Recognizing Indigenous peoples' and local communities' rights and agency in the post-2020 Biodiversity Agenda

The Convention on Biological Diversity is defining the goals that will frame future global biodiversity policy in a context of rapid biodiversity decline and under pressure to make transformative change. Drawing on the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, we argue that transformative change requires the foregrounding of Indigenous peoples' and local communities' rights and agency in biodiversity policy. We support this argument with four key points. First, Indigenous peoples and local communities hold knowledge essential for setting realistic and effective biodiversity targets that simultaneously improve local livelihoods. Second, Indigenous peoples' conceptualizations of nature sustain and manifest CBD's 2050 vision of "Living in harmony with nature." Third, Indigenous peoples' and local communities' participation in biodiversity policy contributes to the recognition of human and Indigenous peoples' rights. And fourth, engagement in biodiversity policy is essential for Indigenous peoples and local communities to be able to exercise their recognized rights to territories and resources.

Free for All: Foods, Landscapes, and Lives in the Paraguayan Chaco

Foods and foodscapes structure and inform our experiences as ethnobiologists and ethnographers, the way we interact with and learn from teachers in study sites, and how relations between peoples and between people and landscapes unfold over time. This short memoir essay revisits my education in foodscapes with the Ayoreo community of Jesudi in the Paraguayan Chaco through stories and experiences of food procurement and distribution. From landscapes in which food was free for all (non-monetized) to contemporary encroachments and land-grabbing in the Chaco for globally-connected markets, the transformations have been rapid and witnessed by Ayoreo and other dispossessed indigenous groups.