Vertebrate biodiversity on indigenous-managed lands in Australia, Brazil, and Canada equals that in protected areas

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2019.07.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Many countries currently fall short of meeting targets to curb biodiversity loss.

  • Indigenous-managed lands represent one avenue by which national targets can be met.

  • Both Indigenous lands and conventional protected lands have high biodiversity.

  • Indigenous-managed lands have equal-or-higher biodiversity than protected areas.

  • Partnerships with Indigenous communities can ameliorate shortfalls in habitat protection for biodiversity conservation.

Abstract

Declines in global biodiversity due to land conversion and habitat loss are driving a ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ and many countries fall short of meeting even nominal targets for land protection. We explored how such shortfalls in Australia, Brazil and Canada might be addressed by enhancing partnerships between Indigenous communities and other government agencies that recognize and reward the existing contributions of Indigenous-managed lands to global biodiversity conservation, and their potential contribution to meeting international treaty targets. We found that Indigenous-managed lands were slightly more vertebrate species rich than existing protected areas in all three countries, and in Brazil and Canada, that they supported more threatened vertebrate species than existing protected areas or randomly selected non-protected areas. Our results suggest that overall, Indigenous-managed lands and existing protected areas host similar levels of vertebrate biodiversity in Brazil, Canada, and Australia. Partnerships with Indigenous communities that seek to maintain or enhance Indigenous land tenure practices on Indigenous-managed lands may therefore have some potential to ameliorate national and global shortfalls in land protection for biodiversity conservation using a mix of conventional protected areas and Indigenous-managed lands.

Introduction

Habitat loss and degradation due to human land conversion are key threats to global biodiversity that, to date, have been addressed mainly by expanding protected areas (PAs) globally (Maxwell et al., 2016; Sala et al., 2000). However, this approach has severe limitations because many existing PAs have limited overlap with the geographic ranges of most of the world’s threatened species, as PAs have often been placed in regions with relatively low economic value and biodiversity (Rodrigues et al., 2004; Sánchez-Fernández and Abellán, 2015; Venter et al., 2014). In several regions, PAs overlap the ranges of endemic, high-priority species less often than expected if they had been located randomly (Nori et al., 2015; Sánchez-Fernández and Abellán, 2015). Thus, despite a rapid increase in the global extent of terrestrial PAs to meet the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) target of protecting 17% of global terrestrial area, shortfalls in coverage and implementation suggest that 17% will nevertheless be insufficient to prevent further extinctions or meet other area-based conservation goals (Barnes, 2015; Polak et al., 2016; Watson et al., 2014). This implies that many species are destined to extinction unless they can maintain positive growth rates on land in addition to that set aside as conventional PAs. Indigenous-managed land (defined here as land parcels managed or co-managed by Indigenous communities) may represent one such key addition, as some authors conclude that partnerships with Indigenous communities are essential to conserving 17% of global terrestrial area (Jonas et al., 2014). The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples clearly points to Indigenous Rights to Land and resources, thus providing a framework within which conversations about biodiversity conversation on Indigenous-managed lands can take place. Here, we explore the potential for Indigenous-managed lands to contribute positively to national and global goals for terrestrial biodiversity conservation, complementing a related analysis of the global extent of Indigenous-managed lands (Garnett et al., 2018).

Indigenous land management practices have often been shown to result in higher native and rare species richness (Peres, 1994; Redford and Stearman, 1993; Yibarbuk et al., 2001; Arcese et al., 2014) and less deforestation and land degradation than non-indigenous practices (Nolte et al., 2013; Ceddia et al., 2015; Waller and Reo, 2018). However, despite indications of high biodiversity on Indigenous-managed lands, and a recent demonstration that such lands represent >25% of all land area and intersect with ˜40% of terrestrial PAs and ‘ecologically intact landscapes’ (Garnett et al., 2018), no study has quantified species richness or occurrence on Indigenous lands or compared metrics in and outside of Indigenous-managed lands, conventional PAs, and unprotected areas at national scales. To address this key knowledge gap, we therefore compared vertebrate biodiversity on Indigenous-managed lands to protected areas and non-protected areas in three countries (Australia, Brazil, and Canada) with relatively large total areas owned or managed by Indigenous communities.

To achieve the above goals, we estimated total richness of amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles using open-sourced species range maps of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). We then compared estimates among three land types: Indigenous-managed lands (hereafter IL), protected areas with no Indigenous co-management (hereafter PA), and non-protected areas of equivalent area (hereafter NPA). We similarly estimated the richness of species at risk (i.e., classified as ‘vulnerable’, ‘endangered’, and ‘critically endangered’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN]).

If Indigenous-managed lands have the potential to supplement conventional PAs in local, national and/or global efforts to meet conservation targets (Arcese et al., 2014; Garnett et al., 2018; Waller and Reo, 2018), we expect to observe that estimated species occurrence and richness in IL should: 1) meet or exceed levels observed in conventional PAs; and 2) exceed values observed in randomly selected landscapes of similar size.

Section snippets

Data processing

We based our analysis on an initial set of 26,688 spatial data layers consisting of three basic administrative delineations (country boundaries, protected areas and Indigenous lands), and 26,682 vertebrate species distributions, as described below, with total terrestrial land restricted to the country boundaries of Australia, Brazil and Canada.

Basic administrative delineations

National boundaries were derived from the Global Administrative Areas database (http://gadm.org/, accessed 2015-10-10). The data on protected areas was

Results

Indigenous lands as legally recognized by the three national governments, represent 52.1, 13.3, and 6.3% of terrestrial area for Australia, Brazil and Canada, respectively. PAs represent 9.2, 21.1, and 10.7% of terrestrial area for Australia, Brazil and Canada, respectively. In all three countries, Indigenous lands have the highest species richness in all focal taxonomic groups combined, with randomly selected non-protected areas having the lowest species richness (Fig. 2 a,b,c). Indigenous

Discussion

Our results indicate that Indigenous-managed lands represent an important repository of native vertebrate species richness in three of the six largest countries on earth. Moreover, because Indigenous peoples currently manage or have tenure to roughly a quarter of earth’s land area (Garnett et al., 2018), collaborating with Indigenous nations and organizations to support and/or enhance Indigenous land management practices clearly represent one potential route to achieving global targets for

Author contributions

RS, RRG, and PA conceived the study. RS and RRG collected data and conducted analyses. All authors contributed to writing and editing the paper.

Acknowledgments

We thank N. Baron, A. Jacob, H. Locke, M.-C. Loretto, A. Rodewald, D. Secord, and O. Venter for providing comments on the manuscript. RS is supported by a Liber Ero Fellowship, and RRG, JRB, and PA are supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The authors declare no competing interests. The data reported in this paper are tabulated in the Supplementary Materials. Data, analysis scripts and full results are archived here: https://osf.io/f86wv/

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