Exploring the concept of Biocultural Heritage, which comes from the lived experience of Indigenous Peoples and is critical to the success of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework up for negotiation in Kunming later this year.
Mainstream Western economics is destroying the environment - and the Indigenous knowledge that has conserved nature for millennia.
On 2nd of December, the Mexican Parliament voted unanimously to include the protection of biocultural heritage and promotion of agroecology in Mexico’s Law on Ecological Equilibrium and Environmental Protection.
A recent workshop hosted by IIED and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew explored how the way Indigenous Peoples grow and consume food holds answers to the world’s broken food system.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed huge vulnerabilities and inequalities in food systems. They are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change: to droughts, floods, typhoons, sea-level rise – the current locust outbreak in East Africa. But they are also part of the problem, contributing about one third of global greenhouse gas emissions and being highly inequitable too. Krystyna Swiderska spells out what needs to change.
2020 is being hailed as a ‘super year’ for nature, with a series of major international events looking at how we can stop the decline of wildlife and natural ecosystems. IIED’s Krystyna Swiderska argues that saving biodiversity can’t succeed without working to save indigenous cultures.
Joji Cariño sets out three key principles that could underpin a new biodiversity deal where humans and nature work in harmony – and explains why indigenous peoples and local communities will be key in shaping this deal.
Traditional crops and innovations are offering farmers in the Himalayan region a way to deal with the challenges of climate change, but there is much work to be done for this to become a truly viable alternative.
In the latest in blog in the 'Women champions of biodiversity' series, Krystyna Swiderska discusses how women are sustaining biodiverse farming by combining traditional knowledge and innovation to protect local seed systems.
New biocultural heritage landscape will protect rich biodiversity and cultural identities of indigenous communities.
The story of a spiritual journey made by Quechua farmers bringing their cherished potato seeds from the Potato Park, in the high Andes of Peru, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on a remote island halfway between Norway and the North Pole, has been documented in a film.
TV news reports on the Policy Dialogue organised by IIED and Lok Chetna Manch in West Bengal, India
The film “The Making of Rotational Farming” shows the extraordinary diversity of food produced by just one community