Review of How Indigenous Peoples Foster Biodiversity on Their Land

There’s an old-fashioned belief in Western conservation that the only way to save nature is to keep humans away from it. New analysis shows how wrong that assumption is.

The environmental importance of Indigenous peoples

There’s a lot of land with people living on it whose biodiversity is just as high, if not better, than on comparable abandoned land - and it’s mostly populated by Indigenous communities. Indeed, Indigenous and community lands store a third of Earth’s irrecoverable carbon and provide habitat for a majority of its terrestrial mammals.

However, few studies have considered the Indigenous or traditional ecological knowledge that sustains these environmental outcomes. Until now. And it follows an earlier study that found that the world's healthiest, most biodiverse, and most resilient forests are found in Indigenous protected areas.

For a long time, it has been fashionable for well-meaning activists to say we should learn more from Indigenous knowledge systems, and yet that’s seldom put into practice. Now scientists are stepping up - last month, Nature published a systemic review of Indigenous land management practices across 27 nation-states. The conservation world could do well to look at the findings: ways to live well with nature where, yes, trees can be cut and rivers can be fished and animals can be hunted, but within frameworks that work with the world at large, rather than against it.

Great Cumbung Swamp in 2019 (left) and 2022 (right). Photos: James Fitzsimons and Matt Davis.

That is why, for example, The Nature Conservancy TNC) regularly sells lands to First Nations when they want them preserved in perpetuity. The latest victory: Australia’s Great Cumbung Swamp, a drought refuge currently being evaluated as a Ramsar wetland of international significance, is now in the care of Australia’s Nari Nari Tribal Council. Logged and grazed for decades, the land came up for sale in 2019, and the Nature Conservancy snapped it up.

Good thing, too. The land, which when purchased was nearly denuded, is an incredibly important drought refuge for the regions fauna, who come to the wetland when the rest of the landscape is dry. This year, TNC sold the land to the Nari Nari Tribal Council, which pledged to protect the wetland long-term as they are already doing for adjoining properties.