Our Daily Planet

January 29, 2021
In an open letter, 450 elected officials from all around the U.S. support President Biden’s Executive Order action this week to protect 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. The officials hope that the president will lead a swift and aggressive campaign to combat global warming and the extinction crisis through conserving land and ocean spaces for the benefit of nature. Biden has also pledged to reverse a number of the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks, many of which reduced protections for key public lands and infringed on Indigenous sovereignty.

Why This Matters: As this letter makes clear, parks and access to nature are important to Americans across the country – in red and blue states.  During his time in office, Trump rolled back protections for countless public lands, including areas like Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments in Utah, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The rollbacks, meant to clear the way for development, largely failed to attract buyers in Alaska, but fossil fuel companies bought up enough land in the Western U.S. at the end of the Trump administration to continue oil drilling for years.

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Mongabay

December 23, 2020
The world is facing an ongoing sixth mass extinction. To curb this human-caused loss of global biodiversity, many countries have made commitments to protect and conserve large areas of land in the coming decades. But the fate of the Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendants who live on these lands remains unclear.

A new study conducted by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) in collaboration with the Campaign for Nature addresses the risks these groups face from exclusionary conservation measures and urges decision-makers to adopt rights-based conservation approaches.

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Indian Country Today - OpEd

December 17, 2020
Our lands, waters, and tribal communities are currently under siege from biodiversity loss and climate change impacts. As tribal leaders, we recognize that threats to nature and our climate are direct threats to our tribal nations. Progress to safeguard our wildlife and lands in the U.S. has slowed to a near standstill in recent years.

The Trump Administration has taken unprecedented actions to eliminate protections for critical conservation areas and species. Protected areas serve a crucial role in conserving biodiversity, culturally important ecosystems, and mitigating climate change impacts.

President-elect Joe Biden and Congresswoman Deb Haaland are taking direct action to safeguard our environment through an initiative called Thirty by Thirty (30x30) to conserve at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.

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Xinhua Net

December 16, 2020
Multilateral institutions and governments should harness traditional knowledge, practices and innovations possessed by indigenous people in order to revitalize the biodiversity conservation agenda, experts said on Tuesday evening.

Speaking at a virtual forum for indigenous communities' leaders from Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Latin America, the experts said that forest dwellers, hunter-gatherers and nomads are endowed with expertise that can be tapped to strengthen protection of habitats.

"We need to recognize the contribution of indigenous people to the global conservation agenda," said Viviana Figueroa, a legal expert from International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

Figuero said that indigenous communities have for centuries demonstrated prowess in conserving biodiversity hotspots that underpin global food, energy and water security.

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EFE Verde

December 15, 2020
Leaders and representatives of indigenous peoples have asked this Wednesday that the aspirations and ambitions of their peoples be included, recognized and integrated in the process of drawing up the Biodiversity Treaty of the United Nations Convention on the Biological Diversity (CBD).

According to the leaders at the virtual press conference, the zero draft of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework - which will be adopted next year at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the CBD and will set the global agenda for the next 30 years with the objective of guaranteeing the protection of nature - it does not reflect or take into account the aspirations of indigenous peoples.  

"We ask the States to advance in this treaty and recognize the rights, contributions (of indigenous peoples) and our health and sovereignty systems," said the coordinator of the Program for the Management of Natural Resources with Indigenous Peoples of Central America, Ramiro Batzin.

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Thomson Reuters

October 20, 2020
As recent headlines about forest blazes, melting glaciers and sinking islands have made clear, the natural world is in peril. And with repeated warnings about the grim state of biodiversity - and, at the same time, promising predictions about the role of nature in boosting our economies and protecting our health - we need a change in the way we are protecting nature, more than ever before. 

Right now, government officials in countries around the globe, from Canada to Australia, are beginning to take note of a solution critical to a global effort to stop the breakdown of nature. That is partnering with indigenous peoples and local communities who have successfully conserved the biodiversity on their lands for millennia, using traditional knowledge passed down through generations. 

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The Manilla Times

October 15, 2020
Indigenous peoples and local communities offer the best hope for solutions to our planetary emergency. These solutions are grounded in traditional, time-tested practices and knowledge.

