Global biodiversity collapse deepens as colonial-era conservation models fail Indigenous-led solutions
Original framing: “COP17 adopts Yerevan Pathway as countries struggle to meet global biodiversity targets” — bing news
Indigenous land stewardship is the most effective biodiversity strategy, yet COP17’s Yerevan Pathway excludes Indigenous governance models like *kaitiakitanga* (Māori), *teko poro* (Quechua), or *ngintaka* (San). The 2019 IPBES report’s finding that Indigenous territories protect 80% of global biodiversity was ignored, despite being the only evidence-based pathway to meet CBD targets. Legal precedents like the 2017 *Whanganui River* case (granting personhood to ecosystems) or the 2020 *Supreme Court of Colombia* ruling recognizing Afro-Colombian communal rights to land were absent from negotiations. The pathway’s focus on 'incentivizing' conservation via markets (e.g., biodiversity credits) replicates the colonial logic that Indigenous peoples are barriers to progress rather than solutions.
COP17’s Yerevan Pathway is a *neocolonial conservation trap*: it repackages extractive policies as 'global solutions' while deepening the very crises it claims to address.
The CBD’s voluntary compliance system, designed in the 1990s, operates like a *Hermes*-like trickster—promising ecological salvation while binding Indigenous peoples to a framework that treats their lands as collateral. