17.1 Introduction
Along with other small island regions, the Pacific contributes only very modestly to global greenhouse gas emissions yet faces the prospect of severe climate change impacts. However, while low-lying atoll countries and islands are particularly at risk from factors such as sea level rise, the vulnerability of Pacific Island societies is diverse and complex.
Having settled and subsequently inhabited marginal locations subject to significant and drastic environmental variation and change for generations, Pacific societies have over time developed a highly diverse range of local and indigenous knowledge systems and associated practices that serve to mitigate risk and support sustainability and livelihoods across a wide range of often small, isolated, and natural disaster-prone localities. This has resulted in the emergence of a robust tradition of site governance and sustainable management practices, including sacred natural sites and tabu systems.
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While it has been widely acknowledged that these sets of knowledge and practice at present make a notable contribution to the sustainability of Pacific societies (IPCC 2014), local and indigenous knowledge and practice has not translated easily into conventional site designations such as protected areas. There are a number of reasons for this. Traditional and indigenous knowledge and practice is frequently locally rather than nationally governed, relies on oral rather than written transmission, and is often not immediately compatible with the conventional scientific analyses applied in ecosystem assessments.
While historically and to some degree conceptually associated with conventional protected area categories, UNESCO-designated sites as presently applied have the potential to accord visibility, recognition, and support to local and indigenous knowledge and practice relating to the management of natural resources in the Pacific. These sites thereby have the potential to make a significant contribution to the 2030 Agenda and the long-term sustainability of the region.
UNESCO designations in the Pacific remain limited both in terms of number and in the degree to which this potential has been realized. However, the experiences made to date offer both lessons learned and hint at further potential made possible by gradual changes within the UNESCO site-based programmes themselves. They demonstrate how stronger recognition of local and indigenous management knowledge and practice has the potential to enhance the resilience of Pacific Island societies, while at the same time making clear some of the key challenges in this regard. In turn, the potential contribution of local and indigenous knowledge and practice towards ensuring greater resilience in the Pacific is a significant consideration in the treatment of the water-energy-food nexus in the subregion and its long-term sustainability.
17.2 A Brief Overview of UNESCO-Designated Sites
UNESCO-designated sites are areas recognized by UNESCO and its member states as belonging to one or several of three distinct categories: (1) Biosphere Reserves, (2) World Heritage sites, and (3) Global Geoparks. All UNESCO-designated sites are nominated by the member state (or states in the case of transboundary sites) to which the nominated territories belong and remain under the sovereign jurisdiction of the nominating member state after recognition. The decision to accept a given site as a UNESCO designation is made by elected bodies composed of UNESCO member state representatives, in accordance with the distinct rules and procedures of each of the three programmes. World Heritage sites are recognized under the World Heritage Convention of 1972 and are subject to related governance and legal arrangements.
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While each addresses a distinct set of issues and conforming to a distinct set of criteria, the three designations are today all explicitly associated with the contribution of each designated site towards sustainable development in and around the site itself, and through the commitment made to the programme by the nominating member state, in society at large. In spite of the currently explicit association with sustainable development, each programme was established with a distinct purpose. The first UNESCO-designated sites—Biosphere Reserves and World Heritage sites—were established in the mid-1970s with specific reference to their role in global environmental monitoring and assessment (for Biosphere Reserves) and the conservation and protection of cultural and natural heritage of “outstanding universal value” (for World Heritage sites). The most recent addition, UNESCO Global Geoparks, evolved from a non-governmental network attaining UNESCO designation in 2015.
17.2.1 Biosphere Reserves
While their name may invoke the term “nature reserve”, implying an area that is reserved or set aside for conservation purposes, the impact of human activity on the environment has been at the core of the Biosphere Reserve since the UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme was first conceived in the late 1960s. Biosphere Reserves are today defined as “‘learning places for sustainable development’. They are sites for testing interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and managing changes and interactions between social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of biodiversity. They are places that provide local solutions to global challenges.”1 Today, there are 738 biosphere reserves in 134 countries, including 22 transboundary sites jointly nominated by two or more countries.
