Southern Africa contains more than 70% of the continent’s locally adapted cattle, goat and sheep breeds, according to the review. Smallholder and communal production systems maintain much of this diversity, including Sanga-type cattle such as Nguni, Tuli, Barotse, Tswana, Tonga and Mashona, along with zebu breeds including Malawi Zebu and Angoni. These animals have been shaped by generations of environmental pressures and human management, and many display tolerance to heat, drought, trypanosomiasis or low-input conditions. The review reports that 23% of indigenous breeds in the region are classified as at risk of extinction, while the Hottentot, White Woolled Tswana and Namaqua Afrikaner sheep have disappeared.

Indigenous knowledge systems encompass oral and practical knowledge developed through sustained interaction with livestock and the environment. They include criteria for choosing breeding animals, methods of controlling reproduction, ethnoveterinary treatments, seasonal movement of herds, management of grazing areas and water, and customary institutions that regulate ownership, inheritance, sale and ceremonial use. In this sense, knowledge transmission can function as a decentralized selection system operating alongside formal breeding programmes. The review nevertheless separates three outcomes that are often conflated: maintaining recognizable breed characteristics, preserving genome-wide genetic diversity, and retaining variants associated with adaptive traits such as disease resistance or heat tolerance. A practice that preserves a visible trait does not automatically protect diversity elsewhere in the genome.

Coat colour is among the most frequently documented selection preferences. Certain spotted or multicoloured Nguni cattle, known as ibona, have ritual and marriage-related significance in South Africa and Eswatini, while herders in other communities associate particular colours and body characteristics with temperament, fertility, heat tolerance or drought resilience. Tswana herders reportedly describe a preferred breeding bull as one that “walks well and eats little,” while Nguni women evaluate breeding females through udder shape, milk let-down and calf development. These observations show that herders use detailed phenotypic judgments, but the review says genomic evidence has not established whether such preferences preserve adaptive variants, narrow genetic variation, or do both.

Community institutions may also influence how breeding animals move among households. In the mafisa livestock-loaning system of Botswana and Zimbabwe, a better-resourced patron places cattle with a poorer household, which receives milk, draught power and manure while the patron retains breeding rights over offspring. The arrangement is described as dispersing breeding animals across different homesteads, potentially buffering localized disease or drought losses and spreading genetic material. Bull rotation and reciprocal bull borrowing in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and northern Namibia may limit the reproductive dominance of a single sire. Customary restrictions on selling proven breeding females, matrilineal inheritance and the designation of certain animals for ceremonial obligations may also keep breeding stock within community groups. However, most of these proposed conservation effects are supported by ethnographic or indirect population evidence rather than pedigrees, genotyping or long-term measurements of inbreeding.

Animal-health knowledge provides another possible pathway. Where veterinary services are distant or expensive, herders use plant-based treatments for ticks, intestinal parasites, wounds and reproductive conditions. The literature reviewed includes Aloe species, Nicotiana tabacum, Cissus quadrangularis, Sclerocarya birrea and Kigelia africana. Laboratory studies have reported anti-inflammatory, antibacterial or wound-healing activity for some preparations, including Aloe marlothii and Kigelia africana. Yet each step from documented remedy to lower mortality, herd survival and genetic conservation has weaker support than the preceding one. The review does not claim that ethnoveterinary medicine has been shown to preserve genetic diversity. It instead identifies herd survival as a plausible, incompletely tested benefit and notes that deforestation and urban expansion are reducing access to medicinal plants.

Formal conservation programmes produced a mixed contrast in the evidence. Zimbabwe’s community-based breeding programmes were designed around existing collective selection, seasonal mating management and community assessment of breeding females, while external support focused on veterinary assistance and records. Genetic monitoring in Matabeleland South found higher heterozygosity in Nguni and Mashona herds in programme villages than in unorganised communal herds, and participating households reported better calf survival and body condition at weaning. This was among the review’s few cases pairing a genetic outcome with an institutional account, but it remained observational. By contrast, Botswana’s veterinary cordon fence, introduced without Tswana pastoralist participation, disrupted historical movement and bull-rotation practices. Genetic studies reported greater population subdivision, smaller effective population sizes and higher homozygosity in extensively fenced areas, patterns consistent with reduced gene flow but insufficient to establish a direct causal chain.

Molecular surveys also revealed notable differences between village-managed and commercial populations. A study of Nguni ecotypes reported heterozygosity of 69–72%, an average of 6.0–6.9 alleles per locus and an inbreeding coefficient of 0.01. Village chickens managed under traditional free-range systems in Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa showed lower linkage disequilibrium and more distinct regional genetic patterns than flocks in ex situ programmes. In South African pigs, an analysis of genetic variance partitioned approximately 35.5% within populations and 62.4% among groups in the village-managed sample, compared with 76.4% within populations and 5.4% among groups in the commercial sample. These are population-structure measures rather than direct percentages of genetic diversity, and the review emphasizes that they remain associations with community management rather than proof of its effect.

Three gaps stand out. First, genomic studies have concentrated more on phylogenies and population structure than on the functional targets recognized by herders. The authors call for participatory genome-wide association studies using community-defined phenotypes and for longitudinal genotyping of IKS-managed and commercially managed herds. Second, women’s knowledge of small ruminants and indigenous poultry is systematically under-documented, even though women often manage these species, make breeding decisions and maintain matrilineally inherited lineages. Third, almost no study follows herds over time while recording both changing knowledge practices and genetic outcomes. The proposed solution is a network of community genomics sentinel sites, with baseline genotyping, repeated sampling about five years apart and concurrent mapping of customary practices. Such designs could test whether bull rotation, livestock loaning or other practices change heterozygosity, allelic richness and inbreeding over time.

The review recommends documenting community-defined traits as complementary data in national inventories, creating stronger research consent and benefit-sharing arrangements, and revising regional livestock policy to include indigenous knowledge where evidence supports it. It also cautions that indigenous systems are not uniformly beneficial: selection for ceremonial traits can narrow diversity, inheritance rules can restrict gene flow, and externally imposed conservation policies can disrupt effective community institutions. The central conclusion is therefore measured rather than promotional. Indigenous knowledge appears to be a widespread and potentially consequential component of in situ conservation in Southern Africa, but genomic validation, long-term herd monitoring and fuller recognition of women’s management knowledge are needed before its conservation effects can be distinguished from those of other features of communal farming systems.

Subject of Research: Review of indigenous knowledge systems and animal genetic resource conservation in Southern Africa

Article Title: The role of indigenous knowledge systems in conserving animal genetic resource biodiversity in Southern Africa: a review

Article References: Nhara, R. B., Karuma, P. G., Gobvu, V., Mvududu, S. M., Charambira, T., Hodzi, P., Chigede, N., & Baloyi, J. J. (2026). The role of indigenous knowledge systems in conserving animal genetic resource biodiversity in Southern Africa: a review. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 7, Article 1946724. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1946724

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1946724

Keywords: indigenous knowledge, animal genetic resources, livestock conservation, genetic diversity, Southern Africa, community breeding, ethnoveterinary medicine, in situ conservation, food security, climate adaptation, role, indigenous

Dung beetles, the coprophagous members of the subfamilies Scarabaeinae, Geotrupinae, and Aphodiinae, are among the most ecologically significant yet underappreciated insects in terrestrial ecosystems. Through the burial of dung, they recycle nutrients, improve soil structure, disperse seeds, and suppress parasite populations that would otherwise build up around vertebrate droppings. They are also exceptionally sensitive to environmental change, which makes them reliable bioindicators for monitoring habitat disturbance and climate impacts. Despite these services, conservation attention for dung beetles and many other insect groups remains strikingly low compared with charismatic vertebrates. The Oaxaca project set out to address this gap at multiple levels: describing new species, mapping ecological niches, modeling how distributions might shift under climate change, and building the complementary community data needed to understand these insects across a complex mountainous landscape.

Oaxaca presents a distinctive institutional challenge for field biologists. Most of the land is communally owned by Indigenous communities, which means that access cannot be obtained through the standardized permit applications, institutional affiliations, and predefined research guidelines that govern work in federally administered Natural Protected Areas. Instead, researchers must present their proposals formally to local authorities, engage in dialogue, and secure permission through trust and respect. The team describes how this process, while less predictable than bureaucratic permitting, creates something the regulatory route rarely does: a personal, long-term relationship between researchers and the people who live with the biodiversity being studied. The researchers also committed to delivering results back to the communities, a promise that shaped the entire architecture of the project and ultimately produced the outreach collections at the heart of the new paper.

The depth of local knowledge became apparent early. In a first meeting with the comisariado, the community authority, the researchers encountered an encyclopedic command of the natural history of the sacred mountain Zempoaltépetl, so extensive that it prompted reflection on what science might still be missing. In informal conversations, community members explained how they read environmental cues, such as the presence or behavior of particular animals, to time the planting and growing of food. These encounters convinced the team to integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Local Ecological Knowledge, known as TEK and LEK, into the research design rather than simply extracting data. TEK and LEK represent generations of accumulated understanding of ecosystems, species, and natural processes, and they are woven into cosmovisions, practices, and language. The researchers framed their work explicitly as co-learning, aiming for mutual education rather than a one-directional transfer of facts.

