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In Japan, fisheries’ product has decreased since the 1980s, and the government amended the fisheries law in 2020 to shift to managed fisheries. However, awareness of seafood sustainability is still low. This study identifies the reason for the low awareness and states the necessary actions to increase sustainable seafood consumption. The proactive stakeholders in seafood supply were surveyed to determine the current status of sustainable seafood sales. Marine Stewardship Council-certified fishers and MSC’s Chain-of-Custody certification holders answered the questionnaires. Fishers showed a positive attitude, citing proactive sales channel expansions and contributions to sustainability. Distributors were primarily passive, mainly because they obtained the certification at the request of their clients, and about half of them did not disseminate information between consumers and suppliers. Both fishers and distributors expect the government to promote campaigns and education. The stages of the awareness of producers, intermediary trade, and retailers are different and did not align. Therefore, if the supply chain stakeholders proactively educate themselves, choose sustainable products from the fishers, and pass the sustainability information to the consumers, sustainable seafood consumption would progress.

Solving complex system challenges such as natural resource management in social-ecological systems (SESs) is fraught with great uncertainty. To cope with these challenges, socially vulnerable people in developing countries have created various autonomous innovations. This study focuses on the concept of leverage point (LP) to understand the emergence of innovations and the transformation mechanism of SESs. An LP is a part of a complex system where a small change can cause transformations in the entire system and can be identified from causal networks in an SES. This study analyzed the emergence processes of autonomous innovations as causal networks through transdisciplinary collaboration with innovators in communities and succeeded in visualizing the initial conditions, outcomes, and challenges. We constructed a new definition of LPs based on graph theory and classified LPs into three types based on their characteristics. The network analysis of the causal networks of two innovations in developing countries revealed that the three types of LPs functioned synthetically in complex systems to promote transformation. Based on these results, we propose the potential ways of interventions for the transformation of complex system networks including plural LPs and discuss their effectiveness as boundary objects in transdisciplinary processes collaborating with diverse stakeholders. Further research is expected to accumulate knowledge for solving the various challenges faced by SESs.

Vulnerable sectors of the population living in poverty in developing countries are highly dependent on renewable natural resources for their livelihoods and daily lives. Sustainable resource management, improving the well-being of vulnerable people, and building resilience to shocks are global challenges. This study analyzed the outcomes of various autonomous innovations by the people themselves and the enablers of these innovations in the communities of developing countries. This analysis of 20 autonomous innovations from six countries revealed that these innovations produced outcomes that simultaneously improved multiple indicators of human well-being, including “basic materials for a good life”, “safety”, “health”, and “good social relations”. The process of promoting public values, such as education, health improvement, and landscape conservation as a by-product of collective actions was an important enabler of these innovations, as well as the innovator’s proactive attitude toward continuous improvement. Public values and supporting ecosystem services were emphasized from the early stages of collective actions, to realize synergies toward integrated natural resource management. It is also important to achieve conditions in which collective actions could be practiced autonomously and adaptively. These results revealed the great potential of autonomous innovations emerging among socially vulnerable groups and the important mechanisms for promoting autonomous innovations for the transformation of social-ecological systems toward sustainable futures.