The first Biosphere Reserves, established in 1975 as an offshoot of the intergovernmental scientific programme Man and the Biosphere (itself created in 1971), were envisioned as representative samples of the world’s biomes. The primary objective of the establishment of a World Network of Biosphere Reserves was to ensure that adequate examples of all important and representative biomes and ecosystems were protected (UNESCO 1973). It was envisioned that countries would nominate “representative biome subdivisions” not yet under protection under conventional protected area criteria. The resulting Biosphere Reserves would in turn serve as “a standard against which to judge the result of human use of modification elsewhere in that biome”. To complement this type of Biosphere Reserve, it was envisioned that environments that had undergone substantial modification by human activity would also be included among areas identified for Biosphere Reserve status (Thulstrup 2016). It was hoped that this approach—by which the areas under protection would be identified on the basis of their representativeness of a given biome rather than by other criteria, such particularly outstanding biodiversity or the presence of flagship species, would yield protection for plants and animals about which knowledge was still considered limited.
In this way, Biosphere Reserves would secure in-situ conservation of genetic resources; known and unknown, as well as a baseline against which to assess human impact on the global environment (UNESCO 1973). While a tracing of the extensive trajectory of the MAB programme’s history is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted that the programme has contributed significantly to the global discourse on issues such as sacred natural sites, detailed in the joint IUCN-UNESCO publication “Sacred Natural Sites: Guidelines for Protected Area Managers” (Wild and McLeod 2008).
17.2.2 World Heritage Sites
The predominantly scientific purpose underlying the establishment of the early Biosphere Reserves is distinct from the early drivers for the World Heritage Convention of 1972, which was established with a highly tangible purpose in mind; to protect the world’s cultural and natural places of outstanding universal value, and with an initial close association with cultural heritage rather than nature conservation.
Significantly, early mobilization of support for the convention in the late 1950s and 1960s occurred in response to a direct, specific, and clearly identifiable threat to the Abu Simbel temple complex in Egypt and the threat it faced from the construction of the Aswan High Dam. This early focus on tangible, iconic properties, eventually also including sites of natural heritage significance, allowed the World Heritage Convention to convey a clear and simple message to its constituency as well as to the general public: global support is needed to protect places that are of such extraordinary value that their preservation concerns all of humanity (Thulstrup 2016).
Recognition of interactions between people and nature within the World Heritage Convention has received increasing attention as the World Heritage List has grown, and the Convention today recognizes not only cultural, natural, and mixed World Heritage properties, but also cultural landscapes: sites that explicitly recognize the interaction between people and nature. In the Pacific, Papua New Guinea’s Kuk Early Agricultural site2 is an example of a World Heritage listed cultural landscape.
Today, the notion of sustainable development is firmly integrated into the principal guiding document for implementation of World Heritage at all levels, the World Heritage Convention’s Operational Guidelines. The 2019 edition of the Guidelines (which are continuously updated to ensure guidance for implementation of the Convention that takes into account current international commitments, priorities, and complementary programmes) encourage States Parties:
to mainstream into their programmes and activities related to the World Heritage Convention the principles of the relevant policies adopted by the World Heritage Committee, the General Assembly of States Parties to the Convention and the UNESCO Governing Bodies, such as the Policy Document for the Integration of a Sustainable Development Perspective into the Processes of the World Heritage Convention and the UNESCO policy on engaging with indigenous peoples, as well as other related policies and documents, including the 2030 Agenda. (UNESCO 2019)
There are today 1,174 World Heritage sites, including 43 transboundary sites. Of the total number of World Heritage sites, 900 recognize cultural heritage, 218 natural heritage, while 39 are mixed properties featuring both cultural and natural properties.
