Jeneva Wright
ACUA Chair

In June, David Ball and I presented “Depth Without Division: Intangible Heritage and Living Seascapes” at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, as part of the scientific conference marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. It was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with members of the 2001 Convention’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Body, Secretariat staff, and researchers and practitioners from around the globe, all gathered to take stock of what the Convention has accomplished and where the next twenty-five years might lead.

A panel of four speakers sits at a long desk in a wood‑paneled conference room, with a large screen behind them displaying a tree diagram labeled “Tangible World” and “Intangible World.”
Delivering “Depth Without Division: Intangible Heritage and Living Seascapes”, UNESCO 2026. Image credit: Chihiro Nishikawa.

Our contribution centered on a question the field is increasingly asking: what do our international frameworks do with the living knowledge, community relationships, and ecological memory that coastal and Indigenous communities carry in connection to underwater places? We considered examples such as submerged landscapes, the named channels of Hawai’i that encode generations of navigational knowledge, and oral traditions, like that of the Wampanoag people of Nantucket Sound, that preserved accurate memory of a coastline that has been underwater for thousands of years. Nearly two thousand coastal Indigenous communities in eighty-seven countries hold living relationships to submerged landscapes (Cisneros-Montemayor et al. 2016; Perez-Alvaro 2023). Our governance frameworks are still working out how to see them fully.

The good news is that this conversation has real momentum. The newest marine treaty instrument, the 2023 Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, explicitly references Indigenous knowledge and free, prior, and informed consent. Researchers and communities are developing braided and two-eyed seeing methodologies that weave Indigenous and Western knowledge systems together rather than treating one as supplementary to the other (Bartlett et al. 2012; Kimmerer 2013; Ball et al. 2015; Wright et al. 2019). And climate change, as much as it intensifies the threats to intangible heritage, also clarifies something important: the communities most affected are often the ones whose knowledge systems are best equipped to help us understand what is being lost, and how to navigate what comes next.

What we brought to the discussion was also a case for where professional non-governmental organizations fit in. ACUA and SHA are not treaty parties, and we are not constrained by a single convention’s mandate. What we can do is connect, linking the governance conversations happening in UNESCO to the practitioners, researchers, and communities doing the work on the ground. We can help organize the technical expertise our members hold so that Indigenous communities engaging with complex regulatory processes have meaningful support, without being asked to expose or surrender their knowledge in the process.

Two people wearing professional attire and badges stand in front of a dense display of international flags arranged in rows, suggesting a formal global or diplomatic setting.
Jeneva Wright and Dave Ball, representing ACUA and SHA, UNESCO 2026. Image credit: Charlotte Jarvis.

This is an open and ongoing dialogue, and it belongs to all of us. If your work touches any of these questions—community partnerships, field research, policy engagement, or teaching—we want to hear from you. Reach out. This is exactly the kind of work ACUA exists to support and connect.

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