Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas

The Diversity of ICCAS

Community conservation initiatives are extremely diverse and can be classified or analyzed from several points of view:

• Their coverage of different kinds of ecosystems and wildlife species (encompassing the full range found on Earth)
• The objectives and motivations behind their establishment (including ethical, cultural, economic, and political reasons)
• Their origins (autochthonous by communities or triggered by outsiders)
• The institutions governing them (as different as the communities themselves, ranging from entire villages to youth clubs and women's groups and specialized conservation groups)
• The various ecological and social impacts they have
• Their size (ranging from a tiny patch of forest or sea of less than 1 ha (hectare) to several million ha of rain forest, savanna, or mixed land uses).

ICCAs include the following geographies:

• Indigenous peoples’ territories managed for sustainable use, cultural values, or explicit conservation objectives (e.g., many indigenous protected areas in the Amazon and Australia)
• Terrestrial or marine territories over which mobile or nomadic communities have traditionally roamed, managing the resources through customary regulations and practices (e.g., the territories of the Qashqai in Iran and the Borana in Ethiopia and Kenya, both containing substantial wetland and wildlife values)
• Sacred spaces, ranging from tiny forest groves and wetlands to entire landscapes and seascapes, often left completely or largely free from human use (e.g., thousands of sacred groves in India and several sacred crocodile ponds in Mali)
• Resource catchment areas, from which communities derive their livelihoods or key ecosystem benefits, managed such that these benefits are sustained over time (e.g., community forests in many African and South Asian countries)
• Nesting or roosting sites, or other critical habitats of wild animals, conserved for ethical or other reasons explicitly oriented toward protecting these animals (e.g., dozens of waterfowl nesting wetlands in Southern India)
• Community forests managed by towns (e.g., several in North America)
• Landscapes with mosaics of natural and agricultural ecosystems, managed by farming communities or mixed rural-urban communities (e.g., the Potato Park in the Andean highlands of Peru, the rice terrace regions of the Philippines, or the protected landscapes of Spain and many other European countries)

Though extremely diverse, ICCAs display three essential characteristics: (1) the community (or communities) is the most important decision maker, even though other actors may play a role; (2) the community has one or more crucial links to the area and its species: cultural, spiritual, ecological, economic, and political; and (3) whatever the objectives of management may be, conservation is being achieved in varying degrees.

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