17.2.3 UNESCO Global Geoparks
UNESCO’s work with the concept of geoparks began in 2001. In 2004, representatives of seventeen European and eight Chinese sites identifying as geoparks came together at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris to form the Global Geoparks Network (GGN) where national geological heritage initiatives contribute to and benefit from their membership of a global network of exchange and cooperation. During the Organization’s 38th General Conference in 2015, UNESCO’s 195 member states ratified the creation of a new UNESCO site designation, UNESCO Global Geoparks. Four decades after the establishment of the first Biosphere Reserves and World Heritage sites, the adoption of the concept as a UNESCO designation accorded governmental recognition to the importance of managing outstanding geological sites and landscapes in a holistic manner.
UNESCO Global Geoparks are defined as single, unified geographical areas where sites and landscapes of international geological significance are managed with a holistic concept of protection, education, and sustainable development. The programme advocates a bottom-up approach that combines conservation with sustainable development, while involving local communities and is becoming increasingly popular. At present, there are 177 UNESCO Global Geoparks in 46 countries.3
17.3 Vulnerability, Resilience, Local and Indigenous Knowledge and UNESCO-Designated Sites in the Pacific Context
As outlined in the above, guiding documents for UNESCO site designations (notably the World Heritage Convention’s Operational Guidelines) have over time made more explicit reference to the validity and significance of local and indigenous management arrangements at the site level, as well as advocated for management authorities to respect, and where appropriate, build upon local and indigenous knowledge and management principles. However, there is little doubt that considerable variation exists in the degree to which existing UNESCO-designated sites live up to the standards advocated by the programmes. UNESCO programmes are intergovernmental in nature and as such are not always ideally suited to ensure the full reflection of local and indigenous systems that are local in nature and may not be aligned with, or even recognized by the national authorities responsible for their submission to UNESCO.
The conferral of a UNESCO designation that builds upon local and indigenous Pacific management principles does, however, bring with it the potential to raise the visibility and international profile of viability, value, and relevance of local and indigenous management systems in reducing vulnerability and enhancing resilience of small islands to climate change. This visibility has the potential to leverage a positive impact at the local, national, and international level, even though this potential may yet to be fully realized in the existing Pacific designations.
In the global climate change discourse, small islands have conventionally been considered as particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Chaps. 2, 3 and 10) due to their limited landmass, low elevation and exposure to sea level rise, relative isolation, and susceptibility to natural disasters such as tropical storms, flood, and drought, as well as—in the Pacific case—earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic hazards. While treatment of small island vulnerability in research literature has grown more nuanced in recent years with increasing recognition that considerable heterogeneity exists among and within different small island nations and regions, the overall assessment of small islands as vulnerable has been continuously reaffirmed.
In an example here of, the IPCC’s 5th assessment report published in 2014 confirms with “high confidence; robust evidence, and high agreement” the […] high level of vulnerability of small islands to multiple stressors, both climate and non-climate given the inherent physical characteristics of small islands” (IPCC 2014).
The report, however, also notes with high confidence that “small islands do not have uniform climate change risk profiles […] Rather, their high diversity in both physical and human attributes and their response to climate-related drivers means that climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation will be variable from one island region to another and between countries in the same region.” (IPCC 2014). The report further identifies the “need to acknowledge the heterogeneity and complexity of small island states and territories” as a data and research gap.
The IPCC takes note of an increasing appreciation that not all small islands even within the same country share the same vulnerability profile. Related hereto, the IPCC notes that the research base for assessing the degree to which local and indigenous knowledge and management systems (Chap. 11) play a significant role in the generation and maintenance of this heterogeneity has yet to be extensively populated.
In this regard, the IPCC recognizes the importance of local and indigenous knowledge systems and their potential in strengthening resilience to climate change: “…there is continuing strong support for the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into adaptation planning. However, this is moderated by the recognition that current practices alone may not be adequate to cope with future climate extremes or trend changes. The ability of a small island population to deal with current climate risks may be positively correlated with the ability to adapt to future climate change, but evidence confirming this remains limited” (IPCC 2014), thus indirectly identifying the relationship between present-day resilience climate risk among small island societies and their ability to address future climate change as yet another research gap.
