Kherlen River in Mongolia (flowing to Dalainor Lake Ramsar wetland in China) is threatened by damming and water transfer to supply coal mining enterprises in Gobi Desert

Banks called upon to take action to protect biodiversity ahead of UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming

Today, 24 organisations and civil society alliances based in 16 countries sent an open letter to 55 private sector banks globally, calling on them to take concrete action to help protect biodiversity and safeguard the rights of Indigenous and local communities.

The signatories seek commitments from banks to adopt a “No Go” policy for high biodiversity areas, introduce methodologies to measure the impactsof their investment and financing activities on biodiversity, strengthen biodiversity and human rights safeguards in sector finance policies, refrain from financing carbon and biodiversity offset projects and respect Indigenous rights and the role of human rights and environmental defenders.

The letter was sent to banks five months ahead of the UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming, scheduled for October, which is tasked with reviewing the achievements of the Convention for Biological Diversity’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and deciding on follow-up steps to halt the accelerating extinction rate of animal and plant species globally. While banks are not formal parties to the conference, civil society considers it crucial that banks commit to support the objectives and targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The letter is part of the wider Banks and Biodiversity campaign, a civil society initiative launched in 2020 that seeks to safeguard the rights of Indigenous and traditional communities in formally, informally, or traditionally-held conserved areas, as well as to address the current crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and emergence of zoonotic diseases. The main objective of the campaign is to see banks and other financial institutions adopt a “No Go” policy which prohibits direct or indirect financing of unsustainable, extractive, industrial, environmentally, and/or socially harmful activities in or impacting upon eight categories of protected areas. These “No Go” areas include, but are not limited to: Indigenous Peoples and Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs), areas recognized by international conventions and agreements, such as the Ramsar Convention and World Heritage Convention sites, and Iconic Ecosystems, such as the Amazon and the Arctic. 

Marília Monteiro, Forests and Biodiversity Campaigner at BankTrack, commented: “Business activities such as infrastructure development, industrial agriculture, and the extractive fossil fuel and mining industries are major drivers of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss worldwide. As key financial supporters of these harmful activities, banks can have a major impact on either accelerating or slowing down these drivers of biodiversity destruction. The commitments we seek from banks will go a long way in ensuring safeguards against further biodiversity loss and violation of indigenous and traditional territories”.

Eugene Simonov, Coordinator of Rivers without Boundaries International Coalition (RwB) notes: “The importance of adopting “no go” policies is best exemplified by remaining free-flowing rivers – if you build a dam on such a yet unaffected river it will certainly interrupt key ecosystem processes and degrade habitat of endemic aquatic organisms. And there is no credible ‘mitigation’ solution for that other than to abstain from developing such infrastructure on new pristine watercourses. If we consider that 85% of known aquatic species populations are already in decline,  a ‘No Go’ policy is an imperative to preserve biodiversity and protect local people who depend on those wild rivers”.

Paulina Garzón, of Latinoamérica Sustentable, added: “A ‘No Go’ policy is a long overdue obligation for financial institutions around the world. To have best practices and standards is not enough anymore. The ecological integrity of the world’s ecosystems is too close to collapse. We urge all banks to stop lending to destructive projects in precious habitats.  It is time for the financial industry to respect our planet”.

Economic Policy Director of Friends of the Earth US Douglas Norlen added: “Biodiversity loss is an urgent global challenge on par with climate change, and yet banks have long failed to adequately recognize, let alone address the biodiversity impacts of their financing. The international banking sector must quickly rise to the challenge and prevent further biodiversity loss by adopting our proposed Banks and Biodiversity No Go policy in order to protect high biodiversity areas and respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Failing to stop biodiversity loss would be like failing to stop an open wound – a grim cascade of economic, social, and environmental collapse will most likely follow the bleed out.”

