Tokyo, 22 April 2025, the Keidanren Nature Conservation Council (KNCC), the Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MOEJ) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) jointly hosted a hybrid seminar entitled “Societies in Harmony with Nature: locally-led landscape approaches”. The objective of the seminar was to provide updates on implementation of the Community Development and Knowledge Management for SATOYAMA Initiative (COMDEKS) Phase 4 by the GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP) at UNDP. Japanese private sector companies and members of the Keidanren Nature Conservation Fund (KNCF) who have been making financial contributions to the COMDEKS programme since 2023 were the key target audience.

Keiji Nishizawa (Chairperson, KNCC) in his opening remarks noted that there is urgent need to take concrete nature-positive actions to reverse the deteriorating trend of the earth’s natural environment and biodiversity, and to spread good practices and positive impacts to other parts of the world. Yutaka Matsuzawa (Vice-Minister for Global Environmental Affairs, MOEJ) welcomed the contributions by the KNCF to COMDEKS, which has been supported by MOEJ since 2011, stressing the uniqueness of this public-private co-financing in the field of biodiversity conservation.

Suneetha Subramanian (Research Fellow, UNU-IAS/IPSI Secretariat), gave an overview of Resilience Indicator Toolkit which is being utilized in the COMDEKS Programme as a participatory tool to help mobilize communities and stakeholders toward the planning, design, implementation and monitoring conservation initiatives in their landscapes/seascapes. As such the link between locally-led conservation efforts and global biodiversity priorities were clearly presented. In summarising the seminar presentations, Tsunao Watanabe (KNCF Steering Committee Chairperson and Director of IPSI Secretariat) reiterated the importance of the landscape/seascape approach in biodiversity conservation, and expressed his wish to see further concrete project activities with landscape-level results with joint support from all COMDEKS partners. The seminar was well attended with over 150 participants joining in person and online, including participants from the Secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative (IPSI), and academia. 

The field trip took place on the sidelines of the seminar to share experiences and learn about Japan’s conservation and biodiversity management practices in productive landscapes.