While further research to build the evidence base through which to better assess this potential correlation is required, examinations of the ability of Pacific societies to manage environmental change has been examined in the recent past. In 2012, UNESCO and the United Nations University published “Weathering Uncertainty”, a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature, primarily peer-reviewed, but also grey, relating to the contribution of local and indigenous knowledge to our understanding of global climate change. A special report on small islands contained in the review and drawing extensively on Pacific sources concluded that:
Small island societies have lived for generations with considerable and often sudden environmental change. The traditional knowledge and related practice with which small island societies have adapted to such change are of global relevance. Areas in which small island societies have developed adaptation-relevant traditional knowledge include natural disaster preparedness, risk reduction, food production systems and weather forecasting. In many small island contexts, the transmission and application of traditional knowledge is under threat from changes in consumption and migration patterns, as well as from the lack of recognition of traditional knowledge in the formal educational system. (Nakashima et al. 2012)
Significantly, the review found local and indigenous knowledge and practice to be a significant factor in reducing vulnerability and adapting to often drastic environmental change, while at the same time acknowledging the erosion of the associated knowledge transmission caused by its gradual replacement as Pacific societies become more integrated into globally determined consumption, migration, and knowledge production patterns. This erosion in turn is considered a detrimental factor in maintaining resilience in the face of climate change.
The review notes a number of examples of sophisticated small island local and indigenous resource management regimes from the Pacific that have provided (and continue to provide) for the social and ecological regulation of resource production, access, harvesting, storage, and distribution. Several examples are provided of how Pacific local and indigenous knowledge and practice relating to the water-food-energy nexus have served to maintain resilience. A striking example of this is provided from the Vanuatu northern outlier of the Torres Islands:
The Torres Islands are situated in a very highly active seismic region that provokes constant, violent shifts in shoreline ecologies and hydrodynamics. Distributing environmental risk is a central element in traditional small island vulnerability mitigation strategies, such as the scattering of food production sites. The authors argue that overall changes to the local shoreline, especially in relation to soil quality, vegetation growth and hydrodynamics, as provoked by extreme seismic uplift and downlift, offer a unique and informative example of the longterm adaptability that is present in both the human population and the observed coastal milieu of these islands, and is applicable to climate change adaptation. Adapted from the paper ‘Seasonal environmental practices and climate fluctuations in Melanesia. An assessment of small island societies in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.’ (Damon and Mondragon 2011)
The example highlights how local and indigenous food production in the Torres Islands has mitigated the threat posed by constant and often violent shifts in local ecological conditions caused by frequent extreme seismic shifts. This constant threat of drastic change helped shape a complex system of kinship relations and associated food production strategies that ensure the distribution and buffering of risk among members of the community to ensure an overall enhancement of the community’s resilience when drastic change occurs.
The Torres Islands case is significant in that it provides a tangible demonstration of the ability of Pacific local and indigenous knowledge and practice to mitigate even drastic environmental change. At the same time, it provides a good example of an approach that seeks to understand and manage changes and interactions between social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of biodiversity, as well as provide local solutions to global challenges. This role dovetails entirely with the contemporary definition of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve given in Sect. 17.2.1. Two additional examples are worthy of mention here, providing a further illustration of the contributions towards resilience made by local and indigenous knowledge and management systems, and the principles advocated by UNESCO’s site-based programmes.
