on human well-being. Based on that, this project has gone on to discuss an optimal allocation level and optimal management standard for the use of various resources that allow for the provision of these resources without impeding biodiversity and regulating services. In addition, it has clarified the use of ecosystem services as a commons, the sustainability of the commons, and the history and changes of the commons to extract cultural values and interactions that contemporary people expect from the satoyama and satoumi. Thus, this project has examined policy options for the reconstruction of a sustainable nature-harmonious society. I hope that this special edition helps readers to obtain deep insight about ecosystem services provided by the satoyama and satoumi and that it provides an awareness of the implications of exploring a path to a nature-harmonious society.

The present paper reviews the current state and related issues of Japan’s satoyama and satoumi, and provides a summary of how relevant environmental policies have been established and changed throughout the years. An analysis of related case studies nurtures the discussion on how the topic may be dealt with in the future.

In recent years, Japan’s environmental policy-making has been strongly impacted by heightened public interest in the conservation of nature, and by the ongoing international discussion on biodiversity. During the last 50 years, Japan’s satoyama and satoumi landscapes have dwindled, and the tendency continues today. The paper analyzes the process of the gradual establishment of a legal framework in Japan for the conservation and restoration of satoyama and satoumi landscapes. We discuss results achieved up to now, and make proposals for the future. We conclude that in the future, a grand design for satoyama and satoumi landscapes must be established on the national level; the wisdom and traditional techniques of rural areas must be brought to good use; and “new value” of the satoyama and satoumi for today’s society must be created through a “new system” of co-management by various stakeholders.

We present a new metric known as the inclusive wealth index (IWI) for evaluating progress in human well-being. The metric is based on a welfare economic framework but goes just beyond incorporating the economic component of welfare to include natural and social systems. There has been much debate on declining natural systems and the implications this will have on human well-being. We make a strong case in contradiction to recent literature from the natural sciences in our assertion that humanity’s life support systems include not just the natural systems but also the social and economic systems. We illustrate how local place-based programs can contribute to maintaining and strengthening these life support systems. The socio-ecological production of satoyama landscapes in Japan will be used to illustrate this synergy.

This essay presents the story of the Japanese diaspora community of Tome-Açu in the Brazilian Amazon as a basis for reflecting on the challenges of maintaining social and economic vitality of rural areas in many parts of the world. Over the years, Tome-Açu farmers faced the struggle of finding viable land-use and economic systems to sustain their community, promote prosperity and engage the younger generations. They experienced economic booms and busts associated with monoculture and global markets. They re-emerged from economic collapse by developing a production system based on agroforestry systems and diverse land use strategies. Tome-Açu farmers have cooperated to develop value-added industries for their production. Notwithstanding their specific historical-geographical context, their ability to craft and re-craft cooperative institutions, their agricultural experimentation with regional plants and forest products, and their entrepreneurship in creating value-added industries offer an opportunity to reflect on the potentials and challenges faced by rural communities in an urbanized world.

We tried to estimate the values of ecosystem services using the stated preference method and the revealed preference method, with the objective of incorporating these values into the basic concept of ecosystem goods and services, a tool used in decision making processes, in order to create a new “commons.” The dataset from “The Top 100 Japanese Rural Landscapes” showed that rural Japanese landscapes, known as the satoyama, have great cultural value related to tradition and history. Many people feel a sense of “homeland” or belonging concerning paddy fields, villages and people’s old settlements. At the same time, villages surrounded by nature give them a sense of seasons, time, and the presence of other living organisms. These are services that the urban landscape cannot offer. The dataset of “questionnaires to people who are not particularly involved in satoyama movements” also demonstrated the image of the rural landscape with the attributes of nature, mountains, rivers, forests, homeland and a place for relaxation. At the same time, it revealed that 10% of people felt that they would like to live in rural areas in the future. Jobs such as “attractive agriculture,” the renewable energy sector or ”telecommuting” to offices using the Internet, along with opportunities for social interaction are required for people to live there or to consider double residency in urban and rural areas. Paying a premium for “environment/organism brands” by urban people can be considered payment for ecosystem services (PES) to promote monetary contribution to maintain the satoyama.

