Indigenous peoples and the environment

Deforestation and climate change threaten social and ecological well-being in Amazonia. Research co-produced through ethical collaborations across multiple knowledge systems can contribute toward just and sustainable futures for the region.

Lived experience research recognizes the inherent expertise of communities, and challenges existing power imbalances in policy processes. Yet, without a strong rationale for including community lived experience, researchers, practitioners, community members and policymakers may face pushback when seeking to move community voice to the centre of food systems policy processes.

Indigenous food systems ensure ecological and socio-economic sustainability but remain marginalized in science and policy. We argue that better documentation, deeper understanding, and political recognition of indigenous knowledge can help transform food systems.

Colonial relationships with Indigenous land and knowledge in geoscience disciplines must be acknowledged to address harm and change how science is done, argues Max Liboiron.

Indigenous Peoples’ and other traditional knowledge systems are deemed ‘unscientific’ when assessed against conventional hierarchies of evidence. Science–policy processes building on the commitments of the UN Food Systems Summit must ensure that due recognition, acceptance and prominence are given to traditional knowledge.

Globally, land- and fire-management policies have counterproductively caused cascading ecosystem changes that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, wildfires. Given rapidly changing climate and land-use conditions that amplify wildfire risk, a policy shift to adaptive management of fire regimes is urgently needed.

Species diversity is maximized in Maya community forests when ecological disturbances caused by cutting and burning trees are neither too rare nor too frequent, suggests an analysis of multispectral images and biodiversity inventory data from two Q’eqchi’ Maya villages in southern Belize.

The fruit tree Theobroma grandiflorum underwent different phases of domestication by indigenous Amazonian populations 8000 to 5000 years ago and the domestication process intensified during the modern era, suggests an analysis of population genomic data from four sites from the Brazilian Amazon.

More than 15 million cases of respiratory and cardiovascular infections could be prevented, saving $2 billion USD each year in human health costs by protecting indigenous lands in the Brazilian Amazon, suggest estimates of PM2.5 health impacts between 2010 and 2019.

Access to semi-permanent trails on land, water and sea ice in Inuit Nunangat, Canada, is projected to diminish over the next 40 years with lengthening periods of inaccessibility, according to CMIP6 projections coupled with community-developed trail access models.

Indigenous farming practices in the Basin-Plateau Region of the western USA influenced high-elevation forest fire regimes, according to sedimentary archives, tree rings and archeological data

Indigenous and Western knowledge ethically combined is uniquely suited to address ongoing climate challenges. To build an environment where Western and Indigenous knowledge systems thrive, funding institutions must value co-production of knowledge and be available to Indigenous experts.

Armstrong et al. describe how rates of obesity and hypertension differ across three sub-populations of Brazil, including two under-studied Indigenous groups. The more urbanized cultures experience more obesity and hypertension, suggesting urbanization impacts cardiovascular health.

The Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) has Earth’s largest tropical rainforest and a history of tension around its fate. Between 2001 and 2018, this study finds that Indigenous territories and protected areas in the BLA have expanded and reduced deforestation markedly, with some gains eroded in recent areas.

Transitioning the global energy system to renewables will likely expand energy transition minerals and metals (ETMs) projects to sensitive territories. Across 5,097 projects globally, greater than half of the ETM resource base appears to be located on or near the lands of Indigenous and peasant peoples whose rights to consultation are embedded in United Nations declarations.

Energy-development projects typically adopt a Western perspective, which can create tensions and difficulties among Indigenous communities. In this Review the authors examine sustainable energy interventions in Indigenous territories and call for a more pluralistic approach that is focused on learning from Indigenous narratives.

Josefa Cariño Tauli is an Ibaloi-Kankanaey Igorot Indigenous person from the Cordillera Region in the Northern Philippines. She is currently the policy co-coordinator for the Global Youth Biodiversity Network, the international coordination platform for youth participation in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

‘Commercial fisheries have decimated keystone species, including oysters in the past 200 years. Here, the authors examine how Indigenous oyster harvest in North America and Australia was managed across 10,000 years, advocating for effective future stewardship of oyster reefs by centering Indigenous peoples.’

Temperature extremes increase energy use and reliance on the services that energy provides, which can increase energy insecurity and the associated risks of harm. This study examines energy use of Indigenous communities in remote Australia and finds increased disconnection rates for prepayment-meter users during temperature extremes.

Tropical forests are threatened worldwide. This study finds Indigenous Lands reduce deforestation and degradation throughout the tropics at rates comparable to protected areas and at higher rates in Africa.

The authors assess the risks to global biodiversity and Indigenous lands arising from projects financed by China’s policy banks between 2008 and 2019, and compare that with the risks associated with similar projects financed by the World Bank.

Forests play a key role in plans to mitigate climate change and reach carbon neutrality by sequestering and offsetting anthropogenic emissions. Nature Climate Change spoke to representatives from Tribal Carbon and If Not Us Then Who about the role that Indigenous peoples living in forest communities play in climate mitigation.

An analysis of the overlap between tropical forest restoration, human populations, development and national policies for community forest ownership shows that 294.5 million people live within forest restoration opportunity land in the Global South.

Multi-proxy palaeoecological methods reconstruct phases of land clearance, maize cultivation and forest regrowth in the High Andes centuries before European incursion, and do not support the idea that forest regrowth and peak carbon sequestration were coincident with European arrival.

Palaeoenvironmental analysis reveals the ecological history of the Andean–Amazonian corridor, where European colonization resulted in depopulation, land-use decline and forest succession such that by the nineteenth century the region came to be seen as a pristine natural environment.

Previous studies of Pre-Columbian earthworks in the Amazon basin have left a gap in the Upper Tapajós Basin (UTB). Here, the authors detect 104 Pre-Columbian earthworks in the UTB, suggesting continuous occupation across southern Amazonia and higher population densities than previously estimated.