Marília Monteiro of BankTrack further added: “Currently, the majority of large international banks has not yet developed sufficient and effective systems to measure and monitor the impacts of their lending activities on biodiversity, and many have not yet publicly supported the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Many of the existing business initiatives aimed at biodiversity protection are based on the “financialization of nature” discourse, valuing biodiversity through a monetary lense while disregarding the intrinsic value of all nature, and not considering the underlying human and social issues. Indigenous peoples and local communities play a key role in protecting nature and biodiversity worldwide, and yet the banking sector as a whole is failing to guarantee the protection of their rights.”

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The world’s seven largest advanced economies agreed on Friday to stop international financing of coal projects that emit carbon by the end of this year, and phase out such support for all fossil fuels, to meet globally agreed climate change targets.

Stopping fossil fuel funding is seen as a major step the world can make to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, which scientists say would avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.

Getting Japan on board to end international financing of coal projects in such a short timeframe means those countries, such as China, which still back coal are increasingly isolated and could face more pressure to stop.

In a communique, which Reuters saw and reported on earlier, the Group of Seven nations – the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – plus the European Union said “international investments in unabated coal must stop now”.

“(We) commit to take concrete steps towards an absolute end to new direct government support for unabated international thermal coal power generation by the end of 2021, including through Official Development Assistance, export finance, investment, and financial and trade promotion support.”

Coal is considered unabated when it is burned for power or heat without using technology to capture the resulting emissions, a system not yet widely used in power generation.

Alok Sharma, president of the COP26 climate summit, has made halting international coal financing a “personal priority” to help end of the world’s reliance on the fossil fuel, calling for the UN summit in November to be the one “that consigns coal to history”.

He called on China to set out its “near-term policies that will then help to deliver the longer-term targets and the whole of the Chinese system needs to deliver on what President Xi Jinping has set out as his policy goals”.

BE MORE SPECIFIC, SAY GREEN GROUPS

The G7 nations also agreed to “work with other global partners to accelerate the deployment of zero emission vehicles”, “overwhelmingly” decarbonising the power sector in the 2030s and moving away from international fossil fuel financing, although no specific date was given for that goal.

They reiterated their commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement aim to cap the rise in temperatures to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times and to the developed country climate finance goal to mobilise US$100 billion annually by 2020 through to 2025.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry urged countries in the Group of 20 world’s largest economies to match the measures.

But some green groups said while they welcomed the steps, the G7 needed to set a stricter timetable.

Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said: “Too many of these pledges remain vague when we need them to be specific and set out timetabled action.”

In a report earlier this week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made its starkest warning yet, saying investors should not fund new oil, gas and coal supply projects if the world wants to reach net zero emissions by mid-century.

The number of countries which have pledged to reach net zero has grown, but even if their commitments are fully achieved, there will still be 22 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide worldwide in 2050 which would lead to temperature rise of around 2.1C by 2100, the IEA said in its “Net Zero by 2050” report.

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• Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) has unanimously accepted an appeal by the Guarani Kaiowá Indigenous people and agreed to review the process around a past case that cancelled the demarcation of their Indigenous territory.
• The Guarani Kaiowá’s decades-long fight for land rights to their ancestral territory, the Guyraroká land in Mato Grosso do Sul state, had been suspended by a 2014 ruling halting the territory’s demarcation process.
• The STF’s decision to review the process in the 2014 case, which hadn’t allowed for Indigenous consultation, is seen by analysts as a victory for Indigenous groups in Brazil, and as a setback for President Jair Bolsonaro who has declared his opposition to any Indigenous demarcation occurring during his administration.
• In a related upcoming case, the STF is expected to rule on the “marco temporal,” which requires that Indigenous people have been living on claimed lands in 1988 in order to establish a legal territory. But litigators have argued that date is unfairly arbitrary, as many Indigenous groups were forced off ancestral lands by then.

In a landmark decision that could bolster Indigenous land rights in Brazil and serve as a setback to the Bolsonaro administration’s stonewalling of demarcations, the country’s Supreme Court has agreed to review the process around a past case that cancelled the demarcation of an Indigenous territory claimed by the Guarani Kaiowá people.

