Biocultural approaches to pollinator conservation

Abstract

Pollinators underpin sustainable livelihoods that link ecosystems, spiritual and cultural values, and customary governance systems with indigenous peoples a and local communities (IPLC) across the world. Biocultural diversity is a shorthand term for this great variety of people-nature interlinkages that have developed over time in specific ecosystems. Biocultural approaches to conservation explicitly build on the conservation practices inherent in sustaining these livelihoods. We used the Conceptual Framework of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services to analyse the biocultural approaches to pollinator conservation by indigenous peoples and local communities globally. The analysis identified biocultural approaches to pollinators across all six elements of the Conceptual Framework, with conservation-related practices occurring in sixty countries, in all continents except Antarctica. Practices of IPLC that are significant for biocultural approaches to pollinator conservation can be grouped into three categories: the practice of valuing diversity and fostering biocultural diversity; landscape management practices; and diversified farming systems. Particular IPLCs may use some or all of these practices. Policies that recognise customary tenure over traditional lands, strengthen Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas, promote heritage listing and support diversified farming within a food sovereignty approach, are among several identified that strengthen biocultural approaches to pollinator conservation, and thereby deliver mutual benefits for pollinators and people. a Here we follow the global norm of using lower case for "indigenous" while recognising the norm in Australia and New Zealand is to use upper case, following Johnson, J.T. et al. (2007) Creating anti-colonial geographies: Embracing indigenous peoples' knowledges and rights. Geographical Research 45 (2), 117-120.

A State‐of‐the‐Art Review of Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Pollution

“…The management practices conducted on many IP lands, including indigenous community conserved areas and sacred sites, contribute to pollution buffering and nutrient cycling (Ulrich et al 2016; Hill et al 2019). Moreover, the abandonment of these indigenous traditional management practices might result in increasing levels of pollution (Baudron et al 2009).…”

Understanding the diversity of values of “Nature’s contributions to people”: insights from the IPBES Assessment of Europe and Central Asia

“…However, IPBES does not explicitly set out a single theoretical position to be adopted in ecosystem service assessments. Instead, the IPBES approach for undertaking ecosytem service assessments (IPBES 2015) reflect the multiple evidence base perspective (MEB) (Tengö et al 2014), in that it seeks to collate knowledge from multiple evidence sources including scientific data and ILK (e.g., Hill et al 2019). The MEB approach then argues that discussion among all actors involved generate an enhanced understanding of the environmental conditions, which in turn can help identify sustainable management options (Tengö et al 2014).…”

Indicators for relational values of nature’s contributions to good quality of life: the IPBES approach for Europe and Central Asia

“…However, the RV uncovered through ILK in this paper are not comprehensive and do not represent the RV expressed by other Indigenous Peoples and local communities in ECA. The methodological approach that includes the ILK Dialogues and an extensive ILK literature review guaranteed the methodological soundness of this approach (Tengö et al 2017;Hill et al 2019). Hence, this approach is one of the first to apply the context-specific perspective in addition to the generalizing perspective, as outlined by Díaz et al (2018).…”

“…Food, for instance, has instrumental aspects of mere survival, and hence a strong instrumental dimension. However, food is culturally crucially important and the way it is produced and used connects people to their land and culture (IAASTD 2009;Hill et al 2019). Another example is a physical and psychological experience.…”