The methodology behind the outreach collections was meticulous. All specimens collected during standardized surveys in mountain regions including San Pablo Etla, Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, San José del Pacífico, San Esteban Río Hondo, San Esteban Atatlahuca, Huajuapan de León, and San Luis Amatlán were brought to the laboratory at Instituto de Ecología A.C. in Xalapa, Veracruz, where they were pinned and identified to species level. Representative specimens from each site were then curated into outreach collections, labeled with full location and date data like any scientific specimen, but with an added layer: local names and contextual information designed to engage the communities where the insects were found. The remaining vouchers were deposited in major institutional collections in Mexico, Canada, and Brazil, ensuring the scientific record remained intact while the outreach materials traveled a different path.

In workshops, three kinds of drawers were deployed. The first showcased the most recognizable insect orders and families, including butterflies and moths, bees, dragonflies and damselflies, mantises, and scarab beetles, giving participants familiar anchors before the material turned specialized. The second and third focused on dung beetles at the state and local levels respectively, allowing participants to see both regional diversity and the species living on their own land. Digital graphics, infographics featuring newly described species, and a series of six posters on dung beetle ecology supplemented the physical specimens. The format was deliberately interactive: researchers shared information about reproductive biology, ecosystem services, taxonomy, and curation, then asked attendees about common names, habitats, diets, and seasonal patterns, treating community members as experts in their own right rather than as an audience.

The linguistic findings illustrate why this exchange matters scientifically. In Tu’un Savi, the Mixtec language, dung beetles are called timirru shini ti yivi; in Ayuujk, the Mixe language, tsëkë ti’ny yumpë. Both names describe the action of pushing or carrying a ball of dung with the head, a precise behavioral observation embedded in the vocabulary itself. In Didze, the Zapotec language, no specific term for dung beetles emerged, but the word mingut refers generically to members of Scarabaeoidea. Horned beetles are often named toritos, little bulls, a category that can span several beetle families. Communities consistently associated dung beetles with the rainy season and forested areas and knew their burial behavior, while tunnel construction and larval stages were less familiar. Notably, the researchers found no evidence that dung beetles hold sacred or cultural significance in these communities, likely because, unlike fungi or agave, they are not a managed or used resource. Documenting these names required care: behavioral explanations of dung feeding proved essential for accurate identification, since verbal descriptions or pinned specimens alone often led to misidentifications, and community members verified spellings and translations to ensure respectful, accurate representation.

The outcomes extended well beyond nomenclature. Each community received a reference collection for its local library, along with posters, brochures, and educational materials, ensuring the knowledge remained accessible after the researchers left. Hands-on workshops for undergraduate students covered specimen preparation and species identification, and the team participated in local events ranging from a regional identity forum to a mushroom fair and a community assembly. Local teachers observed that students gained knowledge not typically covered in school curricula. An open communication channel through email and WhatsApp has persisted: students and teachers send photographs of insects and arachnids for identification, high school students ask about universities and scholarships, and community members request advice on land management, medicinal plants, and pest control. Community members also showed strong interest in recording species found on their lands, producing local checklists that remain in community libraries.

The researchers are candid about the challenges. Building trust takes time, which sits uneasily with academic pressures to publish and meet deadlines. Communities may deny access to their territories, local customs may make scheduling difficult, and researchers must adapt to the community’s agenda rather than the reverse, accepting that some objectives requiring broad participation may not be achieved. When no mutually beneficial agreement can be reached, the team insists, researchers must respect that decision and never enter a territory without explicit permission. The study also acknowledges the cultural and spiritual significance of sacred sites, which must be recognized as part of any access agreement. These constraints are presented not as obstacles to science but as conditions for doing it well in communally owned landscapes.

The broader lesson is one the authors hope will spread through biodiversity research generally. Outreach collections, they argue, are more than educational tools; they are shared spaces where scientific and cultural knowledge meet on equal terms. By integrating TEK and LEK into ecological research and respecting the agency of Indigenous communities, collections that once sat behind museum glass become connectors, strengthening the link between research and the people who steward the land it depends on. For a field facing an insect biodiversity crisis and shrinking public trust, the Oaxaca model offers a concrete, replicable template: rigorous taxonomy and community reciprocity are not competing priorities but mutually reinforcing ones, and the future of ecological science may depend on practicing both at once.

Subject of Research: Community-based entomological outreach integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge with dung beetle research in Oaxaca, Mexico

Article Title: From collections to connections: empowering communities through entomological outreach

Article References: Cruz-García, B. J., Sandoval, O., Cruz-García, E. J., Escobar-Hernández, F., & Arriaga-Jiménez, A. (2025). From collections to connections: empowering communities through entomological outreach. Natural History Collections and Museomics, 2, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.3897/nhcm.2.147417

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nhcm.2.147417

Keywords: dung beetles, entomology, Oaxaca, Indigenous knowledge, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, outreach collections, knowledge exchange, biodiversity conservation, community engagement, science communication, Mexico, ethnobiology

The stakes could hardly be higher. Oceans host most of the planet’s biodiversity, yet they are experiencing significant degradation and species loss. International frameworks such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 and the Convention on Biological Diversity have pushed countries to designate ever-larger swaths of ocean as protected. Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, nations have committed to effectively conserving at least 30 percent of all ecosystems by 2030, and instruments like the EU Biodiversity Strategy and the BBNJ Agreement are driving a rapid expansion of MPAs worldwide. Currently, only about 3.4 to 5 percent of the global ocean is protected, meaning the pace of designation must accelerate dramatically to meet global targets.

But designation alone, the review emphasizes, is not enough. Drawing on the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11, the authors note that effective and equitable governance is essential for protected areas to function. A 2018 analysis of 27 MPA sites worldwide found that inadequate stakeholder engagement was the most critical factor influencing MPA success or failure. Two of the six factors consistently linked to MPA effectiveness are community engagement and governance, according to earlier research cited in the review. When communities are excluded from decisions about conservation goals, boundaries, and rules, the result is often conflict, low compliance, and what conservation scientists call paper parks: areas that exist on maps but fail to protect anything in the water.

To bring order to a fragmented literature, the researchers conducted a systematic review guided by the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, searching Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science for peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2025. After importing 961 articles into the screening software Covidence and removing 446 duplicates, the team retained 68 studies for detailed analysis using Atlas.ti 25 software. The analysis was structured around the Stakeholder Participation Assessment Framework, or SPAF, a tool designed to evaluate participation in marine spatial planning and MPAs across four dimensions: why people participate, who participates, when they participate, and how participation is facilitated. The team applied both deductive coding based on SPAF dimensions and inductive coding for themes that emerged from the data itself.

The results reveal a striking asymmetry between the stated motivations for community participation and the actual depth of engagement. The dominant drivers fall into three conceptual perspectives: management, ethical, and social learning. Ethical motivations emerged as the most dominant overall, with participation promoted to capture local views, traditions, and indigenous knowledge, foster ownership of MPAs, empower local people through recognition of their rights, and minimize negative impacts on livelihoods. Management-oriented motivations included helping enforce MPA regulations, increasing awareness and positive attitudes toward conservation goals, gathering data for management purposes, and enabling the state to achieve conservation objectives. Social learning motivations emphasized knowledge exchange, collective learning, and capacity development. Legal compliance was also a recurring driver, cited in seven of the reviewed studies.

Yet the practice often falls short of the principle. The review found that community engagement in many MPAs remains passive and serves primarily as a tick-box exercise. Nearly half of the participatory methods identified across the 41 MPA sites were passive, meaning communities received information from authorities without any opportunity to provide input in return. Public hearings, citizen science, biodiversity monitoring, and written public submissions were the most popular engagement methods, but the number of methods used declines rapidly as one moves toward strategies that promote higher levels of engagement. Most MPAs relied on informative methods such as public hearings, radio interviews, and media awareness tools, followed by consultative methods like community committees and workshops that allow limited two-way exchange. Notably, zero publications in the review documented genuine empowerment, the highest rung on the participation ladder, where communities hold final decision-making authority.

The timing of engagement matters as much as the method. The review found that communities are mainly engaged during park designation and establishment, and during operations and administration, when support for enforcement is needed, rather than during the conception and planning stages when fundamental decisions about conservation goals, boundaries, and governance systems are first made. Only nine of the 41 MPAs examined, including the Sian Ka’an and Banco Chinchorro Biosphere Reserves in Mexico, the Soufriere Marine Management Area in Saint Lucia, and several locally managed areas in Myanmar, engaged communities across all three governance stages. This pattern suggests that participation is often treated as an event rather than a continuous process, undermining the social capital and trust built during early planning phases.

