Storytelling for Change ft. Kiliii Yüyan

And in my 30s, I became a photographer and not that long after became a National Geographic photographer.

And I pitched stories that took me to Indigenous communities around the world.

And I started to see that there was actually a really powerful link between the world's most beautiful places and the people that lived in those places.

And in fact, Indigenous territories make up almost 40% of all remaining natural lands.

And indigenous territories contain more biodiversity than national parks and UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

So I want to take you guys on a journey and start in the Pacific, in the island nation of Palau, which is an indigenous majority country.

And the coral reefs of Palau have among the highest biodiversity in all the world's seas.

They're also the most resilient to climate change.

The Scripps Oceanographic Institute, which I traveled there with, tracked changes to the coral here in Palau and found that Palauan reefs would actually recover from coral bleaching really fast.

Why? Because of huge numbers of healthy fish.

So Palau's ancient system of fishery management is called BUL, or B-U-L, and this is how it works even today.

So one day you have a chief that hears from a fisherman that there's not a lot of parrotfish left near a certain reef.

So the chief, who is a fisherman himself, goes freediving and finds, oh, yeah, there's not a lot of parrotfish here.

Let's shut it down.

So the chief declares a bull or a closure, closing down one area of the reef, and then that automatically opens up another part of the reef.

And that's how that fishery is kept so healthy.

And that includes these young reef sharks who were living in the protection of a mangrove lagoon.

So the indigenous Palauans made history when they were the first ones to declare their waters as a shark sanctuary.

For them, it was kind of a no-brainer.

This was part of their values.

And Palau is just, I have to say, I mean, it's full of magical animal encounters like this beautiful black banded sea snake, which is one of the most venomous snakes in the world.

But they're also very curious and lovable.

And this image made the cover of the 2023 National Geographic Pictures of the Year.

So I want to jump over to the world's oldest rainforest, which is Australia's wet tropics.

So it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site.