Correction: Using an inclusive bioeconomy framework in support of indigenous peoples and local communities living in mountains
Year: 2026
Type: erratum
Abstract: The ecological health of global mountains today is intimately connected with the current health and future well-being of people and nature on Earth. Mountains cover about 17-20% of the planet's terrestrial surface (Korner et al., 2021), yet highlands harbor over half of all global biodiversity hotspots and 30% of Key Biodiversity Areas (Payne et al., 2020). Montane regions provide disproportionately rich habitats for birds, mammals, and amphibians (Rahbek et al., 2019), and mountain ecosystems offer an array of important ecosystem services. Humans living in highlands have developed rich biocultural traditions and lifeways over centuries and today, some 500 million people dwell at 1500 meters or more above sea level, about 6.5% of all people on Earth (Tremblay and Ainslie, 2021). Links between people and nature are found everywhere in mountains. Upstream, highlands sequester a significant amount of carbon in soils and vegetation that need to be protected for climate change mitigation (Zomer et al., 2023), while downstream, some 20-25% of people on Earth depend on freshwater originating from the world's "water towers" (Viviroli et al., 2020).Yet, global montane regions are under increasing pressures from anthropogenic climate change and land-use patterns. Mountains are warming faster than other areas of Earth (Pepin et al., 2025); this is leading to irreversible loss of glacial mass (Van Tricht et al. 2025), and increasing likelihood of changes in montane groundwater availability (Somers and McKenzie, 2020) and carbon storage in montane grasslands and shrublands (Ward et al. 2014) into the future.Mountain people are already impacted by these changes. Ongoing montane land-use changes including loss of forests (Chen et al., 2024), habitat fragmentation (Theobald et al., 2024), and human resource extraction pressures inside existing protected areas (Li et al., 2026), are combining with climate impacts to drive general ecological degradation and increasing food insecurity for mountain people (Romeo et al., 2020).While impacts are not homogeneous across all global mountains, these trends are especially concerning in the Global South where the majority of montane people live (Dragonetti et al., 2024).Many of Earth's mountain-dwelling residents self-identify as indigenous, though there is little disaggregated data showing what percent of specific mountain regional populations identify as such. Across the great diversity of thousands of groups of indigenous peoples, there are multiple ways to describe "indigenous"(see discussion in Garnett et al., 2018;Reyes-Garcia et al., 2026). In this paper, we use a slightly modified definition from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (IPBES 2019): Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) are individuals and communities who self-identify as Indigenous and/or are members of local communities that maintain inter-generational reciprocal relations with nature through livelihoods, cultural identity, institutions, and ecological knowledge. For IPLC living in mountains, highlands not only uphold daily life, they also undergird identities and lifeways.Over the last decade, research has clarified that IPLC's reciprocal relations with lands and lifeways are powerful drivers for sustaining nature and people. Over 25% of global lands are managed by IPLC in multiple ways that result in effective conservation of biodiversity (Garnett et al., 2018). Compared to nation-state management, IPLC lands often exhibit greater ecological intactness (Fa et al., 2020) Goals, and are active in multiple international research and advocacy partnerships (Grumbine and Xu, 2021a). Scholars suggest that long-term global conservation goals cannot be met without wider acknowledgement, knowledge co-production, and sustained support with and for IPLC (Brondizio et al. 2021;Zheng et al., 2021).Despite advances in research and contributions by IPLC to long-term conservation planning, current on-the-ground actions to conserve mountain ecosystems and cultures remain limited (IPBES, 2024; UNEP, 2025). To address these issues, since 2016, members of the Mountain Partnership, an international alliance of over 70 countries and 600+ members hosted by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) (https://www.fao.org/mountain-partnership/about/vision-and-mission/en), have been developing a global-scale Mountain Futures Initiative with goals to enhance the ecological health of mountain ecosystems while supporting sustainable lifeways for highlands dwellers (Grumbine and Xu, 2021a). Recent actions include defining and beginning implementation of a Mountain Futures Action Plan linked to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) (Grumbine and Su, 2023). Today, there exist proposals to extend these efforts by employing an inclusive bioeconomy framework (hereafter inclusive BE) as the basis for ongoing coordination and implementation of international field research projects that seek to support and partner with mountain-dwelling IPLC (Xu and Grumbine, 2026). In early 2026, the Mountain Partnership released the Andorra Proclamation updating actions in mountains out beyond 2030 including efforts to accelerate a sustainable circular bioeconomy. In this paper, we review recent publications and ongoing work toward these goals, and then consider how employing an inclusive BE may strengthen and speed up support for montane IPLC into the future.Multiple versions of BE have been in existence for 15-20 years. From the beginning, these plans framed sustainable economic development within greater technological use of biological resources from a supply-side perspective on sustainability ( For each of the seven inclusive BE sectors identified above, we spotlight key issues for IPLC living in mountains that are identified by scholars and practitioners in the published literature. For each sector, we offer representative examples of recent and current work addressing these challenges with a focus on mountain IPLC. We then address overall lessons learned from reviewing the literature and future trends in the discussion section followed by policy implications in the conclusion. This single sector is almost as all-encompassing as inclusive BE itself. Circular economy practices seek to construct a more sustainable economic system by reducing, reusing, recycling, and recovering materials throughout life cycles of production, distribution, and consumption, while also attending to environmental quality and social equity. There is broad consensus in the literature that equitable and just