Tapping into indigenous knowledge to protect nature

In the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, the indigenous Quechua people have a tradition known as chirapaq. As the red-orange glow of the setting sun gives way to a deep blue twilight, the Quechua look to the heavens in the hopes that two stars will collide to birth a sparkling, star-filled skyscape.For some Quechua, the celestial renaissance is an allegory representing the hope that indigenous cultures around the world will return to prominence, in many cases after generations of repression.There`s a growing realization among environmental advocates that the spread of indigenous practices is also crucial to the planet`s future. An emerging body of research suggests that traditional techniques, some millennia old, for growing food, controlling wildfires and conserving endangered species could help arrest the dramatic decline of the natural world.“We must preserve and strengthen indigenous practices, which contribute to sustainable environmental management and provide leadership in combating climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste,” says Siham Drissi, a Programme Management Officer at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “It must be preserved and enhanced.”This year`s International Day of the World`s Indigenous Peoples, to be held on 9 August is expected to cast a spotlight on the importance of traditional knowledge in environmental management and the role that indigenous women have in preserving indigenous culture.The world`s indigenous population comprises some 476 million people living across 90 countries and representing 5,000 different cultures. They manage an estimated 25 per cent of Earth`s land mass, which accounts for 40 per cent of all ecologically intact landscapes.Yet indigenous peoples are arguably among the world`s most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups due to systemic marginalization. They are almost three times more likely to be in extreme poverty than non-Indigenous peoples and make up 15% of the world's poorest. Nevertheless, in many parts of the world, indigenous communities are at the forefront of conservation, according to a 2021 report supported in part by UNEP. Many live in fragile ecosystems and are experts in coping with limited biodiversity. 

For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,  the Bambuti-Barbti community has helped protect one of the last remaining  primary tropical forest areas in Central Africa. In Iran, his Chahdegal Balouch, a semi-nomadic tribe, oversees his 580,000 hectares of fragile scrubland and desert. And in the northernmost part of Canada, Inuit leaders are working to revive a severely declining caribou herd.

In regions like Australia and South America, indigenous land control, consisting of slow-burning and purposefully set brush fires are taken into consideration key to stopping large-scale wildfires, which in lots of locations ought to come to be extra not unusualplace because the weather will become warmer and drier.

“Indigenous hearthplace is set burning in a manner that helps healthful culture, ecosystems and society,” says Oliver Costello, Director of the Jagun Alliance Aboriginal Corporation in Australia. “More socio-political alternate and funding is needed to well enforce indigenous hearthplace and land control in Australia and past to understand the capacity of indigenous custodianship and information in practice.”

Tending to standard information

The United Nations Declaration at the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, followed in 2007, calls for all entities to reap free, previous and knowledgeable consent from indigenous peoples earlier than accomplishing sports that effect their rights, survival, dignity and well-being. The assertion posits that interactions have to arise on indigenous peoples` time frames and in indigenous languages.

To that end, 2022 marks the begin of the UN`s Decade of Indigenous Languages, which emphasizes the significance of allowing indigenous languages in justice systems, the media, labour and fitness programmes. Given the significance of oral traditions in passing down environmental control practices and indigenous information, specialists say the maintenance of language and customs is of the maximum significance.

At the resumed 5th consultation of the UN Environment Assembly in advance this year, Member States followed a key decision that makes a speciality of deploying nature to locate answers for sustainable development. The decision calls on UNEP to assist the implementation of such answers, which shield the rights of groups and indigenous peoples.

UNEP additionally has a coverage that pursuits to shield environmental defenders thru denouncing attacks, torture, intimidation and homicide at the same time as advocating for higher safety of environmental rights.,

Recognition and respect

“Indigenous peoples` conventional information has knowledgeable a way to almost make sure the stability of the surroundings wherein they stay so it is able to retain to provide

vital services – inclusive of water, fertile soil, food, shelter, medicines – to all lifestyles forms,” says Drissi.

The Stockholm+50 convention in early June strongly placed indigenous peoples, who produced a assertion calling for “an powerful and on the spot mainstreaming of [indigenous] clinical information into all applicable selections and moves to address” the triple planetary disaster of weather alternate, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollutants and waste.

The assertion additionally highlights the plight of indigenous women, who've especially excessive degrees of poverty, confined get right of entry to to fitness and financial services, and regularly be afflicted by institutional, domestic, political and sexual violence.

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