More recognition for Indigenous communities: the guardians of biodiversity

'Cultural diversity and biodiversity are mutually reinforcing and interdependent but we must recognise indigenous people who manage biodiversity and their rights to live in their territories without being marginalised' – the consensus of the expert panel meeting in Hyderabad earlier this week to discuss ways of better managing biodiversity through local and indigenous systems of knowledge.

Pablo Eyzaguirre, Bioversity senior scientist, one of the roundtable participants, compared current research practices of taking indigenous knowledge and resources out of their cultural context as “picking raisins from a cake and leaving only the crumbs behind”, arguing that is the culture that holds the cake together.

“Everyone can look at a piece of land and perceive it differently depending on their cultural perspective. One person might look and see a marshy area and think, ‘there’s a place where my shoes will get dirty’, whereas another will look and see a good place to grow something, or another may see a spiritual place,” continued Ezyaguirre. “For example, working with communities in Bolivia, we have learnt that often what holds their landscape together is something spiritual.  The highest point in the mountain may be the place you take your crops to be cleaned of disease. We have to take a holistic view.”

Harry Jonas from Natural Justice called for better legal protection of the linkages between cultural diversity and biological diversity, acknowledging improvements in this area but pushing for policymakers to give communities a stronger voice:

“Protecting cultural and biological diversity in law is still a young science. Laws are a significant factor in determining indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ resilience to external threats ... We need to give communities the means to protect the connections between their culture and biodiversity - their landscapes.”

Eyzaguirre spoke further on the need to recognise that the knowledge that lies within indigenous communities is the truth. He gave an example of the importance of such acknowledgement:

“The indigenous peoples of the Arctic were telling us things about their landscape 40 years ago in a very accurate way, but the scientists didn’t listen. In the end the scientific world had to admit that paying attention to that indigenous wisdom could have saved them 10 years of work. I don’t want to wait 10 years. You can only get this body of knowledge when you live on the land – the indigenous communities hold that knowledge. A lot of high-level groups are now coming together to recognise that. We need to preserve this rich mosaic of biodiversity.”

Closing the session, Ram Boojh, UNESCO spoke of the importance of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003): “India’s initiative to document indigenous knowledge is based on this Convention and many other countries are on a similar course. This is a relatively new initiative and, with everybody’s involvement, will be very successful”.

Roundtable Participants:
Joji Carino, Tebtebba, IIFB 
Pablo Eyzaguirre, Bioversity International
Krystyna Swiderska, International Institute for Environment
Terrence Hay-Edie, UNDP GEF Small Grants Programme 
Harry Jonas, Natural Justice
Pernilla Malmer, Stockholm Resilience Centre
Ram Boojh, UNESCO

Further reports from our scientists at the UN Conference on Biodiversity here.

Report by guest blogger Kara Brown.