Good evening. Today I'm going to take you on a biocultural journey through our planet. And we're going to take this journey with some of the beautiful pictures of conservation photographer Joan de la Maya, a very good friend of mine, who's been to some of the world's most magnificent natural wonders, such as here in the Peruvian Amazon, or in the Kenyan Rift Valley, some of the most pristine and wildest landscapes on earth. Some of the last wilderness frontiers up above the Arctic Circle.
very far away from the destructive impacts of human activity. However, the truth is that none of these places are as wild as we think, and they are by no means people-free. On the contrary, a very rich body of ethnobiological, archaeological, and botanical research tells us that actually, when you start to scratch a bit through the surface, and you look closely, you see that many of these places came up to be what they are thanks to human action.
Not all human actions are always inherently destructive. Many of our world's most cherished landscapes are actually cultural landscapes. They have been nurtured by humans over millennia.
The cultural practices that have actually shaped those ecosystems are as diverse as the people and the places from which they stem. And they are reflected in landscapes all over the world that bear evidence of long-term stewardship and management by indigenous peoples and other place-based communities, such as in this ancient sacred site in the Bolivian Amazon carved with petroglyphs on rocks. This is what we ethnobiologists refer to as biocultural diversity.
That's the wide variety and the wide diversity of life in all its manifestations. Biological, cultural, linguistic, genetic, ecological. All of them are deeply intertwined, co-evolved and threatened by the same forces.
Biocultural diversity is to put it simply acknowledging the idea that culture and nature can work in mutually enriching ways through positive human nature interconnections. Some of these interconnections are destructive, we know about those, but many of them aren't and they deserve being celebrated and heard of. I am an ethnobiologist and I've spent much time in the field working with indigenous communities in documenting and trying to raise awareness of the value of their knowledge systems and cultural practices.
And we've tried to show that these knowledge systems are not only locally grounded, but also manifested regionally and relevant on a planetary scale. Through the use of cutting-edge geospatial analysis and mobilizing cartographic resources, working with wonderful colleagues from all over the world, we are trying to show that a substantial proportion of the world's biodiversity lies on the hands of indigenous peoples. We have quantified the fundamental roles that indigenous peoples play in safeguarding over a quarter of the world's terrestrial surface, at least 37 percent of the world's last natural areas, and at least 36 percent of the last intact forest landscapes, which are central to the mitigation action needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
In the Amazon, one of the world's hotspots of biocultural diversity, indigenous lands encompassed almost half of the most ecologically unique landscapes, covering a surface of three times the surface of Germany. The maintenance of these habitats and this biodiversity is thanks to the tenacity, the persistence, the leadership, and the sacrifice of indigenous communities. Unfortunately, indigenous lands are not immune to biological and cultural diversity losses. Take a look at this old picture from the sacred petroglyphs of Pachene in the Bolivian Amazon.
This is the same sacred natural site that I showed you earlier on. And it's a place that is very special and dear to the Chimane indigenous peoples with whom I've been working since my PhD. This is the site where Chimane gods gave birth to humanity according to Chimane oral history.
Unfortunately, the opening of a logging road in 1996 destroyed this sacred site forever. And the only graphic records available of these sites are these old pictures that I'm showing you here. I think that this is a very vivid and brutal example of the challenges that indigenous peoples face in safeguarding their biocultural heritage, and they show how the biocultural diversity of our planet is being destroyed and undermined by the expansion of commodity and extractive frontiers.
There's no doubt that we are navigating troubled waters, and sustaining our world's biocultural diversity will definitely require a transformative shift in how indigenous peoples, their knowledge systems, their cultural practices, and all their expressions in lands and waters are valued, affirmed and recognized. And that goes hand in hand with upholding Indigenous Peoples'rights. This is inextricably linked to our global efforts to address biodiversity loss and mitigate climate change, and to safeguard the fabric of life that weaves us all together.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Alvaro. Very, very interesting.
A few questions. I'd like to maybe start with the communities that you work with. What sorts of issues have the communities that you work with have in common, even though they are very diverse and in different parts of the world, but there are some common issues that you've come across? Could you talk about that a bit? Sure.
I mean, they are definitely very diverse, as we've seen in the pictures. And with this diversity, people might not be aware of how much they share and how many commonalities there are in their experiences. The first of them is the cultural attachment to land. That's really what defines indigenous peoples, is that deep and profound cultural ties and spiritual ties to the lands and waters that make up their homelands.
So that's really something very important. Unfortunately, there's also the sad side, which is the dispossession of that land. Indigenous peoples are the first peoples, but over history there's been second, third and fourth peoples that have come and invaded and colonized those lands. really breaking that integral relationship that some of these communities had with those lands.
And that has perpetuated a story of oppression and dispossession that it varies from one context to another, but still reverberates to this day. But still, I want to emphasize that even if there's this story of dispossession, there's also the sight that there's such a powerful cultural continuity in indigenous peoples'lifeways and cultures. The fact that they continue to manage such a substantial proportion of our planet attests to those cultural ties to lands and to the importance that these lands have for these communities.
Very exciting. You already went into colonialism a bit there. Let's go deeper into that. How has colonialism harmed these positive human-nature interactions that you've been talking about? Tell us a bit more about that.
Yeah, okay. So colonialism has had and continues to have very damaging impacts and effects on biocultural diversity. There's been many brutal campaigns to marginalize and oppress indigenous peoples all over the world, and those have, as I was saying, broken or disrupted those links that people used to have with their lands. These are very disruptive pressures. We're talking about genocide, we're talking about assimilation policies, residential schools, theft of land, destruction of cultural heritage sites, as I showed in my slides.
And those can really create legacies of intergenerational trauma that can somehow ramify over centuries. And they really limit people's ability to engage with their traditional territories. They undermine cultural engagement with the land and basically take a big toll on people's mental and physical well-being.
So those are the sort of forces that we steal nowadays. However, coming back to what I was saying about... cultural continuity and resilience, despite all these efforts of the colonial machinery, despite many attempts at obliterating their traditions, they are still here.
They have resisted all this colonial oppression and they continue to thrive and that's something that we perhaps don't emphasize enough. Sometimes we use all this language that really gives a very apocalyptic idea, but we should also celebrate that powerful cultural continuity and resilience and resistance that is a hallmark of their cultures and ways of life. Great point.
You have worked a lot in the Amazon and the situation there is currently quite worrying. But what sorts of things that you see there at the moment that give you some sort of hope for the situation? Well, it's pretty difficult to speak about hope without putting up front the hard facts.
And the truth is that the Amazon is at a crossroads in its social and ecological history. And we cannot... denied the fact that there's rollbacks in environmental negotiations, the demarcation regulation, sorry, the demarcation of indigenous people's lands has been frozen up, there's been weakening of environmental protections and neutering of federal environmental agencies, and that's really something that we should be very, very concerned about. It's appalling, to say the least. But when you think about hope, I personally find a lot of hope on those stories of resilience I was speaking about and all the...
proactive leadership that indigenous peoples have showed in really defending their territories from all that environmental destruction, defending their homelands from the expansion of extractivism and industrial development pressures. They are really cultivating lots of resistance movements, and that sort of gives me hope. I mean, when you look at the southern rim of the Amazon, indigenous lands are some of the last islands of biological and cultural diversity in the larger landscape. So we should see them as islands of hope in an ocean of despair.
And I think that we should do so much more to support those efforts at safeguarding these lands, the cultures that are there, and all the biodiversity that they harbor. To continue in that vein, how can, for instance, researchers such as yourself support the efforts of indigenous peoples safeguarding their lands, as you said? How can you actually do that? Well, we are trying to honor these efforts, so honor the work that indigenous land and environmental defenders are doing. They are the ones who are leading the good fight on the ground.
And we are just trying to bring visibility to the work that they do and to their struggles and raise awareness of how many challenges they encounter on that journey to really safeguard their lands and cultures and languages. That being said, we also should advocate for the protection of indigenous rights and sort of try to connect those realities on the ground with global and international decision-making and make sure that indigenous people's rights are foregrounded on biodiversity policy and and climate change mitigation options and so on. Nowadays we're having the climate change summit in Glasgow and it's important that indigenous peoples are part of the solution, that they are invited to be part of those solutions to climate change and that any policies that we can come up with to address this mess are foregrounded on their rights, on their knowledge and that we count on them as legitimate stakeholders, rights holders and knowledge holders. That's very concrete and very interesting.
Thank you so much Alvaro for your... beautiful presentation. Let's give a warm round of applause to Alvaro. Thank you.