17.4 Local And Indigenous Management And UNESCO-Designated Sites in the Pacific
17.4.1 Ngaremeduu Biosphere Reserve, Palau
Pacific customary marine tenure, comprising a range of local and indigenous fisheries management practices, is based on control mechanisms that may be temporal or spatial in nature or a combination of the two. These include limited access, closed seasons, no-catch zones, and species-specific prohibitions and are exemplified by no-fishing or tabu areas of Fiji, Vanuatu, and Kiribati; the ra’ui in the Cook Islands; the masalai in Papua New Guinea; and bul in Palau. In Palau, the bul can be put in place to close an area of reef to harvesting on a short-term basis, for example, during periods of fish spawning (Vierros et al. 2010).
In the nomination of the Ngaremeduu Biosphere Reserve in Palau, which was approved in 2005 as one of the first two Biosphere Reserves in the independent Pacific Island countries, the bul was referred as a guiding principle in development of the site’s zonation scheme. In this sense, temporal as well as spatial local and indigenous fisheries management elements were directly incorporated into the justification for the creation of a UNESCO-designated site in the Pacific. The Biosphere Reserve’s acceptance by UNESCO member states served to highlight the visibility and drew global attention to the use of bul in the management of protected areas in Palau.
However, the case of Ngaremeduu also serves to highlight the difficulty in maintaining and advancing implementation of a UNESCO-designation over the long term. Thulstrup (2016) notes that the limited presence in Palau and other small island states of well-established national scientific institutions and scientific research traditions and capacities to some degree plays a role in undermining their ability to engage actively with the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme, a programme anchored in international science networks, and to derive the full potential benefits from it.
In small developing countries, the established scientific institutions that in larger countries traditionally play a key role in shaping the national infrastructure of the MAB programme are often not present. This leaves the designated government department or individual alone with a facilitation and management task normally shared between several larger institutions, and without the networks and resources to draw upon for representation in and engagement with MAB’s governing and advisory bodies, joint MAB-affiliated research projects, and other international cooperation.
In the years following the approval of the site in Palau as a Biosphere Reserve, this led to the a relative decline in terms of active implementation, caused both by the challenges in maintaining a viable focal point and by the complexities of managing a Biosphere Reserve straddling three traditional communities and states. Efforts are currently under way to reassess and reinvigorate the management of the site in line with the interests and priorities of the communities it encompasses.
These challenges are directly related to one of the key principles of UNESCO’s site-based programmes: the nomination of terrestrial and marine areas for conservation through a government-led process. This does not immediately integrate well into the Pacific traditions of a high degree of local-level autonomy and local and indigenous management of natural resources (Chap. 11). Even where national designations are based upon and closely associated with local and indigenous management systems, the conferral of an international designation through an intergovernmental process carries with it an implicit validation of these systems inherent in the process of nomination and assessment of any property. Local and indigenous norms, values, and knowledges may be referenced in the submission dossier, however the very process of committing these norms to paper in accordance with an internationally sanctioned standard in itself may compromise the principles of local and indigenous management, which tends to be locally grounded, oral, and non-static in nature.
While such compromises in the recognition of Pacific UNESCO-designated sites most certainly fail to capture essential elements of how water and biodiversity is managed and sustains life in the Pacific, they have served to shift the global perceptions of how sites are selected, assessed, and documented. Several examples from the Pacific help illustrate this.
17.4.2 East Rennell, Solomon Islands
The nomination of East Rennell by the Solomon Islands for consideration as a natural World Heritage site in 1998 helped cause a shift in the understanding of local and indigenous management of natural heritage recognized under the Convention. The report of the 22nd meeting of the World Heritage Committee notes that:
The Committee had a considerable debate on customary protection and agreed that customary management should be supported […] A number of delegates welcomed the nomination and noted that a site protected by customary law is breaking new ground, and that the inclusion of this type of property is in line with the Global Strategy. Sites from other States Parties, which are under traditional management and customary law, may provide examples for general principles. The Delegate of Thailand stated that although he had no doubt about the World Heritage values of the site, he could not support the nomination at this stage, as it did not comply with the requirements of the Operational Guidelines. He noted that customary land tenure does not automatically guarantee effective customary management and that there are no legislative provisions to protect the site from rapid changes such as tourism, which may affect it. He therefore dissociated himself from the Committee’s decision.4
As the quote highlights, the recognition of local and indigenous management principles as reflective of the established standards to ensure long-term protection of Outstanding Universal Value was not uniformly accepted at the time.
