Aims Transformative Pathways

Indigenous peoples and local communities conserve a significant amount of the Earth’s biodiversity through their cultural practices, especially where their rights over their traditional lands, waters, resources, and knowledge are recognised and respected. Their lands cover at least a quarter of the globe and overlap significantly with biodiversity-rich areas.

However, their current and potential contributions to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity are not sufficiently recognised or supported despite being crucial to the fulfilment of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and to addressing global biodiversity and climate goals.

There is enormous potential to scale up support for these contributions and to embed them into the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

This project recognises this and works with established, engaged networks of indigenous peoples’ organisations and allies to address the biodiversity crisis more effectively, at the local, sub-national, national, and global levels. Working with governments in Peru, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, we recognise that sustained change requires further development and implementation of national laws and policies, as well as support from institutional mechanisms at all levels.