Who gets engaged is equally revealing. The community emerged as the most engaged group, appearing in 36 of the 68 reviewed articles, followed by fishers and anglers in 34 articles, with artisanal fishers more dominant than recreational ones. But many studies treated the community as a homogeneous category without distinguishing the different stakeholder groups within it. Only one reviewed article reported youth participation in marine park processes, and women were similarly represented in just one study. Small-scale business operators and secondary value-chain actors such as fish processors, brokers, and traders were also largely absent, despite their dependence on marine resources. The authors argue that this lack of a difference approach, whereby diverse stakeholder identities, interests, and vulnerabilities are explicitly recognized, can marginalize groups such as women, people with disabilities, and indigenous communities whose voices are often disregarded in conservation decision-making.

The review also documented persistent structural barriers. Limited community representation, weak legislative support, inadequate political commitment, limited funding for participatory governance, and political interference all constrain meaningful engagement. Participation limitations were most pronounced in operational and managerial aspects of MPAs, creating an imbalance between participatory rhetoric and communities’ actual involvement in core governance structures. In one illustrative case, fishers in Portugal’s Litoral Norte MPA reported that they were not properly consulted before the area’s designation and that the public hearings organized by managers during implementation were largely symbolic, held only to meet formal requirements. Such experiences, the authors note, can reinforce existing inequalities rather than redistribute power.

The researchers recommend that MPA authorities adopt stakeholder analysis, ideally using an intersectional approach that recognizes overlapping identities, interests, and vulnerabilities, to ensure that participation processes are inclusive and representative rather than relying on voluntary participation and self-selection. They also call for collaborative, empowering participatory models that institutionalize co-management arrangements, with communities involved in decision-making, enforcement, and monitoring. Marine citizen science, they argue, can equip communities with skills in biodiversity monitoring, fisheries assessments, and marine pollution tracking, building a new generation of citizen scientists. Ultimately, the authors conclude that MPA authorities should work with academia and other key stakeholders to develop, refine, and reform public engagement practices if global conservation goals, from the 30 by 30 target to the health of coastal livelihoods worldwide, are to be met.

Subject of Research: Community participation and stakeholder engagement in marine protected area governance

Article Title: Motivations for community participation in marine protected areas governance systems

Article References: Mutanda, G. W., & Nhamo, G. (2026). Motivations for community participation in marine protected areas governance systems. Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability, 4, Article 1808210. https://doi.org/10.3389/focsu.2026.1808210

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/focsu.2026.1808210

Keywords: marine protected areas, community participation, stakeholder engagement, marine governance, SPAF, PRISMA systematic review, ocean conservation, co-management, indigenous knowledge, citizen science, biodiversity targets, coastal communities

The review, guided by the PRISMA 2020 framework and spanning literature from 1900 to 2025, examined how traditional water knowledge, or TWK, is woven into, or more often left out of, the wildlife and water policies of SADC countries. TWK is defined as the profound, inherited understanding that indigenous peoples hold of natural processes, rooted in their ecological dependence on hydrological cycles and their spiritual and cultural connections to water. It differs from the broader concept of traditional ecological knowledge by centering specifically on hydrological dynamics, waterscape management, and aquatic spiritual values. The review found that while TWK operates as a powerful informal conservation mechanism across the region, it remains poorly conceptualized and inconsistently covered in formal policy documents.

The crocodile itself occupies a paradoxical position in Southern African societies. On the IUCN Red List, the species is classified as of Least Concern, and as an apex predator it performs vital ecosystem clean-up roles in the region’s wetlands. Yet the review documents how traditional uses of crocodile parts, from eyes, tail, head, and scales to gall bladder, belly skins, liver, and bile duct secretions, constitute what the author calls an existential threat through ethnozoological medicinal practices. These uses are grounded in what ethnobiologists describe as symbolic resonance reasoning, the belief that crocodile parts embody survival, longevity, resilience, and physical prowess, and can restore human strength, overcome fear, or treat debilitating conditions. The practice operates alongside humoral principles that classify foods and medicines into opposing thermal or symbolic qualities, where health requires a dynamic equilibrium between hot and cold states.

The review’s analysis of use patterns across SADC countries reveals a striking homogeneity. Using a Use Value Index adapted from ethnobotanical research, the study found nearly ninety percent similarity in how crocodile parts are used across the region. Crocodile oils and fat treat ailments including asthma, skin ulcers, rheumatism, burns, chest and respiratory issues, and ringworm in Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Claws and teeth serve as protective amulets against physical attacks and witchcraft in Namibia, Mozambique, Lesotho, Eswatini, South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia. Gallbladder and gallstones are used by traditional healers for ear and lung infections and as an antidote to poison. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, belly skin is used for protection against lightning strikes. Crocodile meat, especially from juveniles, is consumed in Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe to enhance longevity and improve health. Teeth and skin are crafted into necklaces, sandals, bags, and belts in Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia.

Yet the same cultural framework that drives demand for crocodile parts also protects the species in profound ways. In Madagascar, cultural taboos known as fady designate crocodile habitats as sacred, restricting hunting and fostering coexistence. In Zimbabwe, the crocodile serves as a totem for the BaTonga people, whose clan name Munkuli infers symbolic strength, cunning, and endurance. In Lesotho, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, crocodile imagery signifies chiefly authority and power. In Lesotho, Eswatini, and South Africa, crocodiles are associated with the protection of burial sites, with the belief that ancestral spirits may take the form of a crocodile to guard the deceased. Communities across the region use the presence of crocodiles as bio-indicators of aquatic ecosystem health and fish abundance, inadvertently enhancing conservation. The review characterizes these belief systems as soft conservation tools that regulate resource use, protect nesting sites, and enforce prohibitions on killing.

The policy landscape, however, tells a different story. The foundational legal instrument for wildlife conservation in the region is the SADC Protocol on Wildlife Conservation and Law Enforcement of 1999, which promotes sustainable use and harmonizes national legal instruments. The Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses in the SADC of 2000 governs water management across the region. Yet the review found that TWK is poorly integrated into both frameworks. Countries with well-developed crocodile ranching industries tend to have fair to excellent coverage of TWK in their policies, while those with poorly developed ranching sectors show poor or negligible coverage. An exception is Mauritius, where a remnant captive population of approximately 2,500 crocodiles is well protected for tourism purposes despite the absence of wild populations.

The review identifies a complex web of barriers to integrating TWK into formal conservation. Legal recognition gaps, differing worldviews between formal science and indigenous practices, fragmented administrative bodies, and centralized authorities that block multi-level knowledge transfer all impede inclusion. The systemic privilege granted to modern Western science over unquantified indigenous knowledge-based findings results in exclusion or piecemeal inclusion of TWK across the region. Social Network Analysis of crocodile conservation governance reveals information bottlenecks where scientific data on population dynamics remain trapped within centralized research institutions, failing to reach fringe communities. Power asymmetries mean that wildlife agencies and commercial ranching operators monopolize decision-making while communities most affected by human-crocodile conflict occupy peripheral positions with low bargaining power.

Crocodile ranching presents its own contradictions. The practice, which involves removing juveniles or eggs from the wild for regulated hatching in commercial facilities, is effective at sustaining populations but relies on wild egg collection that negates its overall conservation contribution. Captive crocodiles do not contribute meaningfully to wild populations in countries such as Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Namibia. However, ranching has created what the review describes as subsidized wild security, with some revenue from crocodile farms actively funding anti-poaching patrols and population surveys that state agencies cannot otherwise afford. The review notes that countries with highly developed ranching operations, including Namibia, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, show high inclusion levels of crocodile aspects in wildlife policies, though this does not necessarily translate into high inclusion levels for TWK.

Looking forward, the review proposes integrating geospatial techniques and citizen science with TWK as a holistic framework for crocodile conservation. This includes tracking local ecological indicators, training local elders and residents to record water table levels, flow rates, and pollution using generational place-based observation methods, and establishing partnerships with traditional leaders to enforce seasonal conservation rules and sacred riverbank protections. The author cautions that formalizing TWK carries risks including cultural commodification, bureaucratic rigidity, and epistemic marginalization, and must be done carefully to avoid empowering elite groups over others. The review also highlights emerging pollution threats, noting that crocodiles as apex indicators of watershed health show persistent endocrine-disrupting chemicals in their tissues and bioaccumulating heavy metals that lead to reproductive organ size reduction and declining juvenile recruitment rates.

The broader implications extend beyond a single species. The review argues that policy developers must balance cultural valuation with conservation realities, noting that skewed analysis toward modern conservation science echoes colonial-era exclusions of indigenous rights. The way forward, the author suggests, lies in community-based frameworks that align protection goals with local governance, where indigenous communities living alongside crocodiles are integrated into co-management rather than perceiving wildlife policies negatively. Exploring captive breeding or ethical substitution to satisfy traditional medicinal demands without depleting wild stocks offers a more nuanced long-term solution. As anthropogenic pressures intensify across Southern African wetlands, the review makes clear that the fate of the Nile crocodile will depend not only on scientific monitoring and legal protection, but on whether the ancient knowledge systems that have coexisted with these apex predators for centuries can be formally recognized before they disappear.

