Indigenous Peoples are crucially important to protecting biodiversity, but the claim that 80% of biodiversity is found on Indigenous lands is not based on science

A new paper in Nature Magazine finds that the 80% figure is unsupported.

Two quotations, to start with:

“Indigenous peoples comprise five per cent of the world's population but embody 80 per cent of the world’s cultural diversity. They are estimated to occupy 20% of the world’s land surface but nurture 80% of the world's biodiversity on ancestral lands and territories.”

“Traditional Indigenous Territories encompass up to 22 percent of the world’s land surface. They coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.”

The first is from a 2002 paper submitted in preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. The second is from a 2008 report from the World Bank.

Since then, the claim that Indigenous Peoples protect 80% of global biodiversity has been repeated so often it has become accepted as a truism.

It has been referred to nearly 350 times including UN reports, World Bank reports, news articles, and NGO websites. More than half of these references came in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

But a new paper published in Nature finds that the 80% figure is not based on science.

The paper is written by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Australia’s Charles Darwin University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Indiana University Bloomington, and Forest Peoples Programme. It also included several Indigenous Peoples.

The researchers make clear that, “Indigenous Peoples and their territories are indeed key to safeguarding biodiversity for future generations”. Their concern is that,

The continued use of this number by United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), journalists, conservation biologists and Indigenous activists and advocates, among others, could damage the exact cause that it is being used to support. Efforts to draw on and prioritize Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge in biodiversity conservation, and to protect their governance and rights, could be undermined if the credibility of individuals and organizations who make this claim is questioned.

80% figure is “wrong”

In an article in The Conversation, two of the researchers, Stephen Garnett and Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, list four reasons why the 80% figure is wrong:

• The possible sources for the figure — an encyclopedia chapter and a report on poverty — are either misquotes [from], or a poor summary of, previous research.

• When the figure was first published in the early 2000s, the extent of Indigenous Peoples’ lands and seas had not yet been mapped. So precisely determining what proportion of biodiversity it contained was not possible.

• Biodiversity in its true sense cannot be counted. The widely accepted definition of biodiversity encompasses everything from genes to entire ecological communities. It is impossible to estimate a percentage of something that cannot be quantified.

• Even if one considers biodiversity simply as a list of plant and animal species in a given location, many species have not yet been “described” by science. In other words, the species has not received a scientific name and been formally recognised in a scientific paper.

The 2008 World Bank report gives a 2005 report by the World Resources Institute as a source. That report is titled “The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty”. But WRI’s report makes no mention of 80% of global biodiversity.

The closest it comes is an observation that seven Indigenous communities in the Philippines were “maintaining over 80 percent of the original high-biodiversity forest cover”.

“Calculated over a few beers on the back of a napkin”

In 2019, researchers from Earth Island Institute and Sacred Land Film Project evaluated the World Bank’s claim that 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity is found on Indigenous Peoples’ land. The researchers contacted Stephen Garnett, one of the authors of the recent Nature paper. “We did look at the 80% assertion but could find no documented evidence supporting it,” Garnett told them.

The Earth Island research team concluded that “the World Bank’s figure is unsubstantiated”.

Toby McCleod of the Sacred Land Film Project contacted Claudia Sobrevilla, the author of the World Bank report. McCleod wrote that Sobrevilla told him that she “couldn’t remember where the 80 percent number came from”.

McCleod added that,

In confidence, another person who consulted on the report told me the 80 percent biodiversity number “was calculated over a few beers on the back of a napkin.”

Indigenous Peoples are crucially important to protecting biodiversity

The researchers of the recent paper in Nature make very clear that their criticism is of the 80% figure and not of Indigenous Peoples’ role in conserving biodiversity.

They write that,

Our criticism of the 80% claim should in no way undermine decades of effort by Indigenous Peoples’ organizations and others to influence international biodiversity and climate policy. Nor should it detract from the essential and verifiably considerable part that Indigenous Peoples play in the conservation of the planet’s biodiversity.

They note that studies have shown that more than one-third of the world’s intact forest landscapes are on Indigenous Peoples’ lands. “In the past five years,” they write, “the essential roles of Indigenous Peoples in global biodiversity conservation have been recognized in numerous landmark reports”.

The researchers conclude that,

The global conservation community must abandon the unsupported 80% claim, and instead acknowledge more comprehensively the crucial roles of Indigenous Peoples in biodiversity conservation, restoration and stewardship. This means acting in partnership with and supporting the leadership of Indigenous Peoples, recognizing their rights to their lands and seas, and involving them as leaders or as equal partners in decision-making. It means amplifying Indigenous voices in international biodiversity and climate-change forums, and providing Indigenous Peoples with resources so that they can lead their own conservation initiatives.