Press Release Peoples' Conservation Summit 2026: Road to COP-17 CBD, Armenia Innovation and Creativity Arena, UGM, Yogyakarta, September 2, 2026

Peoples' Conservation Summit (PCS) 2026 brought together approximately 650 participants from Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, government, civil society organizations, media, academics, researchers, and various other parties from across Indonesia. This meeting resulted in a declaration titled "Indonesian People's Conservation Declaration" which became a manifesto of the people-based conservation movement. The declaration was read by representatives of indigenous peoples and local communities representing various regions and was handed directly to government representatives present until the end of the event.

The current worsening biodiversity crisis in Indonesia is accompanied by the seizure of living spaces, agrarian conflicts, plantation and mining expansion, infrastructure development, energy projects, food industrialization, and pressure on coastal and marine areas. In many places, the social and ecological costs of this development model are borne by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

Policies also still work unevenly. To gain recognition, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities must face long and layered processes. Meanwhile, concessions, investments, and various extractive projects continue to gain space. In conservation areas, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are often labeled as encroachers. Yet, long before modern conservation emerged as an institution, indigenous peoples and local communities had been protecting, managing, maintaining, restoring, and defending their territories and environments through customs, knowledge, institutions, and practices that live and are passed down through generations. This existed long before the areas were designated.

However, they are often displaced from their own territories. Similar inequality also occurs in knowledge. The knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities is often marginalized compared to scientific knowledge. Yet, knowledge about conservation continues to live, be practiced, develop, and be passed down. At the global level, Target 3 and Target 22 of the KM-GBF and the Work Program Article 8(j) of the CBD have increasingly strengthened the recognition of the rights, knowledge, and participation of communities. However, the gap between recognition on paper and reality on the ground remains wide.

From these various issues, PCS sees that the conservation issue is not only about how nature is protected, but also about who has the power to determine how nature is protected. Who determines which areas should be protected, whose knowledge is considered valid, who has the right to make decisions, and who should be responsible when damage occurs.

On this basis, PCS emphasizes the need for a change in the direction of conservation. Conservation is not a new concept for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. The relationship between humans and nature is not two separate things, but is built through spiritual, social, and ecological relationships. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are both actors and main actors of conservation and should have the power to determine its direction. Knowledge, resources, and authority must also be distributed equitably, including to women and youth.

Changing the direction of conservation does not stop at recognition. It must bravely face the root causes of biodiversity loss: excessive extractivism, land and territorial seizure, agrarian inequality, destructive development models, and systems that cause environmental damage. Indigenous communities present at PCS hope that this change will encourage policies that side with the people. "I hope there is change, so that Indonesia is no longer influenced by colonial governance systems. From PCS, I hope recommendations are born to the state and collaboration is built in policy-making that sides with the people," said Rosita Tecuari from the Indigenous Women's Organization (ORPA) Namblong in Jayapura, Papua.

Furthermore, Yance Arizona from the Faculty of Law UGM, hopes that the declaration delivered at PCS becomes a shared commitment among various parties to realize fair people's conservation. "Hopefully the declaration delivered at PCS becomes a shared commitment among Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, NGOs, academics, and the government to implement fair people's conservation. We from academia support and are committed to continuing to support these efforts," he said.

Based on various experiences, issues, and ideas discussed during the three-day conference, PCS 2026 participants then formulated 13 demands to encourage a change in the direction of conservation in Indonesia:

1. Acknowledge, protect, and adopt people's biodiversity protection models through various policy schemes.
2. Accelerate the recognition and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities over customary territories, forests, land, agriculture, coasts, and seas, including the designation of 1.4 million hectares of customary forests, including in areas overlapping with Conservation Areas.
3. Repeal the KSDAHE Law and replace it with a law that accommodates Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (MA & KL) recognizing their tenurial rights and safety, placing them as the main subjects in conservation efforts.
4. Immediately ratify the Indigenous Peoples Law and the Climate Justice Law, and completely overhaul the Forestry Law. Also, meaningfully involve Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in monitoring the implementation of IBSAP and NDC through special committees or task forces.
5. Realize funding justice by completely reforming the climate and biodiversity funding architecture through the provision of dedicated funding that is easily accessible and trust-based, to place Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities as the main decision-makers, not project recipients.
6. Achieve the 30x30 rights-based target that accommodates the resolution of conservation conflicts, ensures implementation based on FPIC, and upholds the tenurial rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
7. Immediately ratify the roadmap for the protection and promotion of local wisdom in biodiversity conservation, as a tangible form of implementing the Article 8(j) Convention Work Program. Realize the recognition and protection of knowledge, customary legal innovations, and governance systems of indigenous peoples and local communities.
8. Provide real space for indigenous women and youth in biodiversity governance decision-making, funding, and conservation policies.
9. Stop the seizure of living spaces in coastal and small islands! Reject all forms of destructive natural resource and critical mineral extraction, and protect tenurial rights and biodiversity management practices based on local wisdom!
10. Urge the government to guarantee the full sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities over data, genetic resources, and FPIC-based research from upstream to downstream for the protection of traditional knowledge and fair benefit-sharing.
11. Urge the government and educational institutions to integrate traditional knowledge equally into environmental policies through cross-knowledge collaboration bridges and overhaul the STEM curriculum through a transdisciplinary approach with social-humanities sciences.
12. Stop destructive development for economic growth, the government needs to completely overhaul the destructive development model and immediately implement the mandate of TAP MPR IX of 2001 to ensure the sustainability of nature and the protection of people's living spaces.
13. Stop criminalization, the state and corporations must be responsible for environmental destruction and immediately ratify anti-SLAPP policies to protect the safety of indigenous peoples, farmers, fishermen, environmental defenders, and human rights activists!

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Contact          : Rifky Putra Kurniawan
                                PCS Communication and Campaign Division 
WhatsApp Number  : +62 823-1603-5926