Abstract
Indigenous Peoples’ lands cover over one‐quarter of Earth's surface, a significant proportion of which is still free from industrial‐level human impacts. As a result, Indigenous Peoples and their lands are crucial for the long‐term persistence of Earth's biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, information on species composition on these lands globally remains largely unknown. We conducted the first comprehensive analysis of terrestrial mammal composition across mapped Indigenous lands based on data on area of habitat (AOH) for 4460 mammal species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We overlaid each species’ AOH on a current map of Indigenous lands and found that 2695 species (60% of assessed mammals) had ≥10% of their ranges on Indigenous Peoples’ lands and 1009 species (23%) had >50% of their ranges on these lands. For threatened species, 473 (47%) occurred on Indigenous lands with 26% having >50% of their habitat on these lands. We also found that 935 mammal species (131 categorized as threatened) had ≥ 10% of their range on Indigenous Peoples’ lands that had low human pressure. Our results show how important Indigenous Peoples’ lands are to the successful implementation of conservation and sustainable development agendas worldwide.
Highlights
Through well-established traditional knowledge systems and governance practices, Indigenous Peoples are the environmental stewards of their lands
Species distribution data We focused our analysis on terrestrial mammals that have been comprehensively assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
We found that 2,175 (48.8%) of all mammal species assessed have at least 10% of their ranges within Indigenous Peoples‟ lands, and 646 (14.5%) have > 50% of their range in these lands (Figure 1)
Summary
Through well-established traditional knowledge systems and governance practices, Indigenous Peoples are the environmental stewards of their lands. Any regions free from industrial-level human impacts are likely to be of high conservation value (Di Marco et al 2018), given the connection between land use transformation and species declines (Newbold et al 2015; Tilman et al 2017) These landscapes may be important ecological refugia (Scheffers et al 2016; Allan et al 2019), offering some protection against the pressures of expanding resource extraction frontiers (Rehbein et al 2020). We assess mammal species composition within low-pressure Indigenous Peoples‟ lands using updated „Human Footprint‟ data (Williams et al 2020) These results are relevant to the development and implementation of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework agreement that will emerge from the Convention on Biological Diversity‟s (CBD) discussions on abating species extinctions and reducing the erosion of ecosystem services (CBD 2018), as well as for countries trying to implement actions to achieve the 2030 United Nation‟s Sustainable Development Goals
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