In a unanimous decision last week, judges from the Supreme Federal Court (STF) accepted an appeal by the Guarani Kaiowá Indigenous people, whose decades-long fight for rights to the Guyraroká land was paralyzed by a 2014 ruling halting the territory’s demarcation process.

“This now paves the way for us to start the motion to annul that decision,” said Rafael Modesto dos Santos, legal advisor to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) and one of the lawyers for the Guyraroká community. “In other words, the process will start from zero. But before, we weren’t even allowed on the starting line.”

The Guyraroká territory, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, was recognized as an Indigenous territory in 2004, and FUNAI, the federal agency tasked with protecting Indigenous interests, began the lengthy demarcation process in 2009.

But before the territory could gain full protected status under federal law, STF judges ruled that the Guarani Kaiowá had no legal claim to their ancestral territory because they were not living on it when the Brazilian constitution came into force in 1988.

The community tried to appeal the decision several times with no success, before the case was closed in 2016. But in last week’s ruling, the STF said the 2014 decision to throw out the demarcation process could be appealed and reviewed because the legal proceedings had lacked input from the Indigenous community.

While this latest STF ruling does not overturn the 2014 decision to scrap the territory’s demarcation, the reopening of the case marks a turning point and also sets an important precedent for other disputes over Indigenous lands in Brazil, according to Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer with the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), a nonprofit that defends the rights of Indigenous and traditional people.

“It wasn’t just any victory, it was a victory by unanimous vote,” she told Mongabay. “All the judges agreed that, in a legal proceeding that harmed Indigenous people and did not give them the opportunity to participate, the proceeding must be annulled.”

“There is now a possibility for the judgement annulling the demarcation of Guyreroka to be overturned and another judgment to be handed down,” Batista said, adding that the ruling could also help other Indigenous groups who in the past weren’t allowed to participate in legal proceedings that revoked their land rights.

Last week’s decision is especially important within the current political context, in which signals by President Jair Bolsonaro have emboldened attacks on Indigenous land rights, according to Sarah Shenker, a campaigner with Survival International, an NGO that defends the rights of Indigenous people and has been working with the Guarani people for decades.

“With this war that is being waged on Brazil’s Indigenous people, it’s especially important that the Supreme Court has voted in favor of the Guarani and reminded everybody that Indigenous people have the right to a fair hearing,” Shenker said in an interview with Mongabay.

The Guyraroká territory at the center of the dispute sprawls across some 11,000 hectares (27,181 acres) of Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil’s agricultural heartland. A large part of the area being disputed by the Guyraroká is controlled by José Teixeira, a powerful politician and rancher.

The Guarani Kaiowá people say their land — part of Brazil’s vast tropical savanna biome known as the Cerrado — was stolen decades ago and turned into sugarcane plantations. The Indigenous families living on what they claimed as ancestral lands were forced into government reserves or pushed to the margins of nearby towns, according to Indigenous rights activists.

In 2000, a group of families returned to “re-occupy” a slice of the territory, setting up a makeshift village. Today, some 26 families remain on about 55 hectares (136 acres) of that territory, according to Shenker.

“These powerful ranchers are using the Guarani’s land,” she said. “And in the meantime, the Guarani are living in terrible conditions, in overcrowded reserves or on the sides of main roads or on tiny patches of their land, which they’ve tried to re-occupy.”

In 2013, the Guyraroká community’s leader Ambrósio Vilhalva was found dead just meters away from his home, a makeshift canvas shack in the occupied village. Police later said the murder was not connected to the local land dispute.

While the latest STF ruling has given the Guyraroká community new hope, there is no clear timeframe for when the case will move forward, Modesto dos Santos told Mongabay. “But we are confident that we will win.”