Subject of Research: Integration of traditional water knowledge into Nile crocodile conservation policy in Southern Africa

Article Title: Traditional water knowledge and Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) conservation in Southern Africa: a systematic review of policy integration, institutional gaps, cultural uses, and barriers

Article References: Utete, B. (2026). Traditional water knowledge and Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) conservation in Southern Africa: a systematic review of policy integration, institutional gaps, cultural uses, and barriers. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 7, Article 1910283. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1910283

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1910283

Keywords: Nile crocodile, traditional water knowledge, Southern Africa, SADC, wildlife policy, ethnozoology, crocodile ranching, human-wildlife conflict, indigenous knowledge, wetland conservation, PRISMA review, citizen science

The collection stems from a collaboration between the Joint Program Clean Energy Transition for a Sustainable Society (e3s) of the European Energy Research Alliance and Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy. It spans original research, reviews, and policy and practice analyses, drawing on disciplinary traditions as varied as behavioral economics, text mining, Indigenous studies and socio-technical transition theory. What emerges is not a single blueprint but a multidimensional framework: justice in decarbonization is treated not as a technical prerequisite for cutting emissions but as a normative and political objective in its own right—one with real consequences for how policies are experienced and whether they endure.

One cluster of studies focuses on participatory governance and democratic engagement. Kambo and colleagues demonstrate how a structured deliberative process can bridge the gap between citizens, policymakers and industry actors in shaping Australia’s future energy and fuel systems. Using the “diamond of participatory decision-making” framework, their analysis reveals that while considerable alignment exists across cohorts on the broad direction of a low-carbon future, divergences surface around the social and environmental justice dimensions of specific technology choices—including hydrogen and biogas. Navigating those divergences, the authors argue, requires innovative governance mechanisms rather than simple majority rule. In a complementary contribution, Kunlere and Shah challenge the simplistic binaries that dominate public debates on renewable energy. Their PARO framework categorizes public responses to energy injustice across a spectrum of positions that conventional “supporter versus opponent” dichotomies cannot capture, offering a more granular analytical lens for diagnosing and addressing public resistance. Both studies make one thing clear: how decisions are made matters as much as what is decided—a lesson that is easy to articulate and difficult to institutionalize.

A second cluster turns to sustainable energy systems and socio-technical transitions. Singh and Clough critically interrogate the global bioenergy system, challenging the widespread assumption that bioenergy is inherently carbon-neutral or renewable. Through causal loop analysis, they examine how current production regimes can shift negative social and ecological impacts—including threats to food security, land use change and biodiversity loss—from consumer to producer regions. Their work highlights the uneven distribution of burdens that can arise within particular configurations of globalized bioenergy production and trade. Oduro and Taylor, drawing on expert interviews from industry, academia and policy, map the challenges facing energy networks in Great Britain during decarbonization. Their findings reveal broad agreement on electrification and decentralization, yet deep uncertainty about the future role of gaseous fuels, particularly hydrogen. They also identify a regulatory gap: existing structures may be too rigid and slow-moving to enable networks to drive—rather than impede—the net-zero transition. Soloviy and colleagues expand the debate further by conceptualizing what they call the “triple transition,” linking green, digital and just transitions. Drawing on 28 real-world case examples and five distinct analytical perspectives, their interdisciplinary review argues that tensions between these three policy streams are not merely obstacles to be managed but productive sites of institutional learning if properly engaged.

A third cluster centers on Indigenous knowledge, justice and inclusion. Oliveira and colleagues provide a compelling examination of Sámi perspectives on reindeer herding and energy transition policies in Norway. Through semi-structured interviews with Sámi herders, the authors document how wind turbine development encroaches on grazing lands and disrupts the economic, social and cultural fabric of reindeer herding communities. Crucially, the article does not merely catalog grievances; it also explores the hesitance many Indigenous communities feel toward integrating their Traditional Ecological Knowledge into mainstream transition frameworks, given past experiences of co-optation and tokenism. This nuance—that recognition justice requires more than a formal invitation and demands genuine epistemic respect—is an important contribution. It reminds readers that just transitions cannot be reduced to technological substitution; they must also confront colonial legacies and create institutional space for diverse knowledge systems.

A fourth cluster addresses social vulnerability and climate equity through two complementary scales. Moleskis and colleagues tackle one of the most pressing social dimensions of Europe’s green transition: the unequal capacity of households to access decarbonization support. Framed around the EU Social Climate Fund and illustrated through the case of Cyprus, the authors draw on behavioral science to identify cognitive barriers—such as status quo bias, present bias and information overload—as well as structural barriers including digital exclusion and administrative complexity that prevent energy-poor households from claiming available support. Their policy recommendations move beyond standard subsidy design toward a more human-centered, trust-based approach. Working at the global level, Ayompe examines how distributive, procedural and recognition-based justice have been integrated—or neglected—in international climate governance. The article argues that colonial legacies continue to shape governance structures in ways that systematically exclude the communities most affected by climate change, and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration spanning public health, urban planning and environmental protection.

A fifth and final cluster highlights the cultural and urban dimensions of sustainability transitions. Costanzo and Alderuccio investigate how culture, heritage and the creative industries are being integrated into urban climate-neutrality strategies across European cities. Focusing on Climate City Contracts produced under the EU’s 100 Mission Cities program, the authors apply a text mining methodology to detect the presence—or absence—of New European Bauhaus principles in these planning documents. Their findings reveal that cultural participation is slowly being acknowledged as a driver of climate action, with potential contributions to social cohesion, behavioral change and community-led urban renewal. Methodologically, the article breaks new ground by developing a human-annotated corpus designed to train future AI models capable of analyzing cultural-climate linkages at scale, broadening the understanding of just transitions beyond infrastructure and economics.

Reading across the nine articles, four cross-cutting themes stand out. First, participation matters, but depth counts: whether through deliberative citizen panels, Indigenous consultation processes or community-based climate planning, the legitimacy of sustainability transitions depends on whose voices are genuinely heard and whose knowledge is meaningfully incorporated. Several studies show that participatory processes can remain superficial if institutional follow-through is absent. Second, transitions are inherently systemic and produce feedback effects that extend across sectors, scales and geographies; technological shifts in energy systems interact with regulatory structures, supply chains, cultural identities and global inequalities in ways that can produce new injustices even as they address old ones. Third, justice must be understood in both procedural and distributive terms, and the two cannot be traded off against each other—policies that achieve technically equitable outcomes through opaque or exclusionary processes will struggle to secure the social license they require. Fourth, different kinds of knowledge—scientific, local, Indigenous and experiential—are not competing claims to be arbitrated but complementary resources that policy needs to learn to use together.

Importantly, the collection also demonstrates that tensions within sustainability transitions should not be viewed solely as obstacles. Divergences between stakeholders, conflicts over land use, disagreements regarding technology pathways and competing policy priorities all reveal the complexity of transforming societies. Yet these tensions can also become productive spaces for democratic negotiation, innovation and institutional learning. The challenge for policymakers, researchers and practitioners is therefore not to eliminate disagreement but to create governance structures that can handle complexity while maintaining fairness and legitimacy. The editors also identify a set of research gaps that future work should prioritize: most contributions focus on Europe, North America and Australia, leaving the just transition experiences of communities in the Global South—where climate vulnerability is highest and adaptive capacity often lowest—underrepresented. The role of gender in shaping both exposure to transition risks and access to transition benefits is raised but remains undertheorized. The political economy of transition, including the influence of fossil fuel incumbents, financial flows and trade regimes on the pace and direction of change, is notably absent. Methodologically, the field would benefit from longitudinal studies able to track whether participatory processes translate into durable policy change over time, and from closer examination of implementation fidelity—whether well-designed interventions are actually delivered equitably on the ground. Naming these gaps, the editors stress, is not a criticism of the contributions collected here but an invitation for the next wave of just transition research to take them on.

At a time when there is serious concern that climate targets and their implementation remain insufficient relative to the pace and scale of emissions reductions required, just transition research faces the challenge of demonstrating how greater attention to fairness can contribute to the social acceptability and political legitimacy of decarbonization pathways. The nine studies collected here range from Norwegian reindeer pastures and Australian deliberative panels to EU urban climate contracts and global bioenergy supply chains. They provide critical and diverse guidance for governments, industries, communities and scholars seeking to align decarbonization with social inclusion and democratic accountability. Viewed through this lens, the Research Topic shows that a just transition cannot be assessed on technical performance alone: the question of who bears the costs and who shares the benefits is political and deserves explicit attention. Just transition scholars therefore face a continuing task—to demonstrate how attention to distribution, participation, recognition and legitimacy can contribute to rapid and effective decarbonization while addressing its social consequences, at a moment when the gap between policy ambition and lived social reality remains substantial.