As discussed above, subsequent iterations of the Operational Guidelines of the World Heritage Convention have reflected the validity of local and indigenous management authorities, approaches, and governance systems. While the nomination of East Rennell as a natural World Heritage site may have served as a watershed in the recognition of Pacific local and indigenous management, the subsequent performance of the site in the eyes of the Committee demonstrates, as with the Ngaremeduu Biosphere Reserve, the complexities inherent in aligning local and indigenous management with World Heritage expectations for the management of and conservation of Outstanding Universal Value.
After years of concern over threats to the integrity of the site, by 2013 East Rennell was placed on the “World Heritage in Danger” list due to persistent threats to the integrity of the site stemming from a range of factors, including among others, commercial hunting, fishing/collecting aquatic resources, forestry and wood production, invasive and alien terrestrial species, as well as the state of the legal and management framework.
The discussion by the World Heritage Committee of a reactive monitoring report prepared and submitted to the Committee by the IUCN in 2019 shows the persistence and considerable complexity of the challenges facing the site today:
Continued efforts by customary landowners and local communities of East Rennell and by the State Party to keep the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of the property intact by banning commercial logging and mining within the property are welcomed. However, it is regrettable that a new logging concession was recently granted by the State Party, which allows commercial logging up to 200 meters from the boundary of the property, while no information is made available regarding its potential impact on the property’s OUV. […]
The clarification that the letter allegedly sent on behalf of the Tuhunui tribe, requesting to withdraw its customary land from the property, was made without mandatory consultation with tribal chiefs and subsequently revoked, is welcomed. The 2019 Reactive Monitoring mission also verified this particular issue with the Paramount Chief, Council of Chiefs and LTWHSA, and it is clear that competing and contested claims of customary rights among tribes and individual households remain a challenge for the customary management. […]
The on-going dialogue between the State Party and local communities to consider application of the Protected Area status to the property and to finalize the Management Plan is welcomed but needs to be concluded. Defining and adopting an adequate legal mechanism to continue protecting the property from commercial logging and mining while safeguarding customary rights to land and natural resources for sustainable use, in line with Paragraph 119 of the Operational Guidelines, is critical to ensure long-term mutual benefits to the property and the local communities, who are custodians of the property. The mission notes that the establishment of an IUCN category VI protected area could be a good tool to achieve this.5
As the text above shows, East Rennell is beset by a set of complex and interacting challenges relating to the balancing of the integrity of the site and its ability to protect the outstanding universal value for which it was recognized, the interests of communities and individuals in pursuing livelihoods and representation in decision-making and governance, and the legal status of the site and its recognition at the local versus the national level.
The East Rennell case provides a demonstration of the impact that local and indigenous Pacific management of terrestrial and marine natural resources has had on the perception of local and indigenous management in the global World Heritage context, while also making visible the significant challenges in merging such management systems with global recognition according to conventional conservation standards.
17.4.3 Utwe Biosphere Reserve, Federated States of Micronesia
Along with Ngaremeduu in Palau (discussed above) and And Atoll in the neighboring state of Pohnpei, the recognition of Utwe as a Biosphere Reserve in 2005 broke new ground in terms of its small size (1,773 hectares) and associated concentric spatial organization within a very limited geographical area. The nomination of Utwe as a Biosphere Reserve was also notable in that the process was driven almost entirely on the basis of a local community initiative. The Utwe community, supported by the Utwe-based non-government organization Kosrae Conservation and Safety Organization (KCSO), initiated, organized consultations for, drafted and worked with the federal government to ensure the submission of the nomination dossier to UNESCO.
