Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs), which according to a report published by the Ecological Society of America 36% are within indigenous peoples lands, are critical strongholds for environmental services that they provide, not least for their role in climate protection, making them crucial in the mitigation conversation to avoid a catastrophic climate crisis.
Consequently, world governments are forced to recognize indigenous peoples’ rights, given the urgent need to reduce deforestation rates. Globally, indigenous peoples manage or have tenure rights over at least 38 million square kilometers of land across 87 countries. IFLs even though are a part of the global forest zone, may contain extensive naturally treeless areas, such as grasslands, wetlands, lakes, alpine areas, and ice.
However, to meet the global climate and biodiversity targets, the conservation of forest systems that remain free from extensive industrial and intensive agricultural operations is paramount. Moreover, the reduction in IFL area since 2000 has been smaller on indigenous peoples’ lands than on other lands according to the report titled; Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Indigenous peoples have long recognized the importance of conserving and adequately managing IFLs on their lands, not only because they fulfill their material needs such as being a source of food, medicine and livelihood, and non-material cultural needs, but also because they reinforce and re-establish their traditional obligations with the land. As such, to ascertain the achievement of a sustainable human-landscape interrelationship, indigenous governance, and land management regimes are imperative, which are more likely to be effective than buffering against deforestation and forest degradation.
The world’s remaining IFLs are under considerable threat from human encroachment, thus infrastructure development and land-use change. Even though the loss of IFLs on indigenous peoples’ lands has already occurred, it has often not been with indigenous peoples’ consent but rather as a result of the lack of recognition of their rights, including land tenure. Therefore, all stakeholders involved in the protection of IFLs should also provide additional resources to support and partner with indigenous peoples’ relationships with intact forests to offer positive biodiversity conservation outcomes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It is of concern that until recently, only 21 of 131 tropical countries have formally committed to expanding indigenous and local communities’ land tenure rights under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Paris Agreement. This indicates a pressing need to better understand the interactions between indigenous peoples and their ecosystems when negotiating local or global conservation agreements both within and outside of indigenous peoples’ lands, taking into consideration that indigenous peoples do not have uniform aspirations to maintain the natural environment in its current state.
Notably, in August 2023, Commonwealth Alumnus Sylvester Chisika, a Sustainability Analyst and Conservator at the Kenya Forest Service in Nairobi Kenya, delivered a workshop to share ways of integrating traditional and indigenous methods of biodiversity conservation with modern forest management certification in Eburru Forest, targeting the Ojiek indigenous community.
“Understanding and respecting indigenous knowledge is essential for sustainable forest management. It’s a holistic approach that combines cultural traditions with practical, time-tested techniques,” one of the participants said.
Conservation policies aimed to protect biodiversity on indigenous people’s lands should not only deliver environmental returns but also have strong local support, align with indigenous peoples’ self-determined priorities and motivations, and provide mechanisms for benefit sharing through equitable partnerships.