Subject of Research: Just transition research on equity, participation, governance and legitimacy in decarbonization

Article Title: Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future

Article References: Paier, M., Sari, R., Pellegrini-Masini, G., Sciullo, A., Menon, M., & Carley, S. (2026). Editorial: Advancing the just transition: navigating towards a sustainable future. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1936488. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1936488

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1936488

Keywords: just transition, energy justice, decarbonization, participatory governance, Indigenous knowledge, energy poverty, socio-technical transitions, climate equity, bioenergy, urban climate policy, Editorial, Advancing

The core argument is deceptively simple. Sustainability in food systems increasingly depends on governance models that integrate the environmental, social, and cultural needs of each territory, and community-based governments are uniquely positioned to deliver that integration. Drawing on their own regulatory frameworks and principles of self-determination, these governments have developed knowledge and practices to manage land, natural resources, and food production in ways that remain aligned with local ecosystems and cultural identity. Yet the editorial is blunt about the obstacles: a lack of legal recognition, insufficient institutional support, and weak integration into public policy continue to cap the potential of these governance forms, leaving some of the most adaptive food systems in the world structurally underpowered.

The 16 studies gathered under the Research Topic span continents and scales, from participatory citizen science in Indigenous communities to evolutionary game models of rice-crayfish co-culture in China. One of the most technically rich contributions, by Sarapura-Escobar and colleagues, examines how participatory citizen science can support Indigenous food sovereignty and relational approaches to One Health. The study highlights community gardens, seed saving, local knowledge, and collaborative research as mechanisms that strengthen relationships among people, land, animals, and food while reinforcing cultural continuity and community self-determination. In effect, the research reframes citizen science not as data extraction but as a governance practice in its own right.

Seed systems emerge as another critical frontier. Andersen and colleagues analyzed community seed banks across Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nepal, finding that locally managed seed systems improve access to climate-adapted varieties, strengthen farmer capacities, and promote seed exchange networks that function as living repositories of agrobiodiversity. But the evidence also exposes the fragility of these institutions: the authors identify institutional, technical, and genetic challenges that limit long-term expansion, a reminder that community innovation without structural support can plateau even when it demonstrably works.

Digital governance offers a contrasting pathway. A study by Zuo uses evolutionary game analysis to show that the sustainable transition of rice-crayfish co-culture systems depends on regulation, agricultural extension services, and data-based financial support operating in synergy to align the interests of governments, financial institutions, and small-scale producers. The modeling suggests that no single lever is sufficient; sustainability gains materialize only when these mechanisms move together, and even then the analysis stresses that intensification must not compromise the food-producing function of rice cultivation itself. Related work by Yang and colleagues in Guiyang, China, extends the digital theme to retail, showing that consumer satisfaction, delivery speed, purchasing experience, and product quality data can improve inventory management, reduce waste, and increase the efficiency of fresh food distribution.

Several contributions probe the social architecture of food systems with unusual granularity. Xu and colleagues used micro-level evidence from rural China to ask whether married women’s labor force participation can reduce consumption gaps among rural households, identifying income, social capital, and shifting consumption preferences as key mechanisms. Crucially, the benefits are conditional: long working hours and extended commuting can erode them by increasing women’s time burdens and reducing their capacity for care and household management. In Italy, Briamonte and colleagues analyzed food districts as instruments of multi-level governance, showing that their effectiveness hinges on coordinating national and regional regulations, local participation, institutional recognition, and monitoring mechanisms. And in disaster-prone areas, Hermiatin and colleagues proposed a resilience-oriented framework for food hubs, arguing that these organizations can serve both commercial and humanitarian functions by combining food distribution, local coordination, and emergency response capacities built on robustness, adaptability, recovery, and reconfiguration.

The darker findings concern what happens when communities are given responsibility without authority. Dring and colleagues diagnosed community food system governance in rural Western Canada, showing that local networks can strengthen food access, social cohesion, and emergency preparedness, but that their impact is restricted when communities lack control over land, infrastructure, markets, and public policy. The authors issue an explicit warning against transferring responsibilities to communities without providing adequate resources and institutional recognition, a finding with direct implications for governments that devolve food system functions as a cost-saving measure. A parallel study by Aysan and colleagues in Bozdogan, Türkiye, uncovered a quality paradox: regions producing high-quality olives can still fail to generate high-value olive oil, a failure the researchers trace to demographic change, weakened intergenerational knowledge transmission, limited cooperative organization, and a mismatch between local production practices and dominant market conventions. Certification and technological interventions, they argue, are insufficient without educational, cooperative, and institutional support.

Hybrid governance appears repeatedly as the operative model on the ground. Dado Tossou and colleagues documented how producers, cooperatives, NGOs, research institutions, and public agencies in Benin’s Atacora region respond to the limited institutional recognition of neglected and underutilized species by combining endogenous strategies, including seed exchange, collective labor, and local processing, with external support such as training, equipment, and certification. In Southern Brazil, Andrade and colleagues developed an indicator panel to measure the maturity of territorial goods, services, and governance arrangements in the Crediseara territory of Santa Catarina, finding moderate maturity anchored by a rural credit cooperative and a Family Agriculture Forum, alongside persistent gaps in coordination among public actors and insufficient representation of Indigenous perspectives. Zhou’s separate panel-data analysis of Jiangxi Province from 2021 to 2023 found that rural industrial integration significantly increases the scale of household participation in agribusiness, with e-commerce sales serving as the significant transmission mechanism, while contract premiums showed no statistically supported mediating effect.

Two opinion pieces sharpen the conceptual stakes. Sarubbi-Baltazar and colleagues argue that territorial food networks should be understood as governance infrastructures rather than mere distribution channels, emphasizing women’s contributions to organizing production, exchange, care, knowledge transmission, and trust-building, and suggesting that shorter supply chains, local knowledge, and resource reuse can support low-carbon transitions. Leyva-Hernández and colleagues identify centralized budgets, rigid legal frameworks, bureaucratic practices, and the limited recognition of traditional knowledge as the major institutional barriers to local food resilience, proposing multilevel governance, collective identity, and community participation as pathways toward more autonomous systems. Finally, Sadanand and colleagues propose a participatory, consumption-centered framework for rural food transformation, arguing that change must address how vulnerable communities access, select, prepare, and value food within their social and institutional contexts, not merely how it is produced and shipped.

The editorial’s synthesis is its most consequential claim: the field must move away from an exclusively production-oriented perspective toward an understanding of food systems in which culture, gender, justice, local knowledge, power relations, and local decision-making capacity all play defining roles. Strengthening community governance, the authors conclude, means creating the conditions for communities to define their own food priorities, protect their resources, and preserve their practices. As climate pressures intensify and supply chains wobble, the evidence assembled here suggests that the most resilient food futures may already exist in embryo, governed not by distant authorities but by the communities who have been stewarding their territories all along, waiting for legal recognition and institutional support to catch up with what the data now show.

Subject of Research: Community-based governance of resilient and sustainable food systems

Article Title: Editorial: Strengthening community governance for resilient and sustainable food futures

Article References: García-Montalvo, I. A., Matías-Pérez, D., Sánchez-Medina, M. A., & Matías Cervantes, C. A. (2026). Editorial: Strengthening community governance for resilient and sustainable food futures. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 10, Article 2016058. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2026.2016058

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.2016058

Keywords: community governance, food sovereignty, indigenous knowledge, sustainable food systems, seed banks, multilevel governance, food security, climate resilience, agrobiodiversity, rural development, One Health, food policy

One Health is an integrated approach that aims to balance the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, and it has gained enormous traction since the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the entanglement of human, animal, and environmental wellbeing. Yet the authors identify two persistent shortcomings. First, herpetofauna are routinely left out of One Health research, partly because amphibians and reptiles are rarely treated as charismatic focal species and partly because the health implications of human-herptile and herptile-ecosystem interactions remain poorly quantified. Second, One Health is too often framed as an exclusively Western, systems-science concept, ignoring the fact that Indigenous and ancestral cultures have maintained precisely this kind of integrated relationship with the natural world for centuries. The new paper, led by Ashley Morgan of the University of Tennessee’s One Health Initiative and Fortunate Mafeta Phaka of North-West University in South Africa, sets out to correct both omissions at once.

The evidence base is unusually broad. The team reviewed 119 sources, including 61 journal articles and 34 books, in languages ranging from IsiZulu and SeTswana to Javanese, Lithuanian, and Irish Gaelic. They supplemented this with flexible conversational interviews conducted between November 2024 and March 2025 with 19 adult male participants in South Africa, and with autoethnographies, first-person accounts, from Indigenous co-authors including Jywateju Kayabi and Iauapuru Trumai of the Xingu Indigenous Territory in Brazil, situated between the Cerrado and the Amazon. The result is a mosaic of human-herptile relationships spanning southern African clans, Balinese temples, Hopi ceremonies, and Xingu body painting traditions.