“Satoumi” is defined simply as a seascape with “high productivity and biodiversity in the coastal sea area with human interaction” (Yanagi, 2006). Unlike the satoyama, in which human interaction with nature can be recognized as a visible landscape, the satoumi seems to be an invisible seascape and uncertain without close observation. To demonstrate the concept and practices prevailing in the satoumi more concretely, ecological and institutional effectiveness is examined in small-scale fisheries in western Japan. The focus is access rights in historical continuation between pre-modern and modern periods leading to contemporary fisheries jurisdictions. Stationary fisheries such as bamboo weir, tidal stone weir, and set net fisheries found in Okinawa and the Seto Inland Sea are chosen to demonstrate biologically and institutionally positive effects on the satoumi. In stationary fisheries, conservation and productivity are generally positively realized through communal efforts to maintain the installations. Yet, in individualistic set net fisheries, efforts to conserve marine resources should be more elaborately promoted to avoid over-fishing. In debates on conservation of MPAs (marine protected areas), governance to mitigate serious contradiction among stakeholders is a primary concern. Yet, as it is often hard to reach a final decision in launching MPAs, a new concept of the commons is highly recommended to provide an effective framework for conserving biodiversity as well as promoting marine production.

Major characteristics, functions and recent changes in satoyama and satoumi landscapes are analyzed, in addition to the needs and conditions for enhancing the values added to the ecosystem services, focusing on satoyama resources. Since the 1960s, many rural communities have been faced with the difficult situation of losing their resource base and social community ties, due mainly to the problems of depopulation and aging of society confronting contemporary Japanese society. This study demonstrates that ecosystem services may be regarded as scarce resources having quantifiable economic values, and since traditional markets do not capture these values, subsequent market failures are caused by inefficient allocation of the scarce resources. The Sub-global Assessment of Satoyama and Satoumi in Japan (Japan SGA) has shown that in the process of urbanization and globalization of economies, many of the social relationships in metropolitan areas have changed dramatically, too. Japanese people today do not recognize or even know the origins of ecosystem services they utilize. This itself indicates changes in and weakened social relationships of Japanese society today. During the process of the Satoyama and Satoumi SGA, the necessity of a new form of resource management unit (a “new commons”) was pointed out, as people expect new roles to be fulfilled by the satoyama and satoumi under the strong pressures of resource loss or quality degradation. A new market-based form of economic mechanism, such as payment for ecosystem services, should be adopted.

Japanese fisheries are characterized by (1) having a large proportion of artisanal fisheries, (2) establishing territorial user rights in fisheries (TURFs) by local fisheries cooperative associations (FCAs), (3) being one of the largest national fisheries in the world, and (4) using a variety of resources, from plankton-feeders to top predators, from sea urchin to marine mammals. The marine trophic index (MTI), the average trophic level of fisheries catches, has varied from ca. 3.1 in 1990 to ca. 3.6 in 1960 and 2000. There are many autonomous marine protected areas (MPAs) in Japanese coastal waters. Most of these MPAs are not legally regulated, but managed by the associated FCAs. MPAs are established or expanded when the major fisheries resources are depleted. In the case of Shiretoko, in northern Japan, a seasonal fishing-ban area for walleye pollock was established in 1994 because its stock was depleted. The MPA was extended according to the advice of the Scientific Council of the Shiretoko World Heritage Site in 2005. After that, Shiretoko was designated a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. The marine management plan for the Shiretoko World Heritage Site compiles the catches and yields of fisheries in the Shiretoko area, which are used for assessment of the fisheries’ sustainability. Even at Japanese World Heritage Sites, we seek a balance between sustainable use of bioresources and conservation of biodiversity, instituting UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program.

We analyzed the long-term trends (from the 1950s to 2035) of Japanese “satoyama capital stocks” and ecosystem services in the Mt. Hakusan Biosphere Reserve, Japan. We estimated the spatial distribution of the human population in Hakusan City and chose grid squares where the human population was endangered. Many areas in satoyama regions in Japan will eventually become uninhabited. We made a list of natural and social capital stocks and ecosystem services in the area. We obtained the geographical distribution of satoyama areas that are in danger of disappearing. We also assessed the magnitude of threat and factors threatening the natural and social capital stocks and ecosystem services derived from the satoyama in this region. As a result, we predicted that the satoyama in the Mt. Hakusan Biosphere Reserve would be endangered because people with experience in “dezukuri” are nearly no longer existent. “Dezukuri” is defined as a traditional culture in which people stay in places distinct from their base settlements seasonally or temporally to cultivate farms. On the other hand, the number of people living in two places is increasing because many live in a rural city but visit the houses that their parents lived in to maintain them. They usually stay in or visit their second house on weekends. Such a new type of living in two places can prevent the extinction of satoyama capital stocks.