Legal experts say the Guyraroká case could be held up by another proceeding — a case involving the Xokleng Indigenous people in Santa Catarina state that also questions whether the government can deny land rights to Indigenous people whose territory was appropriated before 1988.

The STF ruling in that case — stalled since October 2020 — is expected to set a precedent that will decide whether the courts can place a time limit on the land rights of the Guarani Indigenous people — known as “marco temporal” in Portuguese.

Litigators have argued that the 1988 Indigenous occupation date is unfairly arbitrary, since many Indigenous groups had their ancestral lands stolen from them before that date and been forced off their lands.

“This is a process that will determine whether the “marco temporal” will be applicable to all Indigenous lands or not,” said Batista. “So we’re all watching closely.”

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Greenland’s left-wing environmentalist party promised to halt a mining project that could have made Greenland a major source of rare earths but at a potentially steep environmental price.

Greenland’s left-wing environmentalist party, Inuit Ataqatigiit, won a victory in general elections on Tuesday after campaigning against the development of a contentious rare earths mine partly backed by China.

The party, which had been in the opposition, won 37 percent of the vote over the longtime incumbents, the center-left Siumut party. The environmentalists will need to negotiate a coalition to form a government, but observers said their election win in Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark that sits on a rich vein of untapped uranium and rare earth minerals, signaled concerns from voters over the impact of mining.

“The people have spoken,” Múte B. Egede, the leader of Inuit Ataqatigiit, told the Danish broadcaster DR, adding that voters had made their position clear and that the mining project in Kvanefjeld in the country’s south would be halted.

Greenland Minerals, an Australian company behind the project, has said the mine has the “potential to become the most significant Western world producer of rare earths,” adding that it would create uranium as a byproduct. The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the vote.

The supply of rare earths, a crucial part of the high-tech global supply chain and used in the manufacture of everything from cellphones to rechargeable batteries, is currently dominated by China. Shenghe Resources, a Chinese rare earth company, owns 11 percent of Greenland Minerals.

Opposition to the Greenland mine, which the incumbent Siumut party had supported, played a primary role in its defeat, its leader, Erik Jensen, conceded in an interview with the Danish station TV2.

The mining project has been in development for years, with the government approving drilling for research, but not issuing final approval for the mine.

Among Greenlanders, opposition to the mine had grown over potential exposure of a unique, fragile area to “radioactive pollution and toxic waste,” said Dwayne Menezes, the director of the Polar Research and Policy Initiative, a London-based think tank. “What they’re opposed to is dirty mining.”

The election result sent a clear message, Mr. Menezes added: Mining companies that want access to Greenland’s deposits will have to abide by stringent environmental standards and should look to give Greenlanders a “viable alternative.”

In Greenland, whose economy is heavily dependent on payouts from Denmark, the tensions over the mine centered on the potential economic boon, including hundreds of jobs on an island with about 57,000 people, versus the environmental cost of doing business.

But the vote also highlighted the Arctic region’s growing geopolitical significance on a warming planet, as its polar seas become more navigable and as the melting ice unveils newly accessible resources, including the rare earths that play an essential part in the production of many alternative energy sources.

“On a global level, we are going to need to address head on this tension between Indigenous communities and the materials we are going to most need for a climate-stressed planet,” said Aimee Boulanger, the executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, a nonprofit.

Given China’s dominance over the global rare earth production and supply, Mr. Menezes said that Western countries should be looking for ways to enhance their partnerships with resource-rich Greenland to keep it in “their sphere of influence.”

Two years ago, Greenland’s lucrative resources and its increasing strategic importance led President Donald J. Trump to muse about purchasing the island. Greenland’s government, however, made clear that it was not for sale.

“We’re open for business, not for sale,” the island’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted on Twitter at the time.

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Colonial era policies in northern Scandinavia continue to affect Sámi life, culture and land use. Meanwhile, truth commissions are being set up and aim to investigate injustices against Indigenous people carried out by the states.

