Without community support, we are bound to fail. But can we choose not to!
The truth is that we all want to safeguard global biodiversity, by reducing or even reversing biodiversity loss for future generation. Whether this is through protecting flagship wildlife species or conserving forest landscape ecosystems, the fact remains, we need the support of local communities and the Indigenous communities to successfully conserve and reverse biodiversity loss.
How would you feel if someone comes into your neighbourhood and start re-organising the neighbourhood by telling you and your neighbours how, where and when to carry out certain activities? Will you be happy with such intrusion? Certainly not.
This is how Indigenous people and local communities feel when conservation organisations, development agencies, researchers and research institutions, environmental activists, local/national governments and private commercial companies, come to their communities to give them instructions or tell them what to do. Most often, these instructions at passed down from top-down without regards to how this might impact these different communities.
In my years of fieldwork as a researcher, working with Indigenous people and local communities, I have had to witness their displeasure to the different types of intrusion including working as a researcher in those communities. Interview with some community leaders as well as field observations, clearly showed their discontentment to this meddling and worse, the fact that they are left out of the planning and decision-making of what is supposed to be their forest and landscape.
Biodiversity conservation is important to prevent biodiversity loss. It is also necessary as it protects and preserves the variety of life on Earth. However, without community support, especially those of the local community and the support of Indigenous people given their extensive wealth of knowledge, it will be almost impossible to halt or reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
Integrating Indigenous people and local communities in the conservation of their forests and biodiversity for future generation is the way to go. Empowering them with access to resources and capacity building to protect, restore and preserve their forests and biodiversity is the right move towards the path to the 2030 biodiversity target.
Furthermore, integrating them in the planning and decision-making of their forests and biodiversity conservation is a necessity. Not including them, as one local leader boldly said to me while collecting field data, is “a recipe for failure.”
What is your take? Have you had the same experience?
