The United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre is holding a dialogue at the seventeenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) in Yerevan, Armenia, on 23 October 2026. The session will give representatives of Indigenous Peoples and local communities a dedicated space to set out their priorities for engagement with business.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities are key stewards of biodiversity. Their knowledge, governance systems and practices are fundamental to achieving the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Yet business engagement with Indigenous Peoples and local communities often falls short on three fronts: respecting rights, securing free, prior and informed consent, and ensuring fair benefit-sharing. Frameworks such as that of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), along with sectoral standards, are helping companies improve. However, significant gaps remain in applying consistent, rights-based approaches at scale.
The dialogue will:
- identify persistent challenges and structural barriers
- showcase good practices, case studies and emerging solutions
- explore the enabling conditions, from corporate frameworks to policy, for scaling responsible engagement
- generate recommendations for action aligned with the Global Biodiversity Framework, moving from doing no harm to participatory value creation
