UNESCO: Pastoralists are custodians of knowledge that sustains livelihoods, protects biodiversity and helps communities adapt to a changing climate

UNESCO

@UNESCO

 

Pastoralists are custodians of knowledge that sustains livelihoods, protects biodiversity and helps communities adapt to a changing climate. 

 

As #COP17 takes place in Mongolia, discover how  @UNESCO works with pastoralist communities to safeguard living knowledge and strengthen resilience. Read more: https://unes.co/rj83a5 

 

#ForThePeople

 

https://x.com/UNESCO/status/2089351549499887754 

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https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unescos-work-pastoralists-highlights-lessons-cop17 

Across the world — in the Andes, the Sahara, the Alps, and the Arctic tundra — communities have spent centuries mastering how to live with the land, not against it. This is pastoralism — raising livestock across environments too extreme for farming, guided by knowledge refined over generations. As COP17 on desertification opens in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (17–28 August 2026), UNESCO shows how pastoralist knowledge, as well as integrated solutions, can address soil degradation, drought, and climate change. 

Working with communities, not just for them

Continuously moving their herds across vast territories is a practice known as transhumance. Several UN agencies work with pastoralist communities on climate and land issues. UNESCO's mandate is distinctive as it encompasses protecting indigenous knowledge systems, safeguarding cultural heritage, and conserving biodiversity through its natural sciences work. Combined with a network of over 2,000 designated sites, this means UNESCO works directly with pastoralists in World Heritage properties, Biosphere Reserves, and Geoparks, where they have a role in land management not just recording their knowledge. 

Roughly 200 of those sites actively partner with pastoralist communities today. Safeguarding knowledge and putting it to use are two different steps, and UNESCO's role is to hold both. 

Knowledge at risk

Pastoralist knowledge survives in songs, recitation, and objects passed between generations, which means it depends entirely on that chain continuing. Among the Tuareg of the central Sahara, ecological and geographic knowledge is carried through poetry and encoded into jewellery, such as silver crosses marking desert locations, pendants mapping the night sky for navigation. If that chain of transmission breaks for even one generation, this precise, functional knowledge can be lost outright — unlike a written record. 

Documenting knowledge before it's lost

For six years, UNESCO supported a research programme with indigenous pastoralists across West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and East Africa, documenting what they know about the changing climate and how. Where conventional climate assessments rely on a handful of measurements that include sea surface temperature and wind speed, pastoralists offered thousands of distinct indicators for reading their environment. The case study of the Mbororo Fulani of Chad shows how transhumance sustains both livelihoods and biodiversity.

Safeguarding makes the practice durable

Protection under the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention works on the same logic as site partnerships: knowledge only stays usable if it survives. In 2023, UNESCO inscribed transhumance and the seasonal droving of livestock across the Mediterranean and the Alps on the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, recognizing it as a living practice, not a relic.  

UNESCO connects what pastoralist communities know with what policymakers need: safeguarding knowledge so it survives, and giving communities a role in applying it. As COP17 turns to desertification, pastoralism shows both steps working. 

 https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unescos-work-pastoralists-highlights-lessons-cop17

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‘They kept us alive for thousands of years’: could saving Palestinian seeds also save the world? Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, believes biodiversity will save the planet in the climate crisis

 "Sansour notes that the project is called a seed “library” rather than a seed “bank” for a reason. It’s about partnering with people who will grow things now rather than preserving seeds in some safe vault for a future doomsday, because from Sansour’s perspective, “doomsday is already here”.

“I got an email from folks in Gaza asking me what to eat in the wild right now, like, ‘what could be growing outside that we can eat? Because we’re starving.’ That email made me cry, not only because they are starving, but also because it made me understand how the work that we’ve been trying to do is urgent,” said Sansour. Reconnecting to heirloom seeds is also about trying to preserve cultural knowledge about food that’s already growing wild, both in a time of crisis and with the dream that someday it could be enjoyed in a time of thriving, as well.

“Every time we plant a seed or we plant a tree, we are planting it with the hope and intention to have a future,” Sansour said." 

Sansour is the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, a project that began in 2016 to conserve Palestinian heritage and culture by saving heirloom seed varieties and telling the stories and history from which they emerged.

Whitney Bauck

Fri 29 Mar 2024 07.00 EDT

“The mission of the seed library is to revitalize and conserve a living archive of our heirloom seeds,” said Sansour. “Not just for Palestine, but also for the world. The world is in a hospice state and we need all the different tools and biodiversity we can in order to adapt.”

 READ MORE     https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/mar/29/palestinian-seeds-conservation-climate-crisis

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Satellite analysis shows farms devastated and nearly half of the territory’s trees razed. Alongside mounting air and water pollution, experts say Israel’s onslaught on Gaza’s ecosystems has made the area unlivable

 

The age of extinction

‘Ecocide in Gaza’: does scale of environmental destruction amount to a war crime? 

 by Kaamil Ahmed, Damien Gayle and Aseel Mousa in Gaza

In a dilapidated warehouse in Rafah, Soha Abu Diab is living with her three young daughters and more than 20 other family members. They have no running water, no fuel and are surrounded by running sewage and waste piling up.

Like the rest of Gaza’s residents, they fear the air they breathe is heavy with pollutants and that the water carries disease. Beyond the city streets lie razed orchards and olive groves, and farmland destroyed by bombs and bulldozers.

“This life is not life,” says Abu Diab, who was displaced from Gaza City. “There is pollution everywhere – in the air, in the water we bathe in, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the area around us.”

For her family and thousands of others, the human cost of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, launched after the Hamas attack on 7 October, is being compounded by an environmental crisis.

The al-Naji family break their fast during Ramadan amid the ruins of their home in Deir al-Balah. Photograph: AFP/Getty

The full extent of the damage in Gaza has not yet been documented, but analysis of satellite imagery provided to the Guardian shows the destruction of about 38-48% of tree cover and farmland.

Olive groves and farms have been reduced to packed earth; soil and groundwater has been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter.

Researchers and environmental organisations say the destruction will have enormous effects on Gaza’s ecosystems and biodiversity. The scale and potential long-term impact of the damage have led to calls for it to be regarded as “ecocide” and investigated as a possible war crime.... READ MORE    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/29/gaza-israel-palestinian-war-ecocide-environmental-destruction-pollution-rome-statute-war-crimes-aoe

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