Event driven adaptation, land use and human coping strategies: human-environment interaction in a smaller SWP island society

The paper focuses on assessing the wider perspectives of adaptive resource management strategies in former subsistence agriculture societies in the SW Pacific. Firstly, we will briefly introduce the theoretical context related to the livelihood framework, adaptation to socio-environmental change and the concept of coupled human-environmental timelines. Secondly, with point of departure in a baseline characterization of Bellona Island derived from a comprehensive survey in the late 1960s and resent fieldwork in late 2006, we present the case of Bellona Island. Key issues addressed concern climatic events, population, agricultural strategies, land use, livelihood strategies, non-agricultural activities, etc. Satellite imagery and aerial photos show relative stability in agricultural land despite an increase in de facto population (51% from 1966-2006). A questionnaire survey of 48 households provide data on the entire household livelihood portfolio and reveal that the natural resources remains a widespread activity, yet increasingly supplemented by other income generating activities( ex. shop keeping, private business, government employment). Group interviews have been employed to reveal how local farmers perceive cause-effect relationships between societal and environmental events and their individual and collective management of resources. The coupled human-environment timelines are used to discuss ways in which the local communities' adaptive resource management strategies have been employed in the face of main drivers of change, incl. climatic and socio-economic changes in the recent past.