Nicole Redvers

Indigenous Peoples continue to steward their Lands through their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), their Laws, and their kinship-driven processes as they have for millennia. There are various factors, including climate change, that threaten Indigenous TEK, Lands, and other processes including intergenerational knowledge transfer. Our team carried out a qualitative research study with Indigenous community members to increase understanding of Dene Peoples’ connections with Land, community TEK protection and stewardship, as well as changes in local environments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten participants from the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, from December 2024 to February 2025. Coding and reflexive thematic analysis were carried out using qualitative software. Six themes were characterized from the interview data including: (1) intergenerational TEK are central to our ways of life; (2) despite various factors, our communities continue to share TEK across generations; (3) our collective health and healing are tied to our TEK as well as our values; (4) climate change-related threats and damages are impacting our People and the Land; (5) protecting and governing our own data is crucial for preserving our stories and knowledge; and (6) we need to protect Mother Earth for future generations. This study further demonstrates that the protection of Indigenous TEK is deeply important for the overall health and wellbeing of Indigenous Peoples. Additionally, the honouring of Indigenous sovereignty and Land rights is essential to transform current climate change approaches.

The health of Indigenous Peoples around the world is tied to longstanding Indigenous knowledge practices and access to Indigenous traditional medicine systems. Indigenous communities continue to have concerns, however, about their ability to ensure intergenerational transfer of Indigenous traditional medicine knowledge. These concerns stem from the continued lack of Indigenous rights as a result of colonization, a lack of protection of land rights and different levels of Indigenous self-determination around the world, all of which affect traditional medicine access and practices. Indigenous Peoples' access to their traditional medicine systems will therefore continue to depend on their access to self-determination, land and cultural rights, as well as on Indigenous data sovereignty. A balanced approach to Indigenous health and well-being is needed that prioritizes Indigenous traditional practices, community involvement, and Indigenous cultural and language revitalization (with support for ongoing intergenerational knowledge transfer). These elements are important for bringing back ecological harmony to Indigenous Peoples, communities and the planet. Additionally, with sufficient resources and support, Indigenous Peoples and their concepts of health can be a blueprint for harmony for people and health systems more widely, with Indigenous Peoples being a key determinant of planetary health. We outline some key points to ensure that the concepts of health and well-being of Indigenous Peoples and their Indigenous traditional medicine systems are maintained going forward for individual, community and planetary health.

Indigenous Peoples have developed and stewarded complex knowledge systems that have contributed to thriving societies. With continued threats to Indigenous lifeways, there is increasing need to further protect traditional ecological knowledges (TEK). We carried out a qualitative study to explore Indigenous community perspectives on stewarding and protecting TEK while identifying gaps in community-level protections of TEK. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews in December 2024 and one focus group in January 2025 with Indigenous Peoples in the southwestern United States. Reflexive thematic analysis through open coding was carried out using qualitative software. Six overarching themes were characterized in the interviews, which overlapped with findings from the focus group, including the following: (1) Historical and current barriers impact the sharing of TEK; (2) Preserving our language is necessary for intergenerational transmission of our TEK; (3) Our TEK reveals changes to our Lands; (4) Protecting our Lands and medicines is vital to our health; (5) We must take the time to learn our TEK for future generations; and (6) We need to protect our TEK. Our research highlights the importance of supporting Indigenous communities’ capacities to protect their TEK for personal, community, and environmental well-being.

Despite evidence that Indigenous Peoples are better guardians of their Forests than international or state protection agencies, they continue to be forcibly evicted from their Lands. Additionally, despite the known impacts that forced land eviction for conservation has on the well-being of Indigenous Peoples in varied contexts, there remains limited appreciation of the well-being impacts of forced land eviction within Kenya from an Indigenous perspective. With this, the aim of this research was to better understand the well-being impacts of forced land evictions from an Ogiek perspective. Twenty-six semi-structured interviews and one sharing circle (n = 7) were carried out with Ogiek Peoples in Kenya between December 2021 and March 2023. The interviews and sharing circle were transcribed verbatim, then reflexive thematic analysis was carried out through iterative coding to identify key themes. Six themes were characterized including: 1) Our cultural practices, ceremonies, and spirituality are tied to our identity as Ogiek; 2) Our foods and plants are our medicines; 3) Maintaining our culture in an everchanging world; 4) The Forest and Ogiek are as one in a reciprocal relationship; 5) Removing an Ogiek from the Forest is like removing a fish from water; and 6) Hope that our rights will be recognized. Findings also demonstrated that the forced displacement of Ogiek Peoples by government entities has continued to impact the social and economic vitality of their communities. Our study exemplifies the substantial and ongoing impacts of colonial conservation approaches on Ogiek Peoples in Kenya, and highlights the continued need for local and international allies to stand in solidarity with and support Ogiek and other Indigenous Peoples in their efforts to return as the original stewards of their Forest and other homelands.

Planetary health movements have advanced substantially within the last ten years with new frameworks and models being considered within health systems in varied contexts. Despite advancements, there continues to be an overall lack of accessible and regional- or field-specific planetary health frameworks to inform health systems. We therefore set out to conduct a scoping review to identify current planetary health-related frameworks that have been developed for health systems. We systematically searched the following electronic databases up to November 2023: Medline, CAB Abstracts, and Scopus; and carried out manual searches in Overton, Policy Commons, Google, and Google Scholar. We engaged a two-stage article review process, then used content analysis to identify the different domains. We identified six overarching categories within the planetary health-related frameworks including: 1) health system and environmental impacts; 2) vision, advocacy, leadership, and communication elements; 3) key structural components for environmentally sustainable health systems; 4) climate resiliency and environmental sustainability of healthcare facilities and systems; 5) climate-resilient and sustainable technologies and infrastructure; and 6) evaluation and accountability mechanisms. Regional, national, and international governments, funding agencies, and organizations are called to support greater research and implementation work around planetary health-informed health systems change while considering existing frameworks. Better inclusion of all facets of planetary health (e.g., biodiversity), as well as key acknowledgement and work with other knowledge systems (e.g., Indigenous Peoples and their knowledge systems) are needed to ensure planetary health-related frameworks are grounded in what we are trying to protect—the planet itself.