There are an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Sámi in the Arctic regions, whose traditional homeland, an area collectively referred to as Sapmi, spans the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia’s western Arctic.

From at least the 19th century, governments in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia pursued aggressive policies of assimilation, involving the education system and church discouraging or actively suppressing Sami languages and culture and forcibly assimilating Sami children into the dominant culture.

The Council of Europe and European human rights organisations have repeatedly condemned the lack of local representation of the Sámi in national governance decisions.

The process, Sámi representatives told EURACTIV, has negatively affected Sami languages, education and way of life until today.

But while the persecution of rights to culture and language have gradually ceased, climate change and land exploitation pose new threats to the existence of Sámi communities.

‘Truth commissions’

Sámi parliaments across Northern Europe have suggested the set-up of so-called truth commissions as one means of addressing systemic discrimination.

Inspired by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which completed its work in 2015, they are meant to include methods such as public hearings and “psychosocial support” for those who testify.

The Norwegian body was established in 2018, while the Finnish government agreed to the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2019 and the Sámi in Sweden started their work on a similar structure in 2020.

Russia, however, is lagging behind with attempts being made to silence critical indigenous voices in the country.

Most of the truth commissions are expected to take several years.

Asked what measures are needed to counteract ethnic discrimination of Sámi, Tuomas Aslak Juuso, President of the Finnish Sámi Parliament, told EURACTIV that the best tool is to focus on reminding Northern European countries of the need to observe human rights.

According to Juuso, “it is important to remind that human rights are a core part of democratic work, especially in Northern Europe, where maybe many people think that we are already human rights countries that are doing everything well in this domain.”

“That’s why we arrived at the need for the reconciliation commission – to recognise that there have been  wrongdoings with dishonest colonial practices that are still impacting Sami people heavily,” he added.

One issue is a general lack of trust by Sámi people that the process will end with tangible improvements for their daily life.

“The majority population has been taught that they are an inferior, lower class of people,” a 2018 report prepared for the Finnish prime minister on the feasibility of a truth commission stated.

“They suspect that … the Finnish government is trying to improve its reputation internationally as a country that respects human rights … at the same time [as] it is further weakening the rights of the Sámi people,” the report added.

Getting a chance to understand the situation and educate the population of the home countries could contribute to “moving away from discrimination attitudes”, Juuso stressed.

“It’s important that governments show a willingness to commit to those rights, which have been promised and which they are obliged to fulfil,” Juuso told EURACTIV.

Europe’s closer look

As the EU works on updating its Arctic policy, which is due to be published by the end of this year, youth representatives from the European Arctic have called on policymakers to ensure that Arctic youth and Indigenous peoples are included in the actions that will directly affect their futures.

“Perhaps in the past, authorities, in general, have been guilty of paying lip service to the views of people who live in the Arctic, to indigenous peoples and also to young people,” Michael Mann, EU Special Envoy for Arctic Matters, told EURACTIV during a recent event.

Arctic stakeholders stressed that identity is of major importance to the young generation, who have “preserved Sámi language, culture and traditions, despite strong assimilation politics”.

“Sámi are threatened with losing their land due to renewable energy production such as windmill parks, mines and new infrastructure. Reindeer herding and industrial projects in traditional lands cannot coexist,” Enni Similä, chair of the Finnish Sámi Youth Association, said.

“We have been watching with interest the various lawsuits that have been going on in the Northern countries aimed at safeguarding these traditional lands and ways of life and in our policymaking,” the EU’s Arctic envoy said.

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Preserving Latin America’s forests is vital to fight the climate crisis and deforestation is lower in indigenous territories

The embattled indigenous peoples of Latin America are by far the best guardians of the regions’ forests, according to a UN report, with deforestation rates up to 50% lower in their territories than elsewhere.

Protecting the vast forests is vital to tackling the climate crisis and plummeting populations of wildlife, and the report found that recognising the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples to their land is one of the most cost-effective actions. The report also calls for the peoples to be paid for the environmental benefits their stewardship provides, and for funding for the revitalisation of their ancestral knowledge of living in harmony with nature.

