The Land Knows Its Stewards: Indigenous and African Communities on the Front Line of Biodiversity Protection

Ancestral Wisdom · Environmental Justice · Community Power

Last reviewed and updated October 4, 2026

The Land Has Always Had Keepers

Ubuntu holds that no one stands alone: I am because we are. Applied to land, that wisdom does not stop at the edge of the human community. The river, the grove, the grazing ground, and the ancestors who rest in them are all part of the “we.” To protect a place, in this understanding, is to stay in right relationship with it, season after season, generation after generation.

Research is beginning to describe what that relationship protects. A 2018 study in Nature Sustainability found that Indigenous Peoples manage or hold tenure rights over at least 38 million square kilometers in 87 countries, which is more than a quarter of the world’s land surface. Those territories overlap about 40 percent of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes, including boreal and tropical primary forests, savannas, and marshes. The authors conclude that recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights to land, benefit sharing, and institutions is essential to meeting conservation goals.

We want to hold this evidence with care. It does not say that communities are a resource for the planet to use. It says that when people keep their own land, with their own authority, the land has a better chance of holding too. Communities are protagonists in this story, never instruments. The same principle runs beneath the soil, where forests share resources and signals through living networks. We explored that in our piece on mycorrhizal networks and the biology of community, and it shows exactly what is at stake when relationships are severed.

The Scale of What Is Being Lost

In 2014, a team led by Duke University conservation biologist Stuart Pimm reported in Science that current rates of extinction are about 1,000 times the likely background rate of extinction. The number is hard to feel, so sit with what it means: the web of life that took millions of years to weave is being pulled apart at a pace the web has never had to survive.

Five years later, the global assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found that around one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.

The loss is also measurable in forest. In 2023, the world lost 3.7 million hectares of tropical primary forest, according to data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD Lab and Global Forest Watch, as reported by the World Resources Institute. That is roughly ten soccer fields every minute. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone lost more than 500,000 hectares of primary rainforest that year, a 3 percent increase over the year before, in a basin that WRI describes as the last remaining major tropical forest that is still a carbon sink.

We name these numbers because grief is information. When a forest falls, communities lose far more than timber or carbon: they lose medicine, memory, and the places where the living meet the ancestors. We have written about what that loss does to a people in What Extraction Leaves Behind: Environmental Grief as Community Health. Naming the grief is the first step toward the repair.

Dispossession Is the Crisis

Here is the part of the story that rarely makes the headline. Habitat destruction is not only about appetite, meaning the consumer choices and corporate decisions that drive extraction. It is also about who is permitted to stay on the land when the concessions, the bulldozers, and the protected-area boundaries arrive. That same global assessment found that the destruction of nature has been less severe, or avoided, on average in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. When the keepers are removed, the protection they provided weakens with them.

Consider the Baka of Cameroon’s portion of the Congo Basin. According to reporting by the National Catholic Reporter in October 2024, the Baka have been pushed from their forests since the 1960s, and conservation regulations passed in 1994 restricted their access further. For the Baka, the loss is not only economic. One community member told the reporter that the law keeps them out of the reserves that now shelter most of the species they use in the Jengi, their spiritual practice. When a forest is closed to the people who steward it, ceremony, medicine, and memory are closed with it. The same reporting describes similar patterns among the Batwa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Maasai in Tanzania.

None of this is new. The assumption that land is empty until a state or an agency decides to protect it echoes the colonial logic we examined in Colonialism and Global Health Policy: both begin by deciding that the people already there do not count. We hold this as a justice question as much as an ecological one. The people who have been dispossessed are not a footnote to the conservation crisis. They are the crisis’s center, and they are the strongest argument for how to end it.

What Actually Works: Land Rights, Local Knowledge, Community Power

Namibia offers one of the clearest examples of what can change when communities share in the benefits of wildlife. A peer-reviewed study in Conservation Biology of Namibia’s communal conservancies found that benefits from hunting and from tourism increased at roughly the same rate. Hunting mainly provided income for conservancy management and meat for the wider community, while the majority of tourism benefits were salaried jobs at lodges. Separately, an analysis by Craig, Gibson, and Uiseb in the journal Pachyderm shows the country’s elephants increasing at about 5.36 percent a year since 1995, to roughly 24,000 animals.

