The IUCN World Conservation Congress is the largest conversation humanity has about its relationship with the planet. Every four years, since 1948, the organization brings together governments, scientists, communities, and businesses in a different city to set the course of global conservation. 

In October 2025, more than 10,000 people from 140 countries took part in over a thousand events across seven days in Abu Dhabi. Among everything that happened that week, one moment stood apart, the first World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature, a self-governed space in which more than 200 Indigenous representatives from around the world gathered to shape the conservation agenda on their own terms.

That this happened in 2025 was not an institutional favor. It was the result of decades of pressure, organization, and evidence accumulated by Indigenous Peoples themselves to claim their place in the spaces where the future of the planet is decided.

Territory as argument

Science has spent years documenting what Indigenous communities have practiced long before there were metrics to measure it. According to the World Resources Institute, Indigenous Peoples steward 54% of the world’s intact forests. A study published in Environmental Research Letters in 2020 found that deforestation inside Kayapó territories, in the central Amazon, was 30 times lower than in neighboring non-Indigenous areas. Eleven million hectares conserved through active territorial governance sustained across generations. 

When data alone is not enough

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species records more than 45,000 species at risk of extinction, more than a quarter of all species assessed. To address that loss, the IUCN developed STAR, a metric that maps opportunities for reducing extinction risk at a territorial scale. When the tool reached Indigenous territories in Mesoamerica, it ran into something the models had not accounted for: the people who actually live there.

“Indigenous knowledge looks at the world as a whole. A species is part of a complex system in which spirit, work, everything is interconnected,” said Arturo Arreola, of the Institute for Sustainable Development in Mesoamerica.

Conventional conservation models treat threat reduction, ecological restoration, and territorial governance as separate categories. Indigenous communities do not. Adapting STAR meant building a dialogue first and letting that dialogue reshape the tool.

“A person from an Indigenous community can see how things are changing, often in far greater detail than a biologist,” said Randall, a senior conservation scientist at IUCN

Coastal communities bring results

The Garífuna people of Honduras brought that argument to the coast. An Afro-Indigenous ethnic group formed by the confluence of Caribs, Arawaks, and enslaved Africans, they presented sustainable management projects for mangroves, wetlands, and fishing zones based on ancestral knowledge of species reproduction cycles.

“We have been preventing species from dying so that we can continue to coexist with them,” said Gregoria Jiménez, president of the Organization for Ethnic Community Development (ODECO).

Their work is part of what the congress called OECMs, Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures: territories that are conserved through the sustainable management of those who inhabit them, outside any formal protection framework. By 2030, the global target is to protect 30% of the planet. Much of that count is already being carried by communities that have never received official recognition or direct funding for doing it.

What unites us

At the close of the congress, IUCN President Razan Al Mubarak spoke of a moment of paradox. Knowledge about the importance of nature has never been deeper, and the loss of biodiversity has never been faster. That paradox has a human cost. In 2023 alone, 177 environmental defenders were killed around the world, and 36 percent of them were Indigenous, according to Global Witness. “The peoples who protect the most intact ecosystems on the planet are also the most criminalized, displaced, and dispossessed,” said Alessandra Yupanqui, Andean activist and editor-in-chief of Sapiens, who participated as a speaker at the congress.

Nature does not need us to save it. It has been reorganizing itself for millions of years without us, surviving mass extinctions, rebuilding entire ecosystems. What is at stake is not the planet. It is our capacity to remain part of it. And for that, it seems, we first need to listen to those who never stopped being so.