Indigenous Peoples and local communities as agents of transformative change for sustainability

dc.contributor.affiliationUniversidade de Santiago de Compostela. Departamento de Fundamentos da Análise Económica
dc.contributor.affiliationUniversidade de Santiago de Compostela. Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Ambientais (CRETUS)
dc.contributor.authorReyes García, Victoria
dc.contributor.authorVillasante Larramendi, Carlos Sebastián
dc.date.accessioned2026-03-23T12:27:25Z
dc.date.available2026-03-23T12:27:25Z
dc.date.issued2026
dc.description.abstractAchieving just, equitable, and effective sustainability transformations requires diverse social engagement. This paper identifies five key roles played by Indigenous Peoples and local communities as agents of transformative change: embodying sustainable lifeways, resisting harm and defending rights, extending their practices to influence broader systems, and offering foundational models for care-oriented economies and governance. Through illustrative examples, we show how Indigenous Peoples and local communities actively contribute to global transformation. We emphasize the importance of engaging with a wide range of actors in supporting, expanding, and deepening these contributions to realize meaningful, systemic change toward a sustainable and just future.
dc.description.peerreviewedSI
dc.description.sponsorshipWe received no specific funding for this work; all authors involved in the IPBES do so on a voluntary basis. The IPBES Transformative Change Assessment was made possible thanks to many contributions to the IPBES trust fund from governments (www.ipbes.net/donors). VRG and SV acknowledge support from the European Research Council (VRG: FP7-771056-LICCI and SV: FP7-101002784-EQUALSEA). SV also acknowledges the financial support to CRETUS from the Rede CIGUS, and the support of the Earth Commission and Future Earth. HCW acknowledges support from the Canada-Inuit Nunangat-United Kingdom Arctic Research Programme (CINUK). NF acknowledges the support from the Department Board and the Faculty of Geosciences of Utrecht University who supported financially and institutionally her participation in the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. HG acknowledges support from the U.S. Global Change Research Program for her participation in the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. This work contributes to the ‘María de Maeztu’ Programme for Units of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CEX2019-000940-M).
dc.identifier.citationReyes-García, V., Nelson, V., Bonilla-Moheno, M., Hausner, V. H., Leventon, J., Wheeler, H. C., Aksoy, Z., Bates, P., Carino, J., Dabezies, J. M., Frantzeskaki, N., Gordon, E., Gosnell, H., Guibal, C., Gurung, J., Heatta, M. J., Hernandez, Y., Huambachano, M., Ifejika Speranza, C., A Magris, R., … Villasante, S. (2026). Indigenous Peoples and local communities as agents of transformative change for sustainability. Communications earth & environment, 7(1), 102. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03098-z
dc.identifier.doi10.1038/S43247-025-03098-Z
dc.identifier.essn2662-4435
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10347/46470
dc.issue.number1
dc.journal.titleCommunications Earth and Environment
dc.language.isoeng
dc.page.final13
dc.page.initial1
dc.publisherNature Research
dc.relation.publisherversionhttps://doi.org/10.1038/S43247-025-03098-Z
dc.rights© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/.
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
dc.rights.accessRightsopen access
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectAnthropology
dc.subjectSocial sciences
dc.subjectSustainability
dc.titleIndigenous Peoples and local communities as agents of transformative change for sustainability
dc.typejournal article
dc.type.hasVersionVoR
dc.volume.number7
dspace.entity.typePublication
relation.isAuthorOfPublication3d6dab6e-219a-423b-baac-dbb45cfd00d1
relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery3d6dab6e-219a-423b-baac-dbb45cfd00d1

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