287 — Biodiversity on Indigenous lands equals that in protected areas

Humans are really bad at looking after a planet.

Well, that’s not exactly true — MOST humans are really bad at looking after a planet. And that irresponsibility is very clear when you look at the immense loss of biodiversity in the past few centuries. Preserved and protected lands generally enjoy a greater amount of biodiversity than their surroundings — so… let’s keep doing that.

But indigenous lands are similar to protected lands in terms of biodiversity. In other words, indigenous communities suck way less than most humans in terms of preserving wildlife.

The researchers queried geographic regions from the World Database on Protected Area (WDPA) and compared the biodiversity of different regions, segmenting based upon indigenous land boundaries when provided by country governments, and designing their own mechanisms for identifying indigenous lands when the data were not available.

These were compared with prior work that identified global biodiversity numbers for other (non-indigenous) regions.

In certain cases, endangered or threatened species lived almost exclusively in protected and indigenous lands, which means that preserving these areas is — GO FIGURE — important.

For a variety of reasons.