social values need to be better incorporated into every sector of an inclusive BE. Yet, in addition to "ownership", there is ongoing debate about who defines "equitable", "inclusive", and "Led by the UN, The Mountain Partnership, and various international organizations, many efforts are underway to empower women in mountain communities. IPLC women are subject to complex relationships between gender and political participation even as they remain key activists in rights and land tenure Governments and private businesses often continue to view IPLC-led movements for social-ecological justice as less than legitimate (Urzedo and Robinson, 2023).Yet progress may be building slowly toward more social equity and justice for IPLC.But, given the great ambition of weaving this work into all sectors of inclusive BE to create a more sustainable whole, one must ask, what does the future hold?4 Discussion: The future montane bioeconomy begins now This literature review reveals broad trends that shed light on using a more inclusive BE in support of IPLC living in mountains. We spotlight five trends: lessons learned from the literature; using inclusive BE; shifts in nature and people; actions of governments and institutions; and ongoing support for IPLC living in mountains.There are six lessons that are documented across every sector of inclusive BE about how to increase support for montane IPLC. These are: recognize, respect and foreground IPLC rights to self-determination; work to establish partnerships with IPLC, researchers, governments, and other actors; integrate projects across multiple sectors and scales; build knowledge through better data; increase institutional and financial support from governments and the private sector; and substantially scale up all these efforts for every sector of inclusive BE. The expert consensus is that every one of these steps is necessary and none alone are sufficient for progress to be made. Our subjective sense of these lessons is straightforward: the more the majority of recommended actions are implemented, the more rapidly support can be scaled up for IPLC. For the hundreds of studies that we reviewed, we see no need to recapitulate the many specific actions that can be taken to advance support for montane IPLC using an inclusive BE. But this literature review has made us aware that specific coverage of IPLC living in mountains is quite scant; most publications aggregate diverse IPLC into a general, composite category for global-scale analyses. However, given the great geographic spread and cultural diversity of IPLC, we are aware from our own field work that much sustainability work remains place-based and often less subject to publication. Any academic literature portrayal at the global scale is therefore unlikely to capture a full measure of positive progress and negative barriers that impact upon IPLC living in mountains. We also want to emphasize that the last lesson from this literature review ---the need to substantially increase support for montane IPLC in all sectors of inclusive BE---shows that 20 years and more of calls for change from international experts and researchers have yet to exert enough influence for countries to rachet up to scale actions that can make a difference.4.2 Future Trends: Using an inclusive BE Working to design and implement an inclusive BE that supports IPLC living in mountains (or any people living anywhere) is deeply aspirational. Inclusive BE shares this trait with the SDGs, the UN climate and biodiversity COP conventions, and work to build "ecological civilization". All these efforts are meant to be guiding stars toward a sustainable future resulting in better policies and more successful implementation;no one expects aspirational goals to be completely fulfilled. Nor does anyone expect researchers who have been socialized to split knowledge into silos or workers trained to narrowly focus on one sector of governance or business to immediately evolve into interdisciplinary actors. Transformations take time. The question becomes: is the social-ecological, multi-sectoral nature of inclusive BE an improved model that can stimulate more people to engage in more actions for long-term sustainability? We think that this can happen, but it has not happened yet (Santos, 2026). In fact, we believe that not making the attempt to use an inclusive BE (or some other transformative framework) will likely result in increased suffering for more people along with more degraded ecosystems less supportive of human endeavors, given the profound inadequacy of current mainstream efforts as detailed in this review. Of course, tensions and tradeoffs between different actors (including IPLC) will not disappear just because partners work within a more inclusive BE. While actions to increase social equity and decolonization for IPLC will continue to be slow and hard- ). Yet, at the same time, uncertainty is evident everywhere for IPLC living in mountains, and the future is a moving target for ecosystems, territories, and cultures.We want to make several summary observations after reviewing these trends. The evolution away from a technology-focused bioeconomy toward the inclusive BE framework described in this paper is a positive response to growing awareness of planetary polycrises that are driving uncertainty around the world (Rakowski et al., 2025;Santos, 2026). Inclusive BE is not a panacea for any of the issues outlined here, but it does offer a more holistic approach to assist people everywhere--researchers and experts, government workers, and more-to reframe their work as they learn to fully recognize and engage with IPLC as co-partners. We have focused this paper on support for mountain-dwelling IPLC, but the recommendations herein have broad application beyond highlands and indigenous peoples.As inclusive BE projects proceed in mountains and elsewhere and innovative learning accumulates, best practices may be debated, agreed upon, adopted, and scaled up. We also understand that another definition of the term uncertainty is 'undetermined'; future change will always be subject to the less predictable human capacity to make decisions today that may scale up sustainable behaviors tomorrow.Indigenous people living in mountains have made sustainability a cornerstone of their cultures for centuries; today, and into the future, many more people now have the chance to learn from and follow their example.Author contributions JX: conceptualization, methodology, funding acquisition, writing-review and editing.REG: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing-original draft, review and editing.
Authors: Jianchu Xu, R. Edward Grumbine
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
OpenAlex ID: W7220942143