The world community is beginning to seriously recognize and consider the evident contribution of Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs), areas or landscapes that are governed and managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) in their own terms, and system, through the ages
By Salam Rajesh
The world view on significant biodiversity loss across landscapes that is said to have tremendous impacts on the natural world and consequently contributing to the pervasive issues on climate variability by inducing changes in the local micro-climatic regime, and conditions, takes centre-stage in global dialogues and negotiations.
It is within this emerging global concern that the world community is beginning to seriously recognize and consider the evident contribution of Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs), areas or landscapes that are governed and managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) in their own terms, and system, through the ages.
On this note, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines ‘ICCAs’ as “natural or modified ecosystems including significant biodiversity, ecological services and cultural values, voluntarily conserved by indigenous and local communities through customary laws or other effective means”.
While recognizing the contributory role of the ICCAs in ecosystem restoration, preservation and management of biodiverse landscapes in tune with the United Nations’ Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to meet climate deadlines, the complicacy on States’ legally protected areas (PAs) overlapping many of these ICCAs bring to the fore the crucial dialogue on how do States consider the ICCAs in their scheme of things.
The formal PAs are the Unclassed Forests, Reserved Forests, Wildlife Sanctuaries, National Parks, Biodiversity Heritage Sites, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Biospheres, and the other forms of landscapes protected and reserved for wildlife rehabilitation in terrestrial, freshwater and marine landscapes.
The complexity of this dialogue is featured in the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) and the WCPA (World Commission on Protected Areas)’s Good Practice Guidelines No.34 on “Recognizing territories and areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities (ICCAs) overlapped by protected areas” (2024).
As per the IUCN’s definition, ICCAs include those parts of the IPLCs’ territories, lands and waters which are conserved ‘through their worldviews, place-specific knowledge, values, customary laws, and land/marine management institutions and practices’.
These territories and areas are often managed with multiple objectives, which can include sustainable use, protecting and caring for sacred places, and other conservation-related goals such as supporting the abundance and continuous renewal of life, fulfilling territorial stewardship responsibilities, and maintaining respectful and reciprocal relationships with other living beings, according to the IUCN WCPA explanatory note.
For the uninitiated, the ICCAs are territories and areas that constitute a major part of the one-quarter to one-half of the terrestrial Earth, which Indigenous peoples and local communities own and manage. ICCAs include conserved Indigenous and traditional territories and commons, conserved sacred places and cultural sites.
In the modern-day deliberation on the plausible achievement of the UN’s 30×30 agenda, that is, greening of 30 percent of the total global land surface area by the target year 2030, the importance of the IPLCs’ local conservation measures and sustainable use of their territories, lands and waters for global biocultural diversity, conservation and sustainability is increasingly being appreciated.
So, why are the ICCAs assuming importance in the very first place? For one thing, IUCN WCPA looks at it from the perspective of the significant ‘ecological restoration of land, inland waters and marine areas, including through reducing or eliminating adverse impacts from overuse and extractive industrial activities, reforestation, restoration of grasslands, species reintroduction, eradication of invasive species, and the use of traditional burning to care for and restore ecosystems and landscapes’.
The ICCAs play an important role in the ‘stewardship of territories and collective lands and waters for conservation, sustainability, regeneration of life, natural abundance and appropriate relationships with territory and other living beings’.
While the Indigenous peoples’ proactive role in promoting and strengthening of ICCAs can assist in the defense of their territories, lands, waters and resources against external and internal threats, the ICCAs can provide new economic opportunities in nature tourism, ecological restoration, and payments for ecological, carbon mitigation and stewardship services that would benefit not only the natives but the entire world community in the larger perspectives on the climate-related issues.
In Manipur’s context, as is true of for much of the territories governed and managed by local stewardships across the seven continents, there are scores of landscapes that local people consider sacred and vital to their well-being in terms of their biocultural systems and in keeping the forests alive to secure their food and water needs.
Although limited in size and in area, the Umang-laikon – the sacred groves – had survived total annihilation, both in the Manipur floodplains and in the uplands, due to the attachment of the local people with the belief systems and socio-religious practices associated with these green spaces.
The center-piece in this new assessment and concept at the global context is the debate on whether community conserved areas – land and water areas that Indigenous people protect and governed as their ‘territory of life’ – can exist, or co-exist, within those landscapes that are notified as Protected Areas by law under the several legal statutes of the State.
At this point of deliberation, the IUCN WCPA re-emphasizes that recognizing and respecting the overlapped ICCAs within States’ protected areas is an important opportunity to affirm and respect Indigenous peoples’ contributions to biodiversity conservation, and biocultural diversity and conservation, and this would further advance the collective objectives of the ICCAs and the PAs in enlarging the Protected Area coverage, which in itself is the larger vision of halting biodiversity loss and species decline globally.
This concern, too, is reflected in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework of 2022 where the thrust on expanding the green area coverage is being projected as would-be-successful in the longer term if and when the Indigenous peoples and local communities are affirmed and accepted as partners in conservation.
The bigger issue is the growing concern on planetary health and human well-being in the context of climate change implications and the rapidly changing character of weather and climate-related processes, and phenomena. The world is already being hammered by extreme weather events one after the other in rapid sequences, and the warnings are too loud to be ignored that easily.