Resilience to climate change and COVID-19
The research shows that across Indigenous cultures, everyday life is guided by core values of reciprocity, balance, solidarity and collectives with nature and in society. These core values provide flexible normative principles for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development and confronting new environmental and societal challenges.
These Indigenous values also play an important role in addressing Sustainable Development Goal 2 – ‘Zero Hunger’. In all four case studies, these values were found to promote biodiversity-rich agroecological practices and sustainable wild harvesting, supporting nutritious diets and climate resilience. In coastal Kenya, cultivating diverse traditional crops that tolerate drought, pests and disease has ensured substantial yields despite climate change.
In all four cases, Indigenous values and agroecological food systems provided food security in their communities despite lockdowns enforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. And the Quechua people of the Potato Park donated a ton of potatoes to people in need in Cusco, based on the principle of solidarity.
Inspiring equity
The research also showed how principles of solidarity and equilibrium promote equity.
The Quechua in Lares and the Moso in China are descended from matriarchal societies. In Lares, women oversee traditional barter markets which integrate nature, economy and nutrition.
Where cultural practices exclude women – such as inheritance of land in Kenya and certain rituals in China – these core principles can be used to re-evaluate practices to enhance gender equity.
Calling for system overhaul at COP15
This study adds to recent research showing that the main drivers of biodiversity loss are not IPLCs but intensive land-use driven by mainstream economic policies. It shows that these same policies are also eroding Indigenous knowledge and values that are so critical for conserving biodiversity.
Achieving the GBF’s vision of living in harmony with nature calls for a revolution in thinking. It requires the integration of Indigenous knowledge across policies for environment, development, agriculture, food and education. National policies rarely integrate traditional knowledge due to colonial legacies and racism against Indigenous Peoples.
Policymakers from governments across the world heading towards the Convention on Biological Diversity summit COP15 must recognise that IPLC leadership and traditional knowledge – not only science – are critical for success.
They must ensure that IPLC rights to land, resources and self-governance are fully recognized and protected across the biodiversity targets, including target 3 on protected areas. And they must work with Indigenous Peoples to develop alternative economic models that are in harmony with nature.
VIED worked with partners in China, India, Kenya and Peru to explore how the interlinked traditional knowledge, biodiversity, culture and landscapes – the biocultural heritage – of Indigenous Peoples can contribute to sustainable development. This research contributed directly to establishing new biocultural heritage territories through a process building on the successful Potato Park model.
The lands and territories of Indigenous Peoples harbour some 80% of the world’s biodiversity – and Indigenous worldviews, cultural values and traditional knowledge typically promote ecological sustainability and equity.
But Indigenous Peoples are also among the world’s poorest and most marginalised communities, often suffering racial discrimination. They face growing dispossession of land and natural resources, their cultures are being eroded by modernisation, and customary institutions have been altered by colonial administrations in some cases.
Development policies commonly seek to modernise Indigenous societies and conservation policies frequently deny Indigenous rights. Even ‘community-led’ approaches can impose external conservation objectives rather than supporting endogenous development.
This project undertook detailed case studies of four target communities, each with unique but threatened agrobiodiversity and biocultural heritage, and informed policymakers about the potential for Indigenous biocultural heritage to support sustainable development.
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