Among the most striking findings is the depth of totemic kinship in southern Africa. For the Majola clans of the AmaXhosa, the Mole Snake (Pseudaspis cana) is not merely a symbol but a relative: clan members address one another by the snake’s IsiXhosa name as a term of respect and endearment. The Nile Crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) serves as a totem for AmaZulu, BaPedi, BaSotho, and VaTsonga communities, while the BaPedi hold the tortoise sacred. Crucially, totemism carries practical conservation weight, because members of clans are culturally obliged to protect the herptiles considered members of their own kin group. Children grow up associating the totem’s name with their family, embedding stewardship obligations into identity itself, a mechanism that no protected-area designation can replicate.

Rain symbolism emerges as perhaps the most widespread cultural pattern. BaPedi communities read Nile Crocodile signs as portents of rain, the KhoiSan regard certain tortoise species as rain symbols, and frogs herald coming rains for the AmaZulu, VhaVhenda, and KhoiSan alike. Some traditions go further: VaTsonga lore holds that bullfrogs literally rain from the sky during heavy storms, and the AmaZulu tell a similar story about African Clawed Frogs while attributing lightning strikes to toads of the genus Sclerophrys. Frogs and monitor lizards and pythons are even used in rain-summoning rituals. On the other side of the planet, the Hopi of northeastern Arizona perform the biennial, 16-day Snake Dance, handling live rattlesnakes as messengers between the people and the rain spirits, a ceremony of reverence that reinforces both spiritual continuity and, implicitly, the protection of snake habitat in an arid landscape where water is life.

The Brazilian autoethnographies reveal how deeply herptiles are woven into body, story, and rite. Kayabi describes how the Kawaiwete people paint themselves with frog motifs using jenipapo and annatto dyes during festivals and political mobilizations, and how turtle shells become the spinning discs of cotton spindles and children’s rattles. Trumai accounts explain that the dark markings around an anaconda’s eyes, said to be its tears, inspire the sacred body paint worn by young men emerging from puberty seclusion, a rite that can last months or years. In one traditional story, a betrayed man tricks his unfaithful cousin into eating fish containing pieces of anaconda and lizard tail, transforming him into the giant snake whose descendants will one day surrender their spiritual strength to young warriors. These narratives do more than entertain; they encode ethics, ecological knowledge, and the rules governing who may use which animal symbols.

Europe’s ancestral traditions, though largely obscured by centuries of religious conversion and cultural assimilation, tell a parallel story. Stylized frog images appear on prehistoric pottery, and frogs were believed to guard springs and water sources. In pre-Christian Lithuania, the toad was sacred to Ragana, goddess of death and regeneration, and toad-with-lily motifs were carved into wooden tombstones called krikštai, with a strikingly similar motif found on a Neolithic statuette from Sesklo in Greece dating to around 6,000 BC. In Croatian and Czech villages, ritualized frog dances were performed into the 1970s to ensure the fertility of fields, cattle, and people, and Polish and Croatian words for frog, boginka and bogińa, literally mean goddess. Grass snakes, meanwhile, lived for centuries in close proximity to European farmers because manure heaps provided ideal egg incubation sites, earning the snakes a reputation as protectors of livestock and symbols of agricultural prosperity, a bond that collapsed with industrial farming and may now contribute to grass snake declines.

The paper’s ecological core lies in its treatment of herptiles as sentinels and ecosystem engineers. Because amphibians have permeable skin and complex life cycles spanning water and land, they are exquisitely sensitive to environmental change, and Indigenous communities have long read them this way. The VhaVhenda of South Africa regard frogs and turtles as extensions of sacred freshwater systems, monitoring their presence as indicators of wetland health. In British Columbia, Indigenous Peoples reported declines in the Oregon spotted frog ahead of formal scientific recognition, because episodic population dips escaped standardized surveys but not long-term local observation. In Mexico, Nahua farmers use the presence of certain snakes and lizards to assess soil moisture and fertility, and Maya communities maintain integrated multi-trophic aquaculture systems, with canals at Edzná still supporting herptile biodiversity today. In Mexico City’s Xochimilco, the Chinampa Refugio project fuses Aztec-era chinampa farming with modern biofiltration to protect the critically endangered axolotl, an approach that has succeeded where captive breeding alone has faltered.

The evidence for collaboration is compelling. A recent study pairing Laurentian University researchers with Shawanaga and Magnetawan First Nations in Ontario found that reptiles and amphibians accounted for 87 percent of wildlife mortalities along railways bisecting traditional territories, including seven species at risk. In Oaxaca, Mexico, the state with the largest Indigenous and Community Conservation Area at nearly 1,300 square kilometers, Indigenous-led sustainable land management has expanded species ranges and even led to the rediscovery of the Brokencollar Graceful Brown Snake, undetected for more than 50 years. Among the Cherokee, cultural valuation of the gopher tortoise as a keystone species sustains prescribed burning and burrow monitoring that benefit dozens of commensal animals. And in the Netherlands, conservationists are deliberately reinstating the traditional manure heap, with more than 80 citizen-science working groups reporting over 300,000 grass snake eggs since 2016, a modern echo of an ancient human-reptile partnership.

The authors are candid about limits: their synthesis covers a subset of communities and simplifies a far more complex mosaic of Indigenous nations and languages, and the patterns should be read as illustrative rather than a unified Indigenous perspective. But the central argument stands. Negative folklore, such as snakes killed on sight as bad omens or geckos exterminated from homes, drives persecution, while reverence and taboo can act as de facto protections for sacred forests and temple serpents. Bridging these worldviews, the authors contend, requires an One Health paradigm that treats Indigenous Ways of Knowing not as decorative add-ons but as co-equal knowledge systems, in what philosopher Isabelle Stengers calls an ecology of practices where different ways of knowing coexist without one dominating. As Kayabi observes, in the past frogs and toads spoke with humans, but people no longer understand the language of animals. Perhaps, the paper suggests, herptiles are still communicating their significance, and calling for their own conservation, in other ways, if only we learn to listen.

Subject of Research: Integrating Indigenous and ancestral knowledge of amphibians and reptiles into One Health conservation

Article Title: Culture and conservation: a One Health approach to Indigenous and ancestral herptile knowledge

Article References: Morgan, A. N., Phaka, F. M., Dewi, I. A. D. K., Julian, A., Carrasco-Medina, A. S., Stark, T., Kayabi, J., Trumai, I., Guimarães, L. D., Torres-Sánchez, M., & Miller, D. L. (2026). Culture and conservation: a One Health approach to Indigenous and ancestral herptile knowledge. Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science, 4, Article 1766675. https://doi.org/10.3389/famrs.2026.1766675

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/famrs.2026.1766675

Keywords: One Health, herpetofauna, Indigenous knowledge, ethnoherpetology, conservation, totemism, amphibians, reptiles, traditional ecological knowledge, biodiversity, cultural heritage, ecosystem sentinels

The legislative vehicle is Projeto de Lei n° 5.894, submitted in 2025 by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It replaces a previous national plan for 2010 to 2020 that lingered on through successive extensions and suffered severe institutional disruption after the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. The intervening years were bruising for both culture and climate policy: during the Bolsonaro administration from 2019 to 2022, the Ministry of Culture was downgraded to a secretariat, its budget shrank, and federal climate action was largely absent. The new plan was drafted under Culture Minister Margareth Menezes, an artist and cultural manager from Bahia and the first Black woman to hold the post, and shaped through multiple rounds of public consultation, including the 4th National Culture Conference.

Constitutionally anchored in Article 215, Paragraph 3, and Article 216-A of the Federal Constitution, the bill declares culture a core element of democracy, inclusion, justice, and sustainable development. The plan is organised into eight strategic axes spanning social participation, heritage, training, infrastructure, the creative and solidary economy, digital rights, and climate. Axis 7 is the outlier. According to Article 5, Item VII, of the bill, it commits the state to protecting, valuing and fostering the cultures and knowledge of traditional peoples and communities, Indigenous peoples, and communities of the African cultural matrix, including Quilombola communities, explicitly framing that protection as a strategy for resilience, the promotion of Bem Viver, and climate action. A second clause calls for the adaptation, mitigation and recovery of the cultural sector itself when disasters and environmental or health emergencies strike, in coordination with cultural agents, groups, communities and spaces.

The conceptual lineage of Bem Viver, known in Spanish-speaking contexts as Buen Vivir, traces back to the Quechua notion of Sumak Kawsay, or Plentiful Living, and has already been written into the national constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador. Scholars such as Alcantara and Sampaio have argued that it offers a viable alternative to conventional development paradigms, a reflective counterpoint to consumerism and environmental degradation. What makes the Brazilian provision technically novel is its translation of that cosmology into operational cultural management. Clause (a) treats the documentation and reinforcement of traditional knowledge not as heritage preservation in the museum sense but as an active instrument for helping communities confront climate-related challenges. Clause (b) extends cultural policy inward, treating cultural institutions and practices as assets that must themselves be made disaster-resilient.