Utwe is located on the island of Kosrae in the central Pacific Ocean, one of the four states of the Federated States of Micronesia. The site comprises marine areas, mangroves, upland tropical forest, as well as the Utwe community itself. As was the case with the nomination dossier, the reserve’s management arrangements and spatial organization were devised, implemented, and monitored by community authorities supported by KSCO.
While Utwe ranks among the world’s smaller Biosphere Reserves, its size and close association with the local community has allowed for the integration of Biosphere Reserve planning and development with that of the community as a whole. While Utwe’s zonation follows a conventional concentric pattern with the core area at the center of the Biosphere Reserve, it is set apart by its small size and by the close proximity of the population center of Utwe to its core area, which was defined with the specific objective of establishing and maintaining a locally protected area that in turn would help minimize and eventually completely halt illegal fishing and associated practices in Utwe’s marine areas in accordance with local and indigenous management practices.
The successful recognition of Ngaremeduu, Utwe, and Atoll helped influence conventional norms applied to Biosphere Reserves in terms of size (being smaller than conventionally recommended), spatial organization (core areas were clearly defined, but on the understanding that local communities would be able to access and manage them in accordance with established local/community practice), as well as in terms of the driving forces behind the nominations (Thulstrup 2016).
The impact of the first Pacific Biosphere Reserve nominations by Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia’s were highlighted through the participation by a delegate from Palau in the 2008 Madrid World Congress of Biosphere Reserves. Discussions at this global forum of Biosphere Reserves served as confirmation that the new approaches taken to Biosphere Reserve nomination and development by Pacific Island countries were not only being tolerated, as evidenced by the approval of their nomination dossiers, but were listened to and recognized by the global biosphere reserve community (Thulstrup 2016).
17.5 Conclusion
This chapter has outlined some of the challenges inherent in seeking, obtaining, and maintaining the recognition of local and indigenous Pacific natural resource management governance in the context of UNESCO site designations, and has argued that such designations have the potential to enhance sustainability and resilience to climate change in the subregion.
While there is little doubt that considerable work remains to be done towards improving the articulation between Pacific local and indigenous knowledge and practice and UNESCO’s site-based programmes, the experiences made in the Pacific to date, of which this chapter has addressed only very limited subset, have demonstrated that such articulation is possible, with potential benefits to both the Pacific peoples impacted by their designation and to the programmes themselves.
The concepts of World Heritage sites and Biosphere Reserves were not initially established with the recognition or integration of local and indigenous knowledge systems in mind. However, aided and informed by the engagement of Pacific communities and governments, these concepts have increasingly found their way into the documents guiding the programmes. In the case of UNESCO Global Geoparks, their incorporation as a UNESCO designation in 2015 allowed for a stronger reflection of traditional, local, and indigenous knowledge, to the extent that “local and indigenous knowledge” is recognized as one of ten focus areas for UNESCO Global Geoparks. In helping bring about the conditions for this recognition, Pacific engagement with the programmes have made a lasting impact with potential benefits beyond the Pacific itself.
Beyond the scope UNESCO-designated sites, recent years have seen further attention to, and recognition of conservation measures beyond the conventional definition of the term. An example hereof is the formal definition of other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), applied as a designation for areas that are achieving the effective biodiversity conservation outside conventional protected areas. Referenced in the Convention of Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Aichi Target 11, OECMs were defined at CBD’s 14th Conference of Parties as “a geographically defined area other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem functions and services and where applicable, cultural, spiritual, socio–economic, and other locally relevant values” (Conference to the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity 2018).
With reinforced focus on long-term sustainability, better integration of relevant management and planning concepts, and the recognition local autonomy, future UNESCO-designated sites in the Pacific have the potential as demonstrated by the efforts outlined in this chapter and in so doing, deliver a tangible contribution to the long-term sustainability of natural resource management grounded in the knowledge and practice that made the successful settlement of the region possible.
The opinions expressed in this chapter are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.
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