---
path: "/posts/biodiversity"
date: "2022-07-29T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Biodiversity"
author: ""
type: "note"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---

On August 21st of 2021, a friend told me, “Indigenous people make up 5% of the world's population, and are stewards of 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity.”

The next day, I decided to look up where this came from, before sharing it, and it sent me down a long research rabbit hole, of not quite finding where the 80% figure came from.

I found lots of research supporting that indigenous peoples have been and continue to be stewards of amazing amounts amounts of biodiversity, such as [this paper](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190731102157.htm), from the University of British Columbia from 2019, showing that the indigenous-managed lands they looked at had even greater biodiversity than "protected lands".<br/>
<br/>
I also see the 80% figure often quoted, but I haven't been able to pinpoint where the 80% figure *originally* comes from.<br/>
<br/>

Here is a summary of where I got to in the rabbit hole:<br/>
<br/>
1. National Geographic article from November 2018: <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-">https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-</a><br/>
   has the subtitle "Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity. Their role is under discussion by world leaders this week."<br/>
   <br/>
   In the article, if you look at where it says this, there is a broken link. I looked up the broken link in the wayback machine internet archive, and found it goes to a report from Sobrevilla, 2008 [2]<br/>
   <br/>
2. If you look at <a href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/995271468177530126/pdf/443000WP0BOX321onservation01PUBLIC1.pdf">Sobrevilla, 2008</a>, The World Bank, The Role of Indigenous Peoples in Biodiversity Conservation, The Natural but Often Forgotten Partners, and you look at where it states this 80% fact, it cites WRI 2005:<br/>

<br/>
"Many areas inhabited by Indigenous Peoples coincide with some of the world’s remaining major concentrations of biodiversity. Traditional indigenous territories encompass up to 22 percent of the world’s land surface and they coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity (WRI 2005)"<br/>
<br/>
If you look at the bibliography of the report, you find, WRI 2005 is:<br/> 
World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Bank. 2005. Securing Property and Resource Rights through Tenure Reform, pp.83–87 in World Resources Report 2005: The Wealth of the Poor – Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty. Washington, D.C.: WRI.<br/>
<br/>
3. If you look into that report (WRI 2005), <a href="https://www.wri.org/research/world-resources-2005-wealth-poor">https://www.wri.org/research/world-resources-2005-wealth-poor</a><br/>
<br/>
It’s not clear to me, where it says,<br/>
“Indigenous people live in lands that coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity"<br/>
<br/>
The phrase “80 percent” appears six times, not in connection with this quote.<br/>
<br/>
Could Sobrevilla be making an original intepretation of [3] without explaining it, or mis-citing [3] or am I missing something?<br/>
<br/>
When I texted my family signal group chat about this, my Mom responded that she had also by chance just seen this same quote in print, in a book she was reading titled “All We Can Save”.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>

