ABSTRACT
These rather scant recommendations hardly impose any obligations on UNFCCC Parties. Equally, IPCC has not created institutional pathways to systematically
involve ILK holders in its work, along the lines of IPBES.55 The application of ILK to climate change, nevertheless, raises a host of questions concerning the maintenance of lifestyles that enable the continued creation and transmission of ILK; securing interaction between modern science and ILK in a way that is respectful of the latter; and enabling ILK holders to participate in the design of climate change response measures. As seen earlier, these questions have already been considered, at least to some extent, in the context of extant international instruments and processes dealing with ILK. The only area of the climate regime where the potential for cross-fertilization
with these instruments and processes has been explicitly acknowledged so far is that of measures to incentivize developing countries’ forest carbon storage capacity, commonly referred to with the acronym “REDD+”.56 In this context, UNFCCC Parties have undertaken some steps to recognize and address overlaps with States’ obligations concerning ILK under human rights law and biodiversity law. Still, the matter of ILK in the climate regime raises particularly complex and multifaceted regulatory questions, whose answers are yet to be written. In this regard, important lessons can be drawn from the implementation of extant international instruments dealing with ILK and from the practice that is being developed in the context of IPBES (Savaresi, 2015).