However, the demand for beef, soy, timber, oil and minerals means the threats to indigenous peoples and their forest homes are rising. Hundreds of community leaders have been killed because of disputes over land in recent years and the Covid-19 pandemic has added to the dangers forest peoples face.

Demands by indigenous peoples for their rights have become increasingly visible in recent years, the report said, but this has come with increasing persecution, racism, and assassinations. Supporting these peoples to protect the forests is particularly crucial now with scientists warning that the Amazon is nearing a tipping point where it switches from rainforest to savannah, risking the release of billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

The report was produced by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (Filac), based on a review of more than 300 studies.This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on EarthNemonte NenquimoRead more

“Almost half of the intact forests in the Amazon basin are in indigenous territories and the evidence of their vital role in forest protection is crystal clear,” said the president of Filac, Myrna Cunningham, an indigenous woman from Nicaragua. “While the area of intact forest declined by only 5% between 2000 and 2016 in the region’s indigenous areas, in the non-indigenous areas it fell by 11%. This is why [indigenous peoples’] voice and vision should be taken into account in all global initiatives relating to climate change, biodiversity and forestry.”

“Indigenous peoples have a different concept of forests,” she said. “They are not seen as a place where you take out resources to increase your money – they are seen as a space where we live and that is given to us to protect for the next generations.”

Indigenous and tribal territories contain about a third of all the carbon stored in the forests of Latin America, said Julio Berdegué, the FAO’s Regional Representative: “These peoples are rich when it comes to culture, knowledge, and natural resources, but some of the poorest when it comes to incomes and access to services.” Supporting them would also help avoid new pandemics, he said, as these are most often the result of the destruction of nature.

“Even under siege from Covid-19 and a frightening rise in invasions from outsiders, we remain the ones who can stop the destruction of our forests and their biodiverse treasures,” said José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, indigenous leader of an umbrella group, the Coordinator of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin. He said the report’s evidence supports his call for climate funds to go directly to indigenous peoples and not governments vulnerable to corruption.

The report found the best forest protection was provided by peoples with collective legal titles to their lands. A 12-year study in the Bolivian, Brazilian, and Colombian Amazon found deforestation rates in such territories were only one half to one-third of those in other similar forests. Even though indigenous territories cover 28% of the Amazon Basin, they only generated 2.6% of the region’s carbon emissions, the report said.

Indigenous peoples occupy 400m hectares of land in the region, but there is no legal recognition of their property rights in a third of this area. “While the impact of guaranteeing tenure security is great, the cost is very low,” the report said, needing less than $45 per hectare for the mapping, negotiation and legal work required.

The report said it would cost many times more to prevent carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning using carbon capture and storage technology on power plants. The granting of land rights to indigenous people has increased over the last 20 years, Cunningham said, but has slowed down in recent years.

Paying indigenous and tribal communities for the environmental services of their territories has reduced deforestation in countries including Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru. Berdegué said such programmes could attract hundreds of millions of dollars per year from international sources.

The need for protection is urgent, the report said, with annual deforestation rates in Brazil’s indigenous territories rising from 10,000 hectares in 2017 to 43,000 hectares in 2019. In January, indigenous leaders urged the international criminal court to investigate Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, over his dismantling of environmental policies and violations of indigenous rights.

Elsewhere, the area of large intact forests in indigenous territories has fallen between 2000 and 2016, with 59% lost in Paraguay, 42% in Nicaragua, 30% in Honduras and 20% in Bolivia. Mining and oil concessions now overlay almost a quarter of the land in Amazon basin indigenous and tribal territories, the report said.

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Dozens of countries are backing an effort that would protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water. Native people, often among the most effective stewards of nature, have been disregarded, or worse, in the past.