The plan’s supporting architecture reinforces this cross-sectoral ambition. Article 3 lists guiding principles that include the valorisation of traditional knowledge, techniques and practices, the promotion of cross-sectoral integration, and an emphasis on territorialisation. Article 4 requires policy to account for territoriality and intersectionality within the Sistema Nacional de Cultura, the institutional mechanism coordinating federal, state and municipal levels. In practical terms, cultural programmes may need to be designed with greater flexibility across regions and social groups, and cultural managers may find their remit expanding well beyond entertainment and heritage display into environmental adaptation. Gong argues this represents an attempt to dismantle the boundaries separating cultural policy from other domains of public policy, reorienting the field toward broader questions of human–nature relations.

The practical difficulties, however, are formidable. Brazil is a federation, and implementation depends on coordination across three tiers of government. Budget allocation under resource constraints, the development of unified indicators, and the meaningful participation of traditional communities all pose challenges. There is also an inherent tension in tempo: documenting and promoting traditional knowledge demands sustained fieldwork and community trust, while climate disasters arrive suddenly and demand rapid response from the cultural sector. Balancing those two rhythms is not straightforward. Measurement compounds the problem, because culture’s contribution to resilience is indirect and difficult to quantify compared with environmental or economic indicators, raising the risk of a gap between the ambition of the policy text and its on-the-ground realisation.

Independent research tempers expectations further. Studies of Bem Viver as a framework for reconfiguring Brazilian cities note that existing urban models, shaped by capitalist and colonial legacies, struggle to accommodate the needs of diverse communities. An empirical study of family farmers in the northern Amazon region of Mato Grosso found that sustainable development and Bem Viver are understood locally as a dialectical, continuously constructed process, underscoring the importance of collective participation and traditional knowledge, while also documenting practical obstacles such as large-scale agricultural expansion in isolated rural areas. Work on bioeconomy and socio-biodiversity argues that combining traditional practices with sustainable use may offer pathways toward Bem Viver, but that socio-environmental crises in a changing climate must still be addressed directly. The collective lesson is that culture can foster community identity and adaptive capacity, yet if reliance falls primarily on the cultural dimension while infrastructure, technical support and economic incentives are neglected, the actual impact may prove limited.

Comparative context sharpens the picture. European cultural management, exemplified by Germany, tends toward institutionalisation and legislative safeguards, advancing climate goals through structured funding schemes and established evaluation processes. Germany’s nationwide Culture4Climate initiative engages the entire cultural sector in climate protection through frameworks supported by federal bodies and the German Cultural Council, while at the European Union level the New European Bauhaus integrates culture, design and heritage with the European Green Deal through coordinated policy instruments. These approaches are stable and predictable, but they rarely articulate climate concerns through Indigenous cosmologies or community-based traditional knowledge as foundational policy principles. Brazil’s model, by contrast, places greater weight on community participation and the living utilisation of traditional knowledge, gaining territorial adaptability at the cost of federal coordination and dispersed resources. A systematic review of Bem Viver applications indicates the concept’s local uptake is expanding but remains dominated by confirmatory studies and critical dialogue, a tension between policy practice and theory that is less pronounced in institutionalised European settings.

Asian comparisons are harder to draw given the region’s diversity, but two cases illustrate the range. In South Korea, climate initiatives affecting the cultural sector have been embedded within broader national development agendas: the Korean Green New Deal supported energy-efficiency upgrades in museums, libraries and other public cultural facilities, situating them within wider technological and environmental transformation programmes. In Japan, the Satoyama Initiative combines technological and infrastructural means with traditional ecological knowledge, integrating cultural landscapes and community-based practices into sustainability frameworks. Both models can mobilise resources swiftly, yet they rely more heavily on technological or infrastructural means and less frequently elevate traditional knowledge to the status of a strategic axis in national cultural policy. Whether Indigenous or traditional worldviews in other Asian contexts could offer comparable resources for Brazil-style integration remains an open question.

Taken together, the three models reflect distinct paths: Europe leans toward institutional stability, Asia toward developmental integration, and Brazil is experimenting with a cross-sectoral approach centred on communities and traditional knowledge. Gong’s assessment is deliberately balanced. Bem Viver has long circulated in Brazilian discourse, so its arrival in cultural policy is unsurprising in itself, and the normative value of the idea deserves acknowledgement. But whether the advocacy can genuinely assist in addressing climate change, especially when set against Europe’s institutionalised machinery or Asia’s development-oriented frameworks, is a question that qualitative research will take time to answer. Axis 7 functions, in effect, as a policy laboratory for gauging how far cultural policy can contribute to ecological resilience: its conceptual value has been demonstrated, its instrumental efficacy has not. The outcome will hinge on the unglamorous details of resources, intergovernmental coordination and evaluation criteria that follow in the plan’s implementation regulations, and on whether the communities whose knowledge the law celebrates are given a genuine share in directing it.

Subject of Research: Integration of the Indigenous Bem Viver worldview into Brazil's National Culture Plan as a climate resilience strategy

Article Title: Cultural knowledge as climate resilience: examining the integration of Bem Viver into Brazil’s national culture plan (2025–2035)

Article References: Gong, J. (2026). Cultural knowledge as climate resilience: examining the integration of Bem Viver into Brazil’s national culture plan (2025–2035). European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16928. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16928

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16928

Keywords: Bem Viver, Brazil, cultural policy, climate resilience, Indigenous knowledge, National Culture Plan, Plano Nacional de Cultura, traditional communities, cultural management, sustainable development, Axis 7, policy integration

The research team, working between February 2024 and October 2025, combined purposive, random, and snowball sampling to capture knowledge across the community. Six kebeles, or villages, were selected for their intense cultivation of the plant, and 318 household heads answered semi-structured interviews, while 30 people took part in focus group discussions and nine knowledgeable elders served as key informants. Respondents ranged from 18 to 91 years old, and nearly 88 percent relied on subsistence agriculture on plots smaller than one hectare. The researchers tested knowledge directly, presenting live specimens of the crop’s landraces and asking informants to match folk names to morphological features, a method that grounded the survey in the plants themselves rather than in abstract recall.

What emerged is a sophisticated folk taxonomy built on close observation. Local farmers distinguish landraces using seedling sheath color, petiole and fruit color, corm traits, leaflet shape and curling pattern, peduncle length, and plant height, as well as yield qualities such as palatability, moisture content, and toxicity. The landrace called Bangayo, for example, has bright green seedling sheaths, broad curled-down leaflets, and red fruit; Dasharo shows whitish spots on a purple sheath and horseshoe-shaped leaflets; and Malao carries purple sheaths, narrow leaflets, and the longest flowering stalk. Informants cited between one and thirteen folk names, including Gistaqo, Etera, Kafo Tsugunta, and Wodala, though the analysis revealed taxonomic overlap, with names sharing prefixes but differing suffixes likely describing the same varieties, and single landraces carrying different names in different villages.

Recognition of this diversity was strikingly uneven. More than one-third of respondents could not distinguish any landrace at all, referring to the plant only by its collective Gamo name, Qolxo, while roughly one-quarter correctly identified all three test landraces. Key informants explained that landraces fall into two broad groups, Adde Qolxo and Macca Qolxo, literally male and female, a classification based on biochemical and culinary properties rather than plant sex. The so-called female types are palatable, low in toxicity, and rich in starch, while male types are bitter, moist, and hard to process. Farmers deliberately conserve both: the starchy varieties for everyday meals and the less palatable ones as insurance against food scarcity, a practice that doubles as on-farm conservation of the crop’s genetic reservoir.

The crop’s agronomy is equally distinctive. Growers harvest corms from late June to August and split each one into two unequal sections in a 75:25 ratio. The larger basal portion, packed with starch, goes to the kitchen, while the apical quarter, containing the buds and active meristematic tissue, is reserved as planting material and buried 30 to 40 centimeters deep. The propagule then lies dormant for four to five months before sprouting. Individual plants need three to five years to mature, but because fields hold mixed populations at different growth stages, farmers harvest mature corms continuously each year while younger plants keep growing. During dormancy, they practice careful shallow tillage, minimal disturbance, and organic fertilization, and they intercrop cereals over the dormant beds, a low-input, shade-tolerant system the study describes as environmentally friendly agriculture refined over centuries.

Turning the corm into food is where the knowledge becomes truly remarkable. Raw corms contain irritating compounds and a delicate mucilage that burns the skin, so the Gamo have developed a processing chain that renders them safe and nutritious. The basal corm is soaked repeatedly to strip away waxy coatings, crushed with a traditional mill called a Wotsa, and then fermented for three to five days in an underground pit. The resulting product, known as Zantsa, is wrapped in enset leaves and pressed with stones to drain moisture. From it, women prepare prestigious cultural dishes: a porridge called Shendera served to household heads, guests, and elders; a bread called Kitta eaten with raw meat during the Meskel New Year festival; and Inchilla, a durable dish carried as portable food, or sinq, by travelers and laborers because it resists mold for days.

