COP17: The crucial role of Indigenous Peoples in nature conservation

A satellite image of parts of the Amazon shows why a shift in policy and practice is so important. Where mining and other forms of extraction take place, brown patches appear across the landscape. Areas managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities often remain green. Their territories can also extend far beyond where they live, encompassing areas where they fish, hunt or graze their livestock. Here, nature and human use are not separate.

“That is no coincidence,” says Jelle Behagel, Associate Professor Forest and Nature Conservation Policy at WUR. “Local communities depend on their environment for their livelihoods and often have strong cultural and natural ties to it.” Over generations, they have developed knowledge and practices that allow them to live from the land without depleting it, such as rules governing when hunting is and is not permitted. “For them, nature is not simply a resource from which to extract whatever they need, but part of a relationship in which use and restoration are kept in balance.”

Global figures underline the importance of these territories for biodiversity. Indigenous Peoples manage or have tenure rights over more than a quarter of the world’s land surface. Other global assessments point to the relatively good ecological condition of many lands held or governed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In the 83 countries for which Indigenous Peoples’ lands have been mapped, these lands overlap with around a third of Key Biodiversity Areas. At the same time, many of these territories are under pressure from mining, logging and other extractive activities. 

Over the past decade, the way in which Indigenous Peoples and local communities are viewed in international biodiversity policy has changed significantly. “People are no longer seen only as harmful to nature. They can also take good care of it and help restore it,” says Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy at WUR. This also implies a different approach to nature conservation: rather than protecting nature solely by excluding people, biodiversity can also be conserved in places where people live and make use of it.

This shift is part of a broader movement in biodiversity policy known as transformative change. It is not only about protecting individual natural areas more effectively, but also about changing the systems, values and power relations that drive biodiversity loss. This requires us to reconsider who gets to make decisions about nature, whose knowledge counts, and how benefits and burdens are shared.

But recognition does not automatically translate into decision-making power. States still largely determine which areas are protected and how. “Indigenous Peoples increasingly have a seat at the table, but that does not yet mean they have an equal voice,” says Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen. “That requires strong rights to land and natural resources, as well as the ability to enforce those rights.” Communities sometimes find themselves up against mining companies, gold mining operations or illegal activities backed by far greater financial and political power. “They often lack the means to withstand that pressure.”

Decision-making power is not only about who has the legal right to decide what happens in an area. It is also about another question: whose worldviews and knowledge shapes how we understand that landscape?

Centuries of living with a landscape generates biocultural diversity, including knowledge about plants, animals and seasons, but also about the relationships between people, species and places. Yet for a long time, this knowledge was only taken seriously when science could ‘validate’ it. “We need to move away from the idea that science has a monopoly on what counts as knowledge,” says Maria Tengö, Special Professor of Human-Nature Relationships in the Anthropocene at WUR and a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Tengö prefers to speak of ‘weaving’ knowledge systems. “Rather than extracting elements from Indigenous and local knowledge and fitting them into science, different knowledge systems continue to exist alongside one another and learn from each other.” Someone without an academic title can also be an expert: their expertise may lie in decades of experience with a landscape. In the Multiple Evidence Base Approach, co-developed by Tengö, Indigenous, scientific and local knowledge systems each contribute perspectives grounded in their own context and complement one another. “You don’t start by asking whether knowledge can be scientifically validated, but with dialogue and an effort to understand each other better.”

Research by Arash Ghoddousi, Assistant Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at WUR, in the Kalahari Desert shows how valuable this can be. “My PhD student wanted to monitor lions there, but we found it very difficult to track them in this vast landscape. Indigenous San, with their exceptional tracking skills, were much better able to detect the lion from limited signs on the sand. By working together, we were able to use their observations and greatly improve our understanding of their population trends.”

Taking different forms of knowledge seriously also changes the role of the researcher. “In the past, local people were often seen mainly as translators or field guides,” says Ghoddousi. “But they are custodians of the land and holders of local knowledge. Collaboration should therefore play a much more central role in how we design our research.” That can mean changing the research question itself. When Ghoddousi was researching the effectiveness of protected areas in Georgia, local herders turned out to be concerned with a very different issue: wolves and bears attacking their livestock. The researchers decided to incorporate that question into their research.

For Bas Verschuuren, Associate Professor Forest and Nature Conservation Policy at WUR, collaboration should begin when a research plan is first conceived. “Research is a collaborative process, not a box-ticking exercise. Building a relationship is important.” In Australia, for example, he initially wanted to study traditional knowledge in protected areas. For the local Indigenous Community, however, a key concern was how recreational and industrial fishers behaved in the Indigenous Protected Area, particularly around places they considered sacred. “Together, we opened a dialogue with the Department of Fisheries and developed a code of conduct, explained in a brochure that is now distributed through local fishing tackle shops. Together with my Indigenous colleagues, I also published a scientific article about how we conducted this research using a both-ways approach.” 

