This guide is for local organisations (e.g. community-based organisations and trusted local non-governmental organisations) which are supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IP & LCs) in their desire to assess the sustainability of natural resources on their lands (both terrestrial and marine), and implement activities to ensure that this use is sustainable, where necessary. It can also be used by Indigenous Peoples and by local community groups directly. In this guidance, we’re looking at sustainability simply as making sure natural resources are used in a way that doesn’t decrease their amount, ensures nature can keep working properly, and aligns with community understandings about responsibilities to future generations.
As circumstances change due to development pressures, or as communities feel the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, change may be needed to adapt their sustainable practices. Blending traditional knowledge with new insights and techniques from scientific approaches, where wanted and appropriate, can help them to do so.
Communities may wish to ensure that their use is sustainable for internal purposes. In such cases, more informal approaches may be suitable, such as arranging regular meetings to review the changes observed in natural resources and identify new priorities for action. However, if communities wish to demonstrate the sustainability of their use of nature to outsiders, they may require more formal approaches and techniques. In this guidance, we offer some technical guidance and approaches to sustainable use that fall on the more formal end of the scale.
International policy recognises the sustainability of many customary forms of use (the traditional ways in which communities use natural resources), which are based on traditional knowledge and practices, and the purpose of this guidance is to set out how customary sustainable use can be supported when necessary with insights and tools from ‘scientific’ approaches to monitoring and managing natural resources.
Enabling local organisations to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IP & LCs) in assessing and developing sustainable use strategies will help these communities to
independently manage their land and sustainability plans more effectively.
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Type: Report
Region: Africa, Asia , and the Americas
Theme: Land and Resource Rights, Community-led Conservation, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Traditional and Local Knowledge
Authors and Contributors:Stephanie Brittain, Helen Newing, E.J. Milner-Gulland, Tom Rowley, Helen Tugendhat, Justin Kenrick, Joji Carino, Maurizio Ferrari, Ayesha Hargey, Carla Bengoa, Claudia Faustino and Lucy Radford.
