'No basis for claim that 80% of biodiversity is found in Indigenous territories' by Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Julia Fa, Dan Brockington, Eduardo S Brondízio, Joji Cariño, Esteve Corbera, Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, Daniel Kobei, Pernilla Palmer, Guadalupe Yesenia H Márquez, Zsolt Molnár, Helen Tugendhat and Stephen T Garnett in (2024) Nature comments
For the past 20 years or so, a claim has been made in all sorts of outlets, from reports and scientific publications to news articles, that 80% of the world’s biodiversity is found in the territories of Indigenous Peoples. Those using this figure invariably aim to highlight the essential roles that Indigenous Peoples have in conserving biodiversity, and seem to have quoted it in the belief that it is based on solid science.
Numerous studies demonstrate that Indigenous Peoples and their territories are indeed key to safeguarding biodiversity for future generations. But the claim that 80% of the world’s biodiversity is found in Indigenous Peoples’ territories is wrong.
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.
The global conservation community must abandon the 80% claim and instead comprehensively acknowledge the crucial roles of Indigenous Peoples in stewarding their lands and seas — and must do so on the basis of already available evidence. ...
The 80% claim is based on two assumptions: that biodiversity can be divided into countable units, and that these can be mapped spatially at the global level. Neither feat is possible, despite important advances in measuring biodiversity. In fact, according to the Convention on Biological Diversity — a multilateral treaty to develop strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, involving nearly 200 countries — biodiversity is the “diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”. It is not something that can be easily quantified.
Even if researchers resorted to using the number of species present as a measure of biodiversity — a narrow yet common proxy — there are still millions of species that have not been described. Furthermore, there is debate over the proportion of described taxa that represents valid species, and knowledge about the geographical distributions of most species is lacking or incomplete. Data on species counts and distributions are especially likely to be missing for Indigenous Peoples’ lands and seas.
The 80% claim seems to stem from misinterpretations of previously published statements. As advocates for Indigenous Peoples (three of us identify as Indigenous), we have had discussions about this figure over several years with Indigenous leaders at policy forums, on field visits and in research projects. To track its origins and assess how frequently it has been cited in the literature and in what contexts, we searched for combinations of the words ‘Indigenous’, ‘80%’ and ‘biodiversity’, as well as for combinations of their variants, such as ‘eighty’, ‘percent’ and ‘biological diversity’. We conducted our search using Google Scholar and Clarivate’s Web of Science, and included literature published up to 1 August this year.
Our search found no reference to the 80% assertion before 2002. A report that year by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, a body tasked with assessing progress on the commitments agreed at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, stated that Indigenous Peoples “nurture 80% of the world’s biodiversity on ancestral lands and territories”. Over the next six years, similar unattributed statements were made in four other reports (see Supplementary information). However, judging by how commonly the number is cited, it seems to have been a 2008 World Bank report that contributed most to its widespread adoption in the academic literature.