Indigenous peoples already steward 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity, as well as nearly one-fifth of the total carbon sequestered by tropical and subtropical forests. Moreover, indigenous territories encompass 40 percent of protected areas globally.

Yet the voices of indigenous peoples and local communities are barely heard and are often excluded from decision-making. Their rights over land, territories and resources are routinely overlooked, and they are frequently threatened and often victimized by murder, assault, intimidation and detention.

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Al Jazeera - OpEd

October 12, 2020
The crisis signs could not be clearer: fires, floods, droughts, pandemic, species extinction … Earth is screaming with all its might. We need to listen and act.

We must defend the planet’s life support against relentless corporate greed and rediscover humanity as part of the natural world, for current and future generations. Restoring balance requires governments to heed the knowledge of communities who have listened deeply and worked with Mother Nature for generations – and to recognise and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.

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Mongabay

October 9, 2020
In 2010, the member nations of the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 195 countries plus the EU, agreed that at least 17% of global land and 10% of the ocean needed to be protected by 2020.

A new global review finds that many countries have fallen short of these targets, and the expansion of protected areas over the past 10 years has not successfully covered priority areas such as biodiversity hotspots and areas providing ecosystem services.

The research team overlaid maps of protected areas, threatened species, productive fisheries, and carbon services, and found that 78% of known threatened species do not have adequate protection.

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The Hill - OpEd

September 28, 2020
This month, world leaders are convening for the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly. While nations will sign a declaration marking the milestone, the reality is that this is no time to rest or to celebrate.

Interlinked challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and economic recovery will be in full focus during UNGA, and the 75th session will culminate with a special high-level Summit on Biodiversity on Sept. 30. There are many overlapping crises that the world is facing, from a global health crisis to record job losses to a growing recognition of long standing systemic racism and growing inequality. 

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Campaign For Nature

September 23, 2020
A complement to the fifth edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook, the second Local Biodiversity Outlooks assesses the views and contributions of Indigenous and Local Communities (IPLCs) to the conservation of biodiversity, finding their their vital role has been “disregarded,” to date, marking a “missed opportunity” as the world seeks to address the dual challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Project Syndicate

September 22, 2020
A growing body of evidence shows that lands and waters that are owned, managed, and used by indigenous peoples and local communities are much healthier than those that aren’t. Governments and multilateral bodies owe it to everyone to engage them in discussions about protecting biodiversity.

In May 2019, a landmark report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services painted a bleak picture of our planet’s health. Around one million animal and plant species – more than ever before in human history – are now threatened with extinction, many within decades. Pollution is proliferating, land degradation is accelerating, and we are nowhere near on track to achieve global goals for protecting biodiversity and achieving sustainability.

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Fronteras

September 1, 2020
It seems counterintuitive to many of us — in order to keep our landscape healthy, we need to let it burn sometimes. That's the lesson that many indigenous leaders are hoping we can learn in order to help our wildfire-ravaged forests and grasslands in the West recover. For tens of thousands of years before Western settlers came to California and Arizona, indigenous peoples cared for the land and made it thrive — often using fire as a tool. And today, there are efforts underway to relearn those lessons and restore our land. I spoke with Debra Utacia Krol, indigenous affairs reporter at the Arizona Republic, more about it.

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Our Daily Planet

August 9, 2020
Yesterday was the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.  In recognition of that, and the key role Indigenous peoples are playing in the conservation movement today in the U.S. and globally, we sat down with Raina Thiele, who is Dena’ina Athabascan, and Yup’ik, and has worked at the highest levels of government on Tribal outreach and issues. She now runs her own business and serves as an advisor on Indigenous issues to the Campaign for Nature.

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African Arguments

July 22, 2020
When it comes to biodiversity, South Africa offers some cautionary tales. The country is the world’s third most biodiverse – containing, fully or partially, three of the earth’s 36 biodiversity hotspots – yet it has lost more than 18% of its natural habit and nearly half its terrestrial ecosystems are threatened.

However, South Africa also offers some invaluable lessons in how biodiversity can be protected. For that tale, we should look to the Gumbi, a small clan of Zulu-speaking people in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Their story underscores the wisdom of conserving large areas of biodiversity and, in the words of the Gumbi leadership, finding ways to “share life with nature”. Here’s what they did.

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