Overview

Indigenous, traditional and local knowledge systems provide place-based ecological knowledge and practices that are vital for achieving the 2030 global biodiversity targets, the Paris Agreement goals on climate change adaptation and mitigation, and many of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Biocultural heritage includes a multitude of ancestral philosophies of ‘good living’ or ‘buen vivir’  through respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships. These provide rights-based, decolonial alternatives to Western conservation paradigms that separate people and nature, and to destructive economic models. 

Biocultural heritage also includes Indigenous and traditional food systems, such as pastoralism, hunting and gathering, and low intensity fishing and farming, which sustain rich agrobiodiversity, medicinal plants, wild foods and crop wild relatives.

Indigenous food systems are crucial for enhancing climate resilience and adaptation, nutrition, food security and health, and for enabling transformation to agroecological and equitable food systems, locally and globally.

Conserving and regenerating biocultural heritage, combining different knowledge systems, and recognising Indigenous philosophies and visions, provide key strategies for transformative change to halt biodiversity collapse, according to the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Biocultural heritage – including traditional ecological knowledge, cultural and spiritual values, adaptive resource management systems, agrobiodiversity and Indigenous foodways – is critical for achieving global goals on nature, climate change, food and nutrition, livelihoods and rights.

Nature conservation

Biocultural heritage provides an alternative decolonial framework for conservation that is based on human-nature interconnectedness, equity and human rights. Indigenous Peoples and local communities have effectively conserved nature for millennia based on traditional knowledge, cultural and spiritual values and customary laws. A global assessment found that biodiversity is best conserved on Indigenous Peoples’ lands.

Many Indigenous Peoples strictly protect sacred natural sites such as mountains, lakes, rivers and forests, and conserve biodiversity across landscapes through sustainable production systems such as agroecological farming, pastoralism and fishing.

Core values of balance, sharing, reciprocity, collectiveness and solidarity with nature and in society that are held by many Indigenous Peoples provide normative governance principles for conservation and equity.

Climate resilience and adaptation

Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ lands and territories, provide critical ecosystem services, such as freshwater from mountains, and a rich diversity of crop and livestock varieties which they have domesticated, improved and adapted to diverse environments. These provide critical resources for climate resilience and adaptation, at a time when the genetic basis for food production is becoming increasingly narrow.

Only three crops – rice, maize and wheat – account for half of all plant-based calories consumed. This poses a threat to global food security.

Indigenous varieties and landraces are continuing to evolve and co-evolve in response to environmental change, unlike those held in gene banks. They contain valuable traits like drought and pest tolerance. Indigenous and traditional farming communities continue to select and breed locally adapted varieties and to conserve resilient crop wild relatives.

Food, nutrition and health

Indigenous food systems include wild and domesticated foods that are important for nutrition and health. Indigenous varieties and landraces are typically more nutritious than high yielding varieties and often have medicinal properties. For example, in the Potato Park in Peru, women use native foods to provide medicine for their children.

During COVID-19, many Indigenous Peoples experienced few impacts to their food security and health, and attributed this to reliance on native crop varieties and wild foods with medicinal properties. Some communities that have revitalised traditional crops and biocultural heritage, such as the Potato Park (Peru) and dalit women in Andhra Pradesh (India), became food donors during COVID-19.

Indigenous food systems and low input varieties have a critical role to play in transformations towards sustainable, resilient, healthy and equitable food systems, and many are already achieving zero hunger (PDF). Indigenous Peoples and local communities have extensive knowledge of medicinal plants, which provide primary healthcare for up to 80% of people in Africa and Asia, and are increasingly used in industrialised countries.

Sustainable livelihoods

Biocultural heritage can improve sustainable livelihoods by creating new opportunities for income generation and employment. For example, the Potato Park (Peru) has established economic collectives that produce value-added products and services based on biocultural heritage (such as herbal teas, potato shampoo, textiles, trekking, homestay and a traditional restaurant).

These women-led micro-enterprises doubled household incomes within a few years. Ten per cent of the revenues are invested in a communal fund for equitable benefit-sharing, reaffirming Andean values of collectiveness and solidarity. In Chad, pastoralism contributes 40% of national GDP.

Biocultural economies include non-monetary production and exchange systems (such as subsistence, barter, labour sharing). These are important for biodiversity conservation, nutrition, self-sufficiency and resilience, and for inter-generational transmission of traditional knowledge and values.

For example, in the Barter-Maize Park in Lares (Peru), barter ensures access to diverse and nutritious diets.

Human rights and biocultural rights

Biocultural heritage provides a framework to advance recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to land, resources and self-determination, as enshrined in   UNDRIP and UNDROP. It builds on the concept of traditional resource rights.

It reaffirms this bundle of rights by stressing the linkages and interdependence between traditional knowledge over which the rights of communities are generally recognised, and biodiversity and landscapes where community rights are often less clear.

