If the world is to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, we must support Indigenous Peoples and local communities to strengthen and protect their territories and cultures, and ensure their full and meaningful participation in developing conservation policy.
Mountains crucial to halting nature loss and addressing climate change.
Traditional landscapes conserved by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) across different ecosystems sustain vital ecosystem services and can deliver large-scale emission reductions. Yet despite being highly vulnerable to climate impacts, IPLCs still receive only a tiny fraction of climate aid. COP27 must provide urgent financial support to IPLC-governed organisations to protect these vital but threatened landscapes.
In the run up to the Convention on Biological Diversity COP15, a new podcast explores how a self-governed biocultural heritage territory can protect Kenya's sacred Kaya forests, and provide an effective and equitable alternative to state-run protected areas. It also examines the role of biocultural territories in conserving genetic resources and traditional knowledge for climate adaptation.
IIED principal researcher Krystyna Swiderska discussed what can we learn from Indigenous Peoples and their food systems in an online event following the UN Food Systems Summit.
At COP26 in Glasgow, Indigenous Quechua farmers from the Potato Park in Peru and Mijikenda farmers from the Rabai sacred Kaya forest landscape (Kenya) shared their enormous wisdom about resilient crops, farming practices and nutritious foods. Watch a full recording of the event.
Indigenous Peoples’ local agroecological food systems bring valuable lessons of resilience for policymakers heading to next month’s UN Food Systems Summit.
Biodiversity policymakers negotiating the new international framework at the upcoming global biodiversity summit (CBD COP15) must ensure traditional knowledge and the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLC) are integrated across all post-2020 targets aimed at saving the world’s biodiversity.
The aim is to link humanities academics, agriculture researchers and Indigenous peoples to design new interdisciplinary research on Indigenous food systems past and present, from farm to plate, and enhance evidence on the role of Indigenous crops in agricultural resilience.
This research contributed directly to establishing new biocultural heritage territories through a process building on the successful Potato Park model.
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.