This study aims to demonstrate factors of changes in ecosystem services in Japan by quantifying the value of those ecosystem services. We focus on ecosystem services related to water and evaluate their economic value by region in 1985, 1995 and 2005. Our results show their economic value in Japan to have nearly doubled from 1985 to 2005. In addition, we found that regulating services, especially flood control, account for high percentages of the total economic value (TEV) and have become the major factor boosting TEV from 1985 to 2005 in Japan.

We devised indicators to assess the biodiversity of satoyama environments and developed models to assess their regulating services at a nationwide scale using a common database. Because of a lack of information on species distribution and farming systems in Japan, we used indirect habitat information such as land use/cover and assessed biodiversity by calculating JOIN values, which can be used as indicators of mixtures of two land uses (e.g., paddy-forest, paddy-built-up area) calculated by land-use grid data. We also developed assessment models of regulating services by collecting grid data such as “digital national land information” and modifying existing models, and measured the values of several regulating services. These values were compared among the land classes of the Rural Landscape Information System (RuLIS), a survey/information system developed by the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences (NIAES), with the aim of monitoring, analyzing and assessing changes in biodiversity and wildlife habitats in agro-ecosystems effectively at various spatial scales. The results suggested that the spatial and temporal conditions and trends in biodiversity and regulating services could be assessed effectively by using RuLIS land class categories. Therefore, these assessment models for biodiversity and ecosystem services, both of which are assessed as functions of land use, could contribute to the creation of land-use change scenarios and estimation of environmental changes by being coupled with the spatial hierarchical framework of RuLIS.

The study applied the framework of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment for assessing the economic values of ecosystem services derived from the satoyama and satoumi to provide policy options for a nature-harmonious society. Using a regional CGE (computable general equilibrium) model, we quantitatively evaluated the effects on the conservation and utilization of the satoyama/satoumi of 1) a satoyama stewardship policy, 2) a trade liberalization policy and 3) a high brand-value policy for domestic agricultural products. We used a static single-country model, with 23 sectors and eight domestic regions and the Interregional Input-Output Table for Japan 2005 as the benchmark data. GDP increases when a stewardship policy is introduced, but the equivalent variation decreases unless the cost of stewardship is reduced to half of the reference case. A trade liberalization policy increases the welfare and GDP in Japan as a whole even if the effect of externalities on satoyama services is included. A high brand-value policy increases GDP and GDP per capita, particularly in Hokkaido, Tohoku and Kyushu. These findings indicate the effectiveness of this method for providing policy options for reconstruction of the satoyama and satoumi with a clear demonstration of the costs/benefits of ecosystem services.

An assessment of ecosystem services provided by the satoyama and satoumi has revealed that the value of regulating services has been enhanced more sharply than that of provisioning services. This study has analyzed the possibility and effectiveness of restoring provisioning and regulating services provided by the satoyama and satoumi based on the following four policy options for their regeneration: (1) environmental stewardship, (2) branding, (3) double habitation and (4) enhancement of knowledge and awareness, as well as nurturing of new bearers. This is the first attempt to integrate a natural scientific assessment of benefits brought to human society by the satoyama and satoumi with a socioeconomic assessment of the same in order to demonstrate specific policy options and their effectiveness with regard to a pathway to reconstruction of a nature-harmonious society.

An environmental stewardship policy would be effective in the conservation and utilization of the satoyama and satoumi and would additionally generate a high return on investment, therefore payment for ecosystem services would be effective in the restoration of the satoyama and satoumi. Increased brand value of domestic agricultural products has changed consumers’ preference from imported agricultural products to domestic agricultural products, thus indicating that this would also be effective in the conservation and utilization of the satoyama and satoumi. It has been revealed that a double habitation policy would be likely to increase the interchange population on the condition that employment, shopping areas, improved medical systems, inexpensive housing and minimum income were ensured and that the region were located near an urban area within an hour by car. This study has also clarified the effectiveness of a policy of utilizing and maintaining ecosystem services as a new type of commons shared by community members rather than through legally reinforced protection of the s satoyama and satoumi. To assess the value of the satoyama and satoumi, all capital elements (produced capital, human capital, natural capital and social capital) must be taken into account. This study has concluded that the incorporation of such a comprehensive value into a development and educational system would allow urban inhabitants with no direct connection to the satoyama and satoumi to become more aware of the social value of these ecosystems, exerting effectiveness in their restoration.