Lighthouse
Indigenous Knowledge and Ocean Solutions
This Indigenous-led invitation calls on ocean carers, practitioners, Indigenous knowledge holders, artists, researchers, community leaders, and allies to co-create a living safe space with the IMCC8 community, where different ways of knowing can meet in respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility for co-creation of ocean futures.
Marine conservation is often shaped by a dominant frame: endangered species, ecosystems, researchers, data, management and enforcement. This frame influences how ocean solutions are imagined, funded, put into practice and most significantly experienced.
Yet Indigenous peoples and marginalised coastal communities hold deep tangible and intangible relationships with the ocean through knowledge, practice, culture, heritage, responsibility and kinship. Ocean solutions are stronger when these knowledge systems shape the first frame, not only the final response.
KEY GAP
The key gap is not simply that Indigenous voices are missing from marine conversations about conversation. It is that they are too often invited into systems and processes already defined by others and rigid. This invitation asks instead: what becomes possible when Indigenous knowledge, protocols, relationships, and responsibilities help lead the frame from the beginning?
LIGHTHOUSE PROGRAMME AT IMCC8
The Lighthouse Programme is an Indigenous-led, co-designed platform for deep listening, unlearning, and learning anew. It creates space for stories, relationships, creative practice, cultural knowledge, and different ways of making meaning to guide more inclusive ocean stewardship.
The space is grounded in the principles of reciprocity and UBUNTU (I am because we are). Contributors share on their own terms, in ways that honour consent, cultural protocols, relationships, and community responsibilities.
By centering Indigenous leadership and diverse knowledge systems, the programme becomes a beacon for locally grounded, just, and connected conservation solutions that can better safeguard our shared ocean heritage.
YOU ARE INVITED TO CONTRIBUTE
If your work is rooted in Indigenous or traditional knowledge systems, community practice, creative expression, interdisciplinary work, or place-based ocean stewardship, we invite you to contribute to this shared space of learning, listening, co-creation, and reciprocity.
Share your stories, lived experiences, knowledge, and practice with the IMCC8 community
Contributions may take the form of art, song, storytelling, cultural immersion, ceremony, dialogue, practice-sharing, or other participatory formats. Together, we can shape a collective space where new relationships, practices, and pathways can emerge for ocean life, livelihoods, and heritage.
In the face of today’s ocean crisis, strong, connected, and diverse voices are essential. Together, let us illuminate different pathways toward a more sustainable future for our shared ocean.
Submit your proposal by October 05.
Submit a Community-Led Programming Proposal
LIGHTHOUSE LEADS
Loyiso Dunga | Lighthouse Lead
Founder and Director of Asili Blue Renaissance (ASILI) and a marine biologist working at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, science, and policy.
Katy Bear Nalven| Lighthouse Co-Lead
Ocean conservation researcher and practitioner focused on developing collaborative strategies for equitable conservation that support ecosystems, wildlife, and communities.
Marine Cusa | Lighthouse Co-Lead
Marine Cusa is part of the Lighthouse leadership team, contributing to the programme’s focus on community-led approaches, diverse knowledge systems, and collaborative ocean conservation.
Connecting Ideas to Action: the IMCC8 Reflections Process
IMCC is a rare opportunity: a few hundred of us convening in one place to share what we've been working on since the last time we met. What's missing is a way to share what we're learning before we leave. Someone describes how they solved a problem you've been stuck on for two years, and right now that conversation ends when the coffee break does. What does get captured usually surfaces months later in a proceedings paper, long after the conversation has moved on. The Reflections Program is our attempt to catch that while we're still together and turn it into something the community can use.
It builds on a session at IMCC7 in Cape Town, where around sixty people spent an afternoon reflecting on what the Congress had produced. It worked, so this time we're trying it across the whole of IMCC8, closing with a plenary on the final day. This is the first time IMCC has run something like this, and we'd like the community to shape what it becomes.
Drawing on diverse examples from different disciplines, regions and scales, the process will connect the dots between knowledge generation, decision-making and implementation. We want to hear about successes, challenges and practical experience, including what was involved, who needed to be at the table, how long things took, and what it cost.
The process will also explore common barriers, identify gaps and critical areas for support, and consider how we can break down silos and build stronger connections between early-career professionals, decision-makers, communities, experts from different disciplines and pioneers.
Importantly, the conversation won't end when the Congress does. We will capture the collective thinking generated during the event and consider how it can be carried forward into individual practice, regional and thematic communities, future IMCCs, and wider initiatives such as the Ocean Decade Blueprints of the UN Ocean Decade.
We encourage everyone to get involved! Over the course of the Congress, we will ask you for your feedback and reflections on session outcomes, things that you have learned, people you met, and conversations you had that changed your perspective. We also aim to organize lunchtime dialogues to discuss critical topics, challenge our thinking, learn from each other, and give people a chance to meet and interact.
Your IMCC reflection session planning team: Jason Landrum, Lydia Koehler, Shaili Johri, John Cigliano, Angelo Villagomez, Alia Hidayat, Nathan Fedrizzi, Andrew Lewin, Marine Cusa
Creative Contributions
Click here or the banner above to learn more about the creative contributions for delegates to participate in at IMCC8! Creative contributions include:
- The Sea We Share: A Collaborative Mosaic presented by Lisa Tossey, Wooden Octopus, USA: The Sea We Share is a participatory art installation that invites conference attendees to help build a collaborative mosaic representing their collective perspectives. By hand pressing small prints, participants will help build a large image of a breaking wave that visually reflects the diversity of disciplines, experiences, and cultural backgrounds of those at the conference, and make a duplicate print for themselves to take home as an IMCC8 keepsake.
- Drawing the ocean: collective comics for hidden marine ecosystems presented by Camilla Brogi, Bioscience Research Centre & CoNISMa, Italy: An interactive art-led workshop exploring hidden marine ecosystems through visual storytelling and comics. Inspired by mediterranean Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows, the session invites participants to reimagine secret underwater habitats using provided species prompts or personal knowledge. Through drawing and collaborative storytelling, participants produce short comics or collective posters depicting marine life, species interactions, and conservation threats. Suitable for all artistic levels, this inclusive session fosters empathy, critical thinking, and dialogue on human–ocean relationships, demonstrating how creative arts can bridge science, imagination, and ocean conservation awareness.
- Coastal Testimonies presented by Our Seas Coalition, Scotland: Coastal Testimonies is a powerful, inclusive and diverse set of photographic portraits and testimonies that brings together voices from many walks of life; fishermen, scientists, educators, activists, young apprentices and lifelong coastal workers. The testimonies come from all of Scotland’s 11 marine regions and together they highlight the deep and diverse relationships people have with our shared sea, and the importance of protecting Scotland’s inshore waters for future generations.
- Andanía: The Sea’s Might presented by SOEC | Nudo Producciones | SERNANP: The exhibition seeks to bring us closer to the experience
of reviving an ancestral practice deeply connected to the sea and shaped by El Niño. Through photographs and artworks created during the reconstruction and voyage of a great ancestral raft of the American Pacific, the works explore the connections between biodiversity and culture, and the forms of resilience that emerge from this relationship, across a corridor that links protected areas in northern Peru with the Amazon. - Through Her Lens: Women in Ancon’s Fisheries presented by Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Peru: A photovoice exhibition presenting the lived experiences of women from Ancon, Peru, following the country’s largest marine oil spill in January 2022. Through photographs taken by the women themselves, the exhibit highlights their critical roles not only in fisheries, but also in supporting marine food systems, family livelihoods, and community resilience.
Questions? Contact us at IMCCteam@conbio.org