Revitalising biocultural heritage can create new opportunities to advance rights. For example, the Potato Park biocultural territory has been registered as an Agrobiodiversity Zone in Peru, enhancing tenure security. The Potato Park communities have also reaffirmed their customary rights through repatriation of native crops and a biocultural protocol.

Biocultural rights are not simply claims to property, but the long-established collective rights of communities to steward their lands, waters and resources according to their customary laws, practices and relational values. They may include the rights of Mother Earth, rivers, lakes, seeds and so on.

Biocultural heritage reflects the holistic worldview of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, where everything is interdependent and interconnected. The concept was originally proposed by the Indigenous NGO Asociacion ANDES (Peru) in 2005, building on its work with Quechua communities in the Potato Park, to provide a common conceptual framework for multi-country research on traditional knowledge.

The  project, titled “Protecting community rights over traditional knowledge: implications of customary laws and practices” (2005-09), aimed to inform implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Article 8J, which requires Parties to ‘respect preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices or indigenous and local communities’.

The project defined ‘collective biocultural heritage’ as:

Knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities that are collectively held and are inextricably linked to: traditional resources and territories, local economies, the diversity of genes, species and ecosystems, cultural and spiritual values, and customary laws shaped within the socio-ecological context of communities.

The project entailed participatory action-research with 11 indigenous groups (over 60 communities) in Peru, Panama, India, China and Kenya. The research identified multiple interlinkages between the different components of biocultural heritage, in both the worldviews and daily practices of communities.

It showed that traditional knowledge does not exist in isolation – its maintenance and transmission depends on the interaction between the different components of biocultural heritage, including indigenous languages:

• Traditional knowledge is maintained, transmitted and renewed through customary use and stewardship of biodiversity, both wild and domesticated.
• Traditional knowledge, cultural values and practices are embedded in traditional crop varieties, as evident from their revival when traditional seeds are restored.
• Traditional knowledge and innovation systems are maintained by cultural values, spiritual beliefs and customary laws, and connected to ancestral landscapes and sacred sites.
• Sacred entities such as Quechua mountain gods teach traditional knowledge, and play a key role in governance and in generating customary law principles for sustainability and equity.

Biocultural systems

Biocultural heritage can be understood as a biocultural system - a complex, adaptive, linked social and ecological system with interdependent, reciprocal parts that co-evolve and self-organise, producing rich biocultural diversity.

A complex systems view can be useful to understand how changes in one component will affect the others, assess the impacts of external pressures, such as climate change, and develop effective responses. It focuses analysis on the processes and relationships between the different parts.

Unpredictability is a key characteristic of complex systems, so rather than trying to 'manage' the system, the focus shifts to creating conditions that foster the emergence of resilience and diversity.

A systems approach reflects Indigenous Peoples’ holistic worldviews and interconnected livelihoods better than using 'sectoral' concepts. It can also help to identify critical situations, or tipping points, that require urgent attention.

Customary laws guide respectful and reciprocal relationships between people and nature and are enforced by community institutions.

They include core ethical values or principles that guide all aspects of life and expected norms of behaviour, and more specific rules (such as for sustainable harvesting). Like traditional knowledge, they are orally held and transmitted.

Core ethical values include:

• Reciprocity: equal exchange in society and with nature
• Equilibrium: balance/harmony with nature and in society
• Duality: everything has a complementary opposite (eg. traditional and Western; male and female), and
• Collectiveness, solidarity and sharing: with nature and in society (such as collective decision-making).

These core ethical values are often derived from spiritual beliefs and interactions with nature. For example, for Quechua people, these values or principles arise from the sacred ‘ayllu’ or community ie. sacred mountains and ancestors.

Research with Indigenous Peoples in Peru, Panama, India, China and Kenya shows that different cultures share similar core values, although they may be expressed differently.

Core ethical values can be strengthened to provide normative principles for collective landscape governance, and to design biocultural economies that reaffirm cultural values that underpin biodiversity conservation (rather than weakening them).

These values can also inform the design of bottom-up policies and tools that support and strengthen biocultural heritage, such as policies for traditional knowledge protection and equitable agreements for access to genetic resources and benefit sharing.

The concept of collective biocultural heritage has proved valuable for action research with and by Indigenous Peoples and local communities in different contexts, for example research on protecting traditional knowledge. It provides a useful framework for:

• Responding to the needs and cross-sectoral livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and addressing local problems holistically.
• Understanding interconnected traditional knowledge systems and identifying different threats to traditional knowledge and biodiversity.
• Engaging with communities with holistic worldviews, and developing holistic responses for reviving traditional knowledge and biodiversity.
• Designing tools and policies to protect traditional knowledge that also strengthen biocultural heritage and related rights.