New Research at CIFOR-ICRAF Symposium Reveals: Global “30×30” Biodiversity Targets Will Fail Without Recognizing African Spiritual Landscapes and IP&LC stewardship

18 February 2026, Kenya: More than 100 leading forestry researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and Indigenous and area-based scholars convened this week at the CIFOR–ICRAF campus in Nairobi for a landmark symposium on Heritage-Sensitive Forest Governance in African Contexts. The event combined the launch of the SPIRAL Project’s latest research findings with the unveiling of the forthcoming book Ecospiritual Practices in African Contexts, issuing a strong message to global conservation policy: without recognizing African spiritual landscapes and the stewardship of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IP&LCs), the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s Target 3 (“30×30”) is at risk of failure.

This symposium marked the second event in an international series catalyzing a global debate on forest governance. The first symposium took place at Chiang Mai University in collaboration with the PLACES Lab (CY Cergy Paris Université). Long-term collaborations between Marco Haenssgen (Chiang Mai University) and the CY PLACES Lab (Elisabeth Auclair, Anne Hertzog, and Alessandra Manzini) have been central to advancing the conceptual framework of heritage-sensitive policies and everyday heritage practices. A third symposium is planned in Latin America, in partnership with CIFOR–ICRAF and Governance, Equity and Wellbeing (GEW) group of Anne Larson.

As the global community accelerates efforts to conserve 30% of land and sea by 2030, dominant conservation frameworks continue to rely on secular, resource-oriented models that often overlook the social, spiritual, and cultural realities of African landscapes. The symposium emphasized that territories governed by IP&LCs currently safeguard more than one-third of the world’s highly biodiverse forest ecosystems, frequently outperforming state-managed protected areas.

In his opening address, Peter Minang, Director for Africa at CIFOR–ICRAF, highlighted the importance of building alliances between science and local cultural values to sustain sacred forests:

“One of the core values we hold at CIFOR–ICRAF is the recognition of Indigenous and local knowledge and the need to bring these knowledge systems into meaningful dialogue with science. When I was teaching in forest communities in Cameroon decades ago, I witnessed widespread deforestation alongside the persistence of sacred forests – protected through traditional values and local knowledge. I have seen this work. The challenge is that science has not yet fully caught up.”

Delivering the institutional welcome, Dr. Phosiso Sola (CIFOR–ICRAF) emphasized the heritage dimension of African forests:

“These spiritual landscapes are not merely ecological spaces; they are heritage systems shaped by long histories of spiritual worldviews. This workshop brings together nearly twenty speakers from across the continent in a transdisciplinary dialogue on indigeneity, eco-spiritual practices, and the biocultural conservation of sacred forests and landscapes.”

In his keynote address, Prof. Kokou Kouami of the University of Lomé emphasized a critical opportunity: “The strategic value of ecospiritual knowledge must be formally recognized as a complementary system to ecological sciences and biophysical data. Genuine conservation depends on inclusive and resilient governance rooted in meaningful community participation and respect for customary institutions, whose adaptive capacities are vital for responding to climate and socio-economic change. By incorporating sacred forests into Forest Landscape Restoration and Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures, we align with emerging paradigms that link forest ecosystem services directly to sustainable livelihoods and nature-based adaptation.”

SPIRAL Project Findings

Opening the dialogue, Dr. Alessandra Manzini (PLACES Lab, CY Cergy Paris Université; EUTOPIA SIF), lead researcher of the SPIRAL Project, addressed constrains faced by Indigenous People and Local Communities in African forest governance:

“Global conservation efforts have long fallen short due to an overreliance on “fortress conservation” models that frame Indigenous presence as a threat rather than a solution. This moment calls for an epistemic shift: moving away from top-down forest governance toward relational and adaptive paradigms grounded in indigeneity, custodianship, and cosmoecologies. Such a transformation requires a polycentric, heritage-sensitive forest policy framework – one that embraces multiple worldviews and ecospiritual practices, honors forest-people relational values and creates space for effective biocultural conservation via alternative customary law systems, everyday heritage practices of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Recognizing these practices as legitimate governance pathways is essential for achieving global biodiversity conservation targets.”

The SPIRAL Project presented results from a cross-cultural study of 72 small-scale societies worldwide, including 28 in Africa and the African diaspora. By intersecting this dataset with the Environmental Justice Atlas (ejatlas.com), the research revealed a strong correlation between the presence of biocultural diversity values associated with sacred forests and community resistance to extractive activities and the commodification of nature.

The findings further demonstrate that customary laws – such as taboos, sacred zones, and harvesting restrictions – function as sophisticated governance and monitoring systems, preserving biodiversity for centuries.

Sacred forests recognition as OECMs

A central theme of the symposium was the potential of Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures to formally recognize the stewardship of IP&LCs engaged in sacred forest management and everyday heritage practices. Unlike conventional national parks, OECMs can acknowledge biodiversity conservation as a secondary outcome of cultural and spiritual relationships with land.

However, participants warned against bureaucratizing sacred landscapes. As several panelists stressed, recognition alone is insufficient; conservation finance must be directly redistributed to communities to avoid turning OECMs into another extractive administrative mechanism.

Book Launch and a Call for Relational Governance

The symposium also featured discussions around the forthcoming edited volume Ecospiritual Practices in African Contexts, edited by Alessandra Manzini, Paula Uimonen, Houria Djoudi, Phosiso Sola, and Vitalis Pemunta. Drawing on cases from Senegal to Madagascar, the book positions spirituality as the heartbeat of a paradigm shift toward heritage-sensitive forest governance and integrated spiritual landscape governance.

The event concluded with a high-level roundtable featuring CIFOR–ICRAF researchers Dr. Phosiso Sola and Dr. Richard Sufo, alongside leading African scholars Prof. Lucie Temgoua (ERAIFT) and Prof. Kokou Kouami (University of Lomé), as well as emerging Indigenous scholars from across the continent.

The consensus was clear: to meet global biodiversity targets, conservation policy must move beyond extractive models and embrace forest–society relational ontologies, understanding landscapes not as resources to be managed, but as living entities sustained through cultural, spiritual, and political relationships.

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