With a million species at risk of extinction, dozens of countries are pushing to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and water by 2030. Their goal is to hammer out a global agreement at negotiations to be held in China later this year, designed to keep intact natural areas like old growth forests and wetlands that nurture biodiversity, store carbon and filter water.

But many people who have been protecting nature successfully for generations won’t be deciding on the deal: Indigenous communities and others who have kept room for animals, plants and their habitats, not by fencing off nature, but by making a small living from it. The key to their success, research shows, is not extracting too much.

In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous people put their bodies on the line to protect native lands threatened by loggers and ranchers. In Canada, a First Nations group created a huge park to block mining. In Papua New Guinea, fishing communities have set up no-fishing zones. And in Guatemala, people living in a sprawling nature reserve are harvesting high-value timber in small amounts. In fact, some of those logs could end up as new bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“If you’re going to save only the insects and the animals and not the Indigenous people, there’s a big contradiction,” said José Gregorio Díaz Mirabal, who leads an umbrella group, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin. “We’re one ecosystem.”

Nature is healthier on the more than quarter of the world’s lands that Indigenous people manage or own, according to several scientific studies. Indigenous-managed lands in Brazil, Canada and Australia have as much or more biodiversity than lands set aside for conservation by federal and other governments, researchers have found.

That is in stark contrast from the history of conservation, which has a troubled record of forcing people off their land. So, it is with a mixture of hope and worry that many Indigenous leaders view this latest global goal, known as 30×30, led by Britain, Costa Rica and France. Some want a higher target — more than 50 percent, according to Mr. Díaz Mirabal’s organization — while others fear that they may once again be pushed out in the name of conservation.

Defending Land, Protecting Vital Forests

In the Brazilian Amazon, Awapu Uru Eu Wau Wau puts his life on the line to protect the riches of his ancestral lands: jaguars, endangered brown woolly monkeys, and natural springs from which 17 important rivers flow. His people, the Indigenous Uru Eu Wau Wau, have legal right to the land, but must constantly defend it from armed intruders.

Just beyond their 7,000-square mile territory, cattle ranchers and soy planters have razed much of the forest. Their land is among the last protected forests and savanna left in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. Illegal loggers often encroach.

So Mr. Uru Eu Wau Wau, who uses his community’s name as his surname, patrols the forest with poison-tipped arrows. Others in his community keep watch with drones, GPS equipment and video cameras. He prepares his daughter and son, 11 and 13 years old, to defend it in the years ahead.

“No one knows what’s going to happen to us, and I’m not going to live forever,” Mr. Uru Eu Wau Wau said. “We need to leave it to our children to get on with things.”

The risks are high. Mr. Uru Eu Wau Wau’s cousin, Ari Uru Eu Wau Wau, was murdered last April, part of a chilling pattern among land defenders across the Amazon. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, at least 46 were murdered across Latin America. Many were Indigenous.

The community’s efforts have outsized benefits for the world’s 7.75 billion people: The Amazon, which accounts for half the remaining tropical rainforest in the world, helps to regulate Earth’s climate and nurtures invaluable genetic diversity. Research shows Indigenous property rights are crucial to reducing illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

A Collapse of Nature

Nature is under assault because humans gobble up land to grow food, harvest timber and dig for minerals, while also overfishing the oceans. Making matters worse, the combustion of fossil fuels is warming up the planet and making it harder for animals and plants to survive.

At fault, some scholars say, are the same historical forces that have extracted natural resources for hundreds of years, at the expense of Indigenous people. “What we’re seeing now with the biodiversity collapse and with climate change is the final stage of the effects of colonialism,” said Paige West, an anthropologist at Columbia University.

There is now broad recognition that reversing the loss of biodiversity is urgent not only for food security and a stable climate, it’s also critical to reducing the risk of new diseases spilling over from wild animals, like the coronavirus.

