Global

Certain threats to ICCAs across the world are common and interlinked across political boundaries. The current global economic system threatens the integrity of ICCAs by imposing industrial forms of extraction, production and consumption, including mining, built infrastructure, monoculture plantations and trawling. In addition to such direct industrial threats, pervasive social and cultural phenomena such as urbanisation and acculturation also threaten custodians of ICCAs by undermining customary laws, traditional and local languages and knowledge systems for food and water, livelihoods and health and wellbeing. More broadly, indigenous peoples and local communities often face structural racism, oppression, violence and other human rights harms and violations as ethnic or religious minorities and in protecting their communities and territories against ​the specific threats affecting them.

 The ICCA Consortium has been responding to global threats by documenting diverse experiences of ICCAs around the world, analysing legal, policy and institutional frameworks that support and hinder ICCAs, exploring national, regional and international connections ​in support of ICCAs and actively promoting recognition of ICCAs in international policy.  Even in the years preceding the ICCA Consortium’s official establishment, the people and organisations who became its Members and Honorary Members were actively engaged in international biodiversity and conservation law and policy, focusing on the ​Resolutions and Recommendations of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the decisions of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).  While the Consortium continues to engage in these processes, with particular emphasis on national and local implementation, it is also increasingly focusing on ICCAs in the context of other policy fora, including human rights, food sovereignty and land tenure, climate change, sustainable development, and the financial and private sectors. The ICCA Consortium’s working group on law and policy aims to coordinate and deepen these diverse efforts as a direct complement to action at the local, national and regional levels.

Read more about the work of the ICCA Consortium here.