Every stage of this chain is gendered, and women emerge as the system’s central custodians. They collect and plant seedlings, fertilize gardens, harvest, clean, mill, ferment, cook, and market the products. A key informant from Lisha kebele captured this in a Gamogna saying, Maccasi baynako Qolxoy sharaffako, translated as, without women’s contribution, Arisaema schimperianum might be a rubbish weed with no food value. The regression analysis backed this up statistically: gender significantly predicted landrace knowledge, with women citing more varieties than men, a pattern reinforced by men’s seasonal out-migration for the region’s famous Shema cotton weaving, which leaves women managing entire farms.

The statistical model, which explained 57.4 percent of the variance in knowledge scores, also exposed a troubling generational and educational divide. Age showed a strong positive association with landrace identification, while education was negatively correlated: informants with no formal schooling named far more varieties than educated respondents, suggesting that schooling does little to support, and may actively erode, indigenous crop knowledge. Family size, marital status, and occupation also mattered, pointing to knowledge embedded in household responsibility and livelihood practice rather than in formal institutions. Overall, the findings echo a pattern seen across Ethiopia’s underutilized crops, from enset to Plectranthus edulis, where ethnobotanical expertise concentrates among older, less formally educated community members.

That concentration makes the knowledge system vulnerable. In pairwise ranking exercises, key informants identified social stigmatization as the single greatest threat to the crop’s future, ahead of tedious food processing, changing land use, lack of research and promotion, and the crop’s prolonged maturation period. Younger people increasingly dismiss the plant as poor people’s food, disliking its taste and rejecting the laborious manual processing it demands. At the same time, the shift from diversified, shade-based traditional farming to monoculture has removed the canopy plants the species depends on, and agricultural extension programs, focused almost entirely on cereals, have never offered growers training or support for this crop.

The study’s authors argue that saving Arisaema schimperianum will require integrated action: on-farm conservation of its landraces, systematic documentation of folk naming and culinary traditions, support for the women who hold the deepest knowledge, improved postharvest technologies that respect cultural values, and stronger links between researchers and farmers. In a world facing persistent food insecurity and narrowing crop diversity, the Gamo highlands offer a quiet lesson. A plant that most of the world has never heard of, rendered edible through centuries of accumulated ingenuity, demonstrates how indigenous science can unlock nutrition from the most unlikely resources, and how quickly that inheritance can vanish when the generations who hold it are no longer connected to it.

Subject of Research: Ethnobotanical knowledge and utilization of the underutilized crop Arisaema schimperianum in the Gamo highlands of South Ethiopia

Article Title: Ethnobotanical knowledge and utilization of Arisaema schimperianum (Schott) in the Gamo highlands of South Ethiopia

Article References: Fekede, F., Asefa, D., & Uncha, A. (2026). Ethnobotanical knowledge and utilization of Arisaema schimperianum (Schott) in the Gamo highlands of South Ethiopia. BioRisk, 24, 205-222. https://doi.org/10.3897/biorisk.24.206801

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/biorisk.24.206801

Keywords: Arisaema schimperianum, ethnobotany, Gamo highlands, Ethiopia, underutilized crops, indigenous knowledge, food security, fermentation, landraces, agrobiodiversity, women farmers, folk taxonomy

The study rests on 22 semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, philanthropic funders, non-governmental organization leaders, Indigenous representatives, and community organizers across Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, supplemented by participant observation at a regional climate adaptation event. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling, with data collection continuing until thematic saturation was reached. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and analyzed through an inductive thematic approach, allowing themes such as funding access, policy support, and barriers to collaboration to emerge from the data rather than being imposed in advance. The work received ethical approval from the Grenfell Campus Research Ethics Board and forms part of a larger transdisciplinary project on collaborative governance in financing climate adaptation and mitigation.

Conceptually, the research is anchored in the Socio-Ecological Systems framework, which treats communities not as isolated units of adaptation but as nodes embedded within interconnected social, institutional, and ecological systems. From this perspective, the most effective adaptation strategies emerge from feedback loops between community experience, institutional support, and environmental change. The author also frames the translation of local knowledge as a three-stage process: recognition, in which local knowledge is acknowledged as a valid source of environmental information; valuing, in which it gains real influence over the priorities and design of adaptation plans; and use, in which it is applied alongside scientific tools to concrete planning decisions, such as combining elders’ memories of past shoreline positions with geospatial mapping.

The findings are striking in their consistency: local knowledge is central to building climate resilience, not peripheral to it. Participants described a rich tapestry of knowledge forms, from fishers’ observations of shifting marine species to the Traditional Ecological Knowledge held by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples, which reflects generations of observation of seasonal change, animal behaviour, and land management. The study also highlights the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, introduced by Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall, which calls for weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing together rather than treating them as competing systems. One participant captured the grassroots ethos succinctly, explaining that the work is not about telling communities what to do but about communities receiving support and encouragement for what they are already doing and want to do.

In practice, this knowledge is being mobilized through four broad categories of adaptation activity. Education and outreach initiatives, including arts communication projects and museum preservation efforts responding to shoreline erosion, rely heavily on cultural knowledge and build public engagement. Community and skills-building efforts, such as public education sessions and community-garden knowledge-sharing, transmit expertise effectively at small scale. Natural infrastructure projects, including living shorelines and regenerative agriculture, showed the deepest integration of traditional ecological knowledge, drawing directly on longstanding local practices. Community planning initiatives, particularly municipal climate advisory committees with formal community representation, demonstrated the strongest institutional uptake. In one municipality, eight community consultation sessions on climate adaptation directly informed local plans, while in another, five of twelve council seats were held in ways that fostered trust and shared responsibility.

Yet the study documents a persistent gap between recognition and substantive use. Systemic barriers, including rigid, short-term funding programs, top-down policy frameworks, and heavy bureaucratic requirements, continue to limit the consistent and equitable application of local knowledge. One participant from a community NGO criticized federal funding structures as formulaic, with everything prescribed in advance and little room for genuine collaboration. A municipal official noted the absence of internal resources to adequately cover climate programs, and another organization described the lack of continuity between short grants as very harmful to progress. Smaller and rural communities face particular disadvantages, forced to compete against large municipalities with dedicated administrative staff for funding opportunities they often lack the capacity to pursue.

Equity concerns surfaced repeatedly. A community foundation representative pointed to Nova Scotia’s history of environmental racism and suggested it extends to adaptation efforts, underscoring the need to embed climate justice principles in planning. Volunteer burnout emerged as another strain on smaller organizations. At the same time, participants identified clear enablers: strong local leadership, grassroots engagement that lets communities define their own priorities, collaborative governance, and flexible funding arrangements. Multi-year funding commitments were described as a game changer, allowing organizations to plan and sustain projects rather than lurching from one grant cycle to the next.

The role of partnerships proved double-edged. Multi-stakeholder platforms connecting municipalities, Indigenous groups, and NGOs were praised for pooling resources and building legitimacy, with one program coordinator noting that such partnerships ensure local knowledge shapes coastal resilience projects. But power dynamics matter enormously. One community organizer observed that input is often sought while final decisions ignore community priorities, such as protecting cultural sites. This distinction between being consulted and having actual influence echoes the scholarly argument that meaningful knowledge co-production requires redistributing decision-making authority, not simply inviting participation. The clearest cases of effective collaboration in the study were precisely those where such redistribution occurred.

Federal policy frameworks received a mixed assessment. Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy was seen as supportive in principle but weak in practice, with one provincial program planner observing that it encourages local knowledge while lacking clear guidelines for implementation. Large funding programs, such as the 41-million-dollar Climate-Resilient Coastal Communities initiative running from 2023 to 2028, provided essential resources, enabling one Nova Scotia municipality to hire local experts to map erosion risks based on community input. But access inequities persist, and rigid use-case restrictions can leave communities unable to pay for what they actually need most: staff and people. By contrast, municipal-level policies establishing climate advisory committees were praised for creating goodwill by giving community members a formal voice in decision-making.

The study concludes that resilience cannot be delivered from the top down; it must be built through collaboration and continuous learning across the system. The author calls for policy shifts to institutionalize long-term, locally controlled funding, formalize community participation in decision-making, and embed equity-centered, co-productive approaches into adaptation frameworks. Without these enabling conditions, the role of local knowledge risks being reduced to a symbolic gesture rather than serving as a core driver of adaptation. The findings carry weight well beyond Atlantic Canada, offering a template for any jurisdiction grappling with how to move beyond token acknowledgment of community expertise toward climate action that is adaptive, context-specific, and grounded in the lived realities of the people who know their places best. As the author notes, the study’s qualitative design offers transferable insight into similar rural and coastal contexts rather than statistically generalizable conclusions, and future research probing how local knowledge shapes the most contentious decisions, such as managed retreat, would be a valuable extension.

Subject of Research: Integration of local and Indigenous knowledge into community climate change adaptation planning in Atlantic Canada

Article Title: Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action

Article References: Yirenkyi, E. (2026). Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(10), e0000291. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Keywords: climate adaptation, local knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, Atlantic Canada, socio-ecological systems, co-production, climate governance, funding, coastal communities, participatory planning, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland