COP15: Aboriginal Australians Connect Biodiversity to Human Rights

This week, nearly every country in the world is meeting for a climate conference: COP15. While the more-popular COP27 focuses on cutting emissions to stop climate change, COP15, or the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, centers on a critical related issue: conserving nature. 

COP15 seeks to create new international targets in an agreement known as the Convention on Biological Diversity on how exactly to protect nature in the coming decade. The last time world leaders created such a list as part of this effort was in 2010 when they set targets for 2020—like reducing habitat fragmentation and degradation. In the 12 years since, they have failed to meet each and every target. 

This time around, the goals are more ambitious—including 30×30, the plan to protect 30% of the world’s land and water by 2030—but advocates emphasize that, to be effective, Indigenous peoples must be empowered to take the lead on managing lands. Despite being only 5% of the global population, Indigenous peoples protect nearly 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Currently, the draft text of the agreement includes language that recognizes the rights of Indigenous peoples as “custodians of biodiversity.” But Indigenous peoples want more than acknowledgment—they want action. 

These custodians are at COP15 to speak for themselves. From the Brazilian Amazon to the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indigenous leaders traveled to Montreal to advocate for their right to manage their traditional homelands. Alongside groups often forefronted in conservation talks is one that receives less attention on the global stage: Aboriginal Australians. Australia is full of ecological marvels, but without funding and support, Aboriginal communities are unable to protect these treasures—and the cultures to which they’re connected.

“I’ve been listening to a lot of people talking about goals and achievements that they’d like to see in 2030, 2040, 2050,” said Rarrtjiwuy Melanie Herdman, a saltwater woman of the Yolŋu people of Australia’s Northern Territory and board member of the nonprofit Country Needs People, which invests in Indigenous rangers and protected area programs. “That’s the same support that we need. If we’re going to make a difference in our region and improve these challenges, we can’t do that with short-term funding.”

Australia’s rich, unique biodiversity is in a precarious position. Because it’s an island, Australia’s biodiversity evolved in isolation for millions of years, meaning there are high rates of endemic species: species found nowhere else in the world. This seclusion has turned out striking, unmistakably Australian creatures: the emu (a giant flightless bird), the Tasmanian devil, and the inland taipan (the world’s most venomous snake). Amid an accelerating global extinction crisis, this one-of-a-kind biodiversity faces an added layer of threat: if a species disappears from Australia, it likely disappears from the world. Already, Australia has the world’s highest rate of mammal extinction. 

One of the big threats is invasive species: water buffalo, cane toads, camels, and cats alongside ever-encroaching non-native vegetation. In northern Australia’s Arnhem Plateau, invasive water buffalo do more damage to the land than uranium mines once did, said Conrad Maralngurra, a land management director at the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area.

Introduced species are one of the many legacies of colonization that Indigenous land managers face. Another is wildfires. Before Europeans arrived, Aboriginal Australians managed bushfires by burning early in the dry season to prevent late-season fires from growing as large. When white settlers removed Indigenous peoples from their lands, controlled burns stopped. Now, with hotter temperatures, invasive grasses, and a century of interrupted management, Aboriginal rangers struggle to control the size and scope of fires. 

The bushfire season of 2019 and 2020—nicknamed Black Summer—burned over 42 million acres and killed an estimated one billion mammals, birds, and reptiles and hundreds of billions of insects. The disastrous fire season had a disproportionate impact on Aboriginal people, researchers argue, as they watched their homes and traditional lands destroyed, and then suffered insufficient or culturally insensitive relief efforts. Though climate change promises more intense fires in the future, fire management is key to reducing the risk of entire communities burning.

“Slowly, we’re bringing back native animals and keeping down feral populations,” Maralngurra said. “Fire managing is the whole way we bring things back in care.”

Then, of course, there is climate change, which exacerbates all of the above. It threatens terrestrial landscapes along with ecological jewels like the Great Barrier Reef. As the world’s largest coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef is home to astounding biodiversity: 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish, and countless other mollusks, crustaceans, anemones, and more. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities in Australia have been at the forefront of preserving the reef, which has suffered widespread coral bleaching in recent years. The reef’s stewards are still granted limited access for fishing and other traditional practices. This year, the Queensland Indigenous Womens Ranger Network won the Earthshot prize for its work protecting the reef.