We do not offer Namibia as a template to copy, and we do not claim that conservancies alone caused the recovery. The elephant surveys cover national parks and conservancies alike, and they do not isolate the conservancies’ effect. No model travels cleanly from one landscape and one people to another, and any system can fail its community if the benefits never arrive. What the two findings suggest is a principle: when communities hold real authority and see real benefit, protection can stop being something done to them and become something done by them.

The principle belongs to Kenya’s story too. Our reflection on the 18 elephants who died in Amboseli asks what we are doing to Kenya’s wildlife, and that question belongs as much to the communities who live beside the herds as it does to any agency or ministry.

We believe restoration follows the same rule. Replanting a forest, rewetting a peatland, or restoring a mangrove coast works best when it begins by asking the people who know that particular place. Habitat destruction takes many forms. The global demand for palm oil has made the plight of orangutans a powerful symbol of forest loss, while industrial fishing is quietly destroying the ocean floor, a habitat destruction crisis hidden from most of us. And as people spend less time outdoors, biophobia, our growing disconnection from the natural world, erodes the public will to protect what remains.

The Political Will Required

Governments must redirect investment from extraction to protection, fund community land-tenure programs, and enforce anti-deforestation rules that reach all the way down supply chains. Financial systems must stop treating a standing forest as an asset only when it is cut. These are not radical asks. They are the conditions under which the evidence above can become real.

The funding question may be the most revealing. According to the Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway, about $270 million a year went to Indigenous and local community land tenure and forest management between 2011 and 2020, which is less than 1 percent of international climate aid. Of that money, only 17 percent went to activities that specifically named an Indigenous organization. At COP26, five countries and 17 private foundations pledged $1.7 billion toward these efforts. Whether those pledges reach the people holding the land is the test of whether the promise was real.

We stand with the call to channel conservation funding directly to the Indigenous and community organizations doing the work, rather than routing it through international organizations headquartered far from the land. Tools and technologies can help, and cross-border cooperation matters, but they serve conservation best when the people most knowledgeable about a landscape are the ones directing how they are used.

What This Asks of Those of Us Who Hold Resources

For those of us who give, vote, and buy, the evidence asks for a shift in posture. Donors are partners, never saviors. The question to bring to any conservation effort is not “How can we save this place?” but “Who has kept this place, and are they leading?” Support organizations led by the communities themselves. Ask where funding goes and who decides. Learn whose land you are visiting, whose forest your purchases touch, and whose knowledge the story is built on.

This is also how we tell these stories. We write under our Ethical Storytelling Policy, which commits us to dignity, agency, and partnership, and never to poverty tourism or savior narratives. Ubuntu Village works where ecology and human dignity meet, in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, and we follow the leadership of the communities we serve.

The window is not yet closed. The solutions exist. What has been missing is the willingness to center the communities who hold the knowledge, and to give them the land rights, the funding, and the political authority to act on it. The land has always known its stewards. May we have the humility to learn their names. I am because we are. And together, we heal.

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Sources & Research

• The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection — Pimm, S. L., et al. Science, May 2014.
• Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ — IPBES / UN Environment Programme, May 6, 2019.
• A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation — Garnett, S. T., et al. Nature Sustainability, vol. 1, 2018, pp. 369–374.
• Brazil and Colombia See Dramatic Reductions in Forest Loss, But New Fronts Keep Tropical Rates High — World Resources Institute, University of Maryland GLAD Lab, and Global Forest Watch, April 4, 2024.
• In Africa’s Congo Basin, Indigenous peoples lose homes to conservation efforts — National Catholic Reporter, October 30, 2024.
• Complementary benefits of tourism and hunting to communal conservancies in Namibia — Naidoo, R., et al. Conservation Biology, vol. 30, no. 3, 2016, pp. 628–638.
• Namibia’s elephants—population, distribution and trends — Craig, G. C., Gibson, D. St. C., and Uiseb, K. H. Pachyderm, no. 62, 2020–2021.
• Making funding for Indigenous Peoples and local communities fit for purpose — Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway, Funding with Purpose report.

Related Reading

• ‣ What Forest Networks Teach Us About Community
• ‣ Colonialism and Global Health Policy
• ‣ What Extraction Leaves Behind: Environmental Grief as Community Health
• ‣ 18 Elephants Died in Amboseli. What Are We Doing to Kenya’s Wildlife?
• ‣ Oil Palm’s African Origins: What Industrial Extraction Stole, and What Smallholder Communities Are Reclaiming
• ‣ Palm Oil’s Toll on Asia’s Rainforests and Wildlife