Enter 30×30. The goal to protect at least 30 percent of the Earth’s land and water, long pushed by conservationists, has been taken up by a coalition of countries. It will be part of diplomatic negotiations to be held in Kunming, China, this fall, under the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity. The United States is the only country, apart from the Vatican, that has not joined the convention, though President Biden has ordered up a plan to protect 30 percent of American waters and lands.

Indigenous communities are not recognized as parties to the international agreement. They can come as observers to the talks, but can’t vote on the outcome. Practically though, success is impossible without their support.

They already protect much of the world’s land and water, as David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the United Nations agency for biodiversity, pointed out. “People live in these places,” he said. “They need to be engaged and their rights respected.”

A coalition of Indigenous groups and local communities has called for the agreement to protect at least half of the planet. Scientific research backs them up, finding that saving a third of the planet is simply not enough to preserve biodiversity and to store enough planet-warming carbon dioxide to slow down global warming.

Creating a New Kind of Park

A half century ago, where boreal forest meets tundra in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the Łutsël K’é’ Dene, one of the area’s Indigenous groups, opposed Canada’s efforts to set up a national park in and around its homeland.

“At that time, Canada’s national parks policies were very negative to Indigenous people’s ways of life,” said Steven Nitah, a former tribal chief. “They used to create national parks — fortress parks, I call it — and they kicked people out.”

But in the 1990s, the Łutsël K’é’ Dene faced a new threat: Diamonds were found nearby. They feared their lands would be gutted by mining companies. So they went back to the Canadian government to revisit the idea of a national park — one that enshrined their rights to manage the land, hunt and fish.

“To protect that heart of our homeland from industrial activities, this is what we used,” said Mr. Nitah, who served as his people’s chief negotiator with the Canadian government.

The park opened in 2019. Its name, Thaidene Nëné, means “Land of the Ancestors.”

Collaboration among conservationists, Indigenous nations and governments holds a key to protecting biodiversity, according to research.

Without local support, creating protected areas can be useless. They often fail to conserve animals and plants, becoming so-called “paper parks.”

Making a Living From Nature

Researchers have found that biodiversity protection often works best when local communities have a stake.

On islands in Papua New Guinea, for example, where fish is a staple, stocks had dwindled in recent decades. Fishers ventured farther from shore and spent more time at sea, but came back with smaller catches. So they partnered with local and international nonprofit groups to try something new. They changed their nets to let smaller fish escape. They reduced their use of a poison that brings fish to the surface. Most critically, they closed some waters to fishing altogether.

Meksen Darius, the head of one of the clans using these measures, said people were open to the idea because they hoped it would improve their livelihoods.

It did.

“The volume, the kinds of species of fish and other marine life, they’ve multiplied,” Mr. Darius, a retired lawyer, said.

Recent research from around the world shows that marine protected areas increase fish stocks, ultimately allowing fishing communities to catch more fish on the edges of the reserves.

To Iliana Monterroso, an environmental scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research in Lima, Peru, what matters is that people who live in areas of high biodiversity have a right to manage those areas. She pointed to the example of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, a territory of two million hectares in Guatemala, where local communities have managed the forest for 30 years.

Under temporary contracts with the national government, they began harvesting limited quantities of timber and allspice, selling ornamental palms and running tourism agencies. They had an investment to protect. “The forest became the source of livelihood,” Dr. Monterroso said. “They were able to gain tangible benefits.”

Jaguars, spider monkeys and 535 species of butterflies thrive there. So does the white-lipped peccary, a shy pig that tends to disappear quickly when there’s hunting pressure. Community-managed forests have fewer forest fires, and there is almost zero rate of deforestation, according to researchers.

Erwin Maas is among the hundreds of Guatemalans who live there, too. He and his neighbors run a community-owned business in the village of Uaxactún. Mahogany is plentiful, but they can take only so much. Often, it’s one or two trees per hectare per year, Mr. Maas said. Seed-producing trees are left alone.

“Our goal is to sustain ourselves with a small amount and always take care of the forest,” he said.

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