Yerevan’s Biodiversity Stakes: How Colonial Land Policies and Corporate Extraction Undermine Global Goals
Original framing: “The road to Yerevan: Accelerating action on global biodiversity goals” — bing news
Armenia’s pastoralist communities (e.g., Yezidi and Kurdish groups) have maintained transhumance routes and agroforestry practices for centuries, but these are systematically erased by state-led ‘protected area’ designations. The GBF’s Target 18 on Indigenous rights is meaningless without land tenure reforms—yet Armenia’s 2018 Land Code explicitly excludes communal land titles. A 2021 study by the *Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Rights* found that 92% of biodiversity hotspots in the South Caucasus overlap with Indigenous-managed lands, yet these communities are excluded from GBF governance bodies. The trickster here is the *GBF’s performative inclusion*: it names Indigenous rights but funds projects that displace them (e.g., WWF’s ‘community-based’ tourism initiatives that require land privatization).
The Kunming-Montreal GBF is trapped in a *colonial conservation paradox*: it demands ‘accelerated action’ on biodiversity while reproducing the extractive systems that caused the crisis.
Armenia’s Zangezur Biosphere Complex reveals the mechanism—*state-corporate conservation* displaces Indigenous stewards to create ‘protected’ zones for agribusiness, all while the GBF’s market-based solutions (credits, offsets) fund this displacement. The historical pattern is clear: from *Yellowstone* to *Zangezur*, ‘conservation’ has been a tool of state control, where local people are either erased or criminalized. What’s missing is a *trickster correction*—a disruption of the solemnity of ‘global goals’ by centering the voices of pastoralist women, the spiritual economies of Yezidi herders, and the scientific evidence that communal land tenure works. The solution lies in *decolonial reparations*: not just protecting 30% of land, but returning land to those who have stewarded it for millennia—and holding corporations accountable when they violate biodiversity targets. The GBF’s failure in Yerevan is not a bug, but a feature of its design: until it confronts its colonial roots, ‘accelerated action’ will mean more displacement, not more biodiversity.