Mapping indigenous seas: defining and plotting indigenous sovereignty, governance and management in fluid seas

 

This presentation provides an overview of the importance of Indigenous marine areas around the world. Critical to the implementation of several global conservation and climate agreements is the understanding of the scale, location, and conservation values of the oceans over which Indigenous Peoples exercise traditional rights. However, spatial information on Indigenous waters, lagoon and oceans has never been aggregated at a global scale. Thus, using publicly available geospatial resources, we show the importance of Indigenous Peoples’ management or tenure rights over the ocean and various seascapes. It concludes that marine spaces over which Indigenous peoples exercise some degree of management, autonomously or shared, are far more extensive than is generally acknowledged in the literature. The presentation argues that vast geographical extent and ecological variation of marine areas with some degree of Indigenous management, plus the variety of effective, multi-party management regimes contained within such marine managed areas, hold valuable lessons for effective, cooperative marine conservation and restoration. The geospatial analysis presented indicates that strategic collaborative partnerships  would provide significant benefits for the conservation and sustainability of seascapes, marine ecosystems, and the culture of local communities.