A toolkit to support conservation by indigenous peoples and local communities: building capacity and sharing knowledge for Indigenous Peoples and Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs).
This toolkit presents a selection of practical resources, developed by numerous organisations, making them readily accessible to community-based organisations who manage ICCAs. In addition to being a valuable resource to practitioners, the toolkit provides a reminder that the achievement of the emerging post-2015 sustainable development goals (SDGs) will need to be linked to a comprehensive valuation of ecosystem services, and be spearheaded by local civil society initiatives coming from the grassroots.
It is the hope that the toolkit will be distributed widely to empower local communities and indigenous peoples as part of the priorities of the UN system to contribute to the recognition of human rights, poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem protection.
A number of partners, including UNEP-WCMC, UNDP, the GEF Small Grants Programme, the Government of Norway, the German Agency for International Cooperation, and the ICCA Consortium, worked closely to develop this toolkit for governing and managing Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs). The purpose of the toolkit is to complement ongoing efforts to build capacity of ICCAs as they gain greater recognition on a global scale.
Just as national governments require guidelines and benchmarks for managing their designated protected areas, indigenous peoples and local communities need to access a set of tools and resources appropriate to their needs. The toolkit includes a range of case studies to highlight the diversity of approaches that communities already use to manage their own areas, and to show how these lessons can be applied to form a “global learning network” of ICCAs.
The majority of conservation tools developed to date have been designed primarily for protected area managers, practitioners, or government agencies. In parallel, a growing number of tools and guides are being written for community-based organisations, particularly for those living in particular habitats (i.e. forests, coasts etc.), or those facing specific threats (i.e. linked to global climate change or extractive industries). The present toolkit was designed to bring together a number of these resources for the purpose of building local capacities to effectively manage ICCAs. Given the increasing recognition of community-based conservation and governance at the global level, the publication is one modest contribution towards the achievement of CBD Aichi 2020 targets, as well as the UN post-2015 sustainable development agenda.
How to use this toolkit?
- Any community that governs and manages a spatial area of land or water, motivated by a variety of potential reasons, could find something of value in this toolkit. The content is organized into five main areas that build upon each other:
- documenting presence;
- management planning;
- monitoring and evaluation;
- communication; and
- finance and values.
- Some groups may find several of the themes to be useful, others may only be concerned with one particular theme.
- The toolkit also includes visual examples and stories from communities who are successfully using various approaches to conserve, protect and restore ICCAs. The toolkit has been designed as a resource kit with a large number of URL links to the internet to facilitate the downloading of documents and visiting web-pages.
You can download this toolkit for free here.