Collaboration also means respecting boundaries. Verschuuren explains what this can mean in practice: “For example, I have agreed that I may publish the fact that sacred places exist in an Indigenous Protected Area, but not their exact locations or any culturally sensitive knowledge associated with them.” According to Verschuuren and Ghoddousi, clear agreements about the ownership and use of data and knowledge should be an integral part of research involving local communities. Consent, moreover, should be seen as an ongoing process rather than a one-off signature. “You should always have an exit strategy if circumstances change or a community no longer supports the research,” says Ghoddousi.

Putting these principles into practice requires researchers to understand how to work respectfully with Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Ghoddousi and Helen Newing of the University of Oxford therefore co-lead the Common Ground project, funded by the Wageningen Biodiversity Initiative, which is developing shared recommendations for conservation research on Indigenous and local territories. In July 2026, they brought together 33 researchers, practitioners and representatives of Indigenous Peoples and local communities from 19 countries to develop a code of conduct for such research. 

The development of nature conservation reveals a clear shift: from research about Indigenous Peoples and local communities, to research with them and, increasingly, by them. But this requires more than good intentions. “Building trust takes time,” says Ghoddousi. “And that time, and the funding for it, are often lacking in academic research projects.” Some communities even experience ‘research fatigue’ because researchers return time and again while barely reporting back on the results.

The same dynamic can be seen in nature management. “Communities need funding for management and enforcement, but also to provide young people with education in which traditional knowledge can be passed on,” says Tengö. Young people currently often leave for cities to pursue education, weakening their connection with their own territory and the knowledge associated with it. “Creating the conditions for knowledge to be passed on between generations and for effective enforcement is important,” she emphasises.

Those conditions also place demands on how research is organised. One of the key principles of WUR’s new ABC Futures programme is therefore to invest in communities’ own knowledge and research capacity. “Five Wageningen chair groups are working with PhD candidates in Suriname, Brazil, Mozambique and Kenya, as well as with Master’s students from local and Indigenous Communities in these countries,” says Behagel, who coordinates the programme together with Verschuuren. “We start ABC Futures with the threats to biodiversity that the communities themselves consider important. In this way, we are not only developing new knowledge together, but also building local research capacity that addresses the communities’ direct needs.”

The programme illustrates how Wageningen’s research on nature conservation is evolving. Ecological knowledge is increasingly being connected with social and political issues and with knowledge about land use and agriculture. Behagel: “At Wageningen, we have a long history of researching nature management with local and Indigenous communities. We also have extensive expertise in sustainable land use and agriculture. That directly relates to how many local communities live from and care for their land.”

Those who associate Indigenous Peoples primarily with peoples of the Amazon or the Inuit may overlook the fact that Europe also has indigenous peoples, such as the Sámi in Northern Europe. “In our own societies, too, we can ask how the relationship between people and nature has changed,” says Tengö. “Political governance was once much more closely connected to landscapes and places. Decisions about land and natural resources have become increasingly detached from them.”

Tengö sees movements in Europe that are trying to rebuild such relationships. “We call these biocultural approaches: ways of living and working in which culture and nature are not seen as separate worlds.” Examples include people exploring more regenerative forms of agriculture and trying to rediscover what it means not only to live from a landscape, but also with it. “Some of this local, place-based knowledge has been lost in Europe, but there are also movements seeking to rebuild it.” 

At COP17 in Yerevan this autumn, countries will for the first time collectively take stock of the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. For Indigenous Peoples and local communities, a key question is what the recognition of their rights, territories and knowledge means in practice. Will they genuinely gain greater decision-making power and the financial and legal means to manage their territories?

WUR researchers particularly hope that the growing attention to Indigenous and local knowledge will continue. Not only because this knowledge deserves recognition, but also because it can offer important insights into how biodiversity loss can be tackled. How can people live from a landscape without depleting it? How can nature management be combined with food production and livelihoods? With international biodiversity targets still far out of reach, the experiences of these communities can offer valuable lessons about how people and nature can coexist. This also raises a broader question at the heart of COP17: is protecting nature in specific areas such as national parks enough, or do the systems driving biodiversity loss across land and seascapes also need to change fundamentally?

“We should not focus solely on achieving the 30 per cent target,” says Behagel. “We also need to change how we deal with nature and natural resources beyond those protected areas. If we protect 30 per cent but simply continue as we are on the other 70 per cent, we will not stop biodiversity loss.”