Advances in Sustainable Agriculture and Horticulture: Towards Resilient, Productive, and Ecologically Sound Food Systems

Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) is broadly defined as the cumulative body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs about the relationships between living beings, including humans, and their environment. This knowledge has evolved through adaptive processes and has been handed down over generations through cultural transmission. The accelerating trajectory of global climate change has exposed the limitations of conventional, technology-centric adaptation strategies, prompting growing scholarly and policy interest in the potential of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) as a complementary and culturally grounded framework for resilience. This review synthesises evidence from peer-reviewed literature published between 2000 and 2026, examining the roles of ethnobotanical practices, traditional water harvesting systems, and community-led adaptation approaches in enabling diverse human communities to respond to climate variability. Drawing on articles retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar using structured search strings, this review identifies consistent findings across geographic contexts: that ITEK embodies sophisticated, place-specific ecological intelligence developed over generations; that ethnobotanical knowledge underpins food security, medicinal resilience, and agro-ecological diversification under shifting climatic conditions; that indigenous water technologies including qanats, zai pits, johads, and terraced irrigation systems offer locally appropriate and low-carbon alternatives to engineered water infrastructure; and that community-led adaptation, when anchored in indigenous governance structures and participatory processes, tends to produce more durable and equitable outcomes than externally imposed interventions. The review further identifies critical challenges, including the erosion of intergenerational knowledge transmission, inadequate intellectual property protections for traditional knowledge holders, the persistent devaluation of ITEK within mainstream scientific and policy discourse, and the risk of decontextualised appropriation. The chapter concludes by articulating pathways for biocultural integration, calling for the co-production of climate knowledge between indigenous communities and scientific institutions, and for legal and institutional frameworks that uphold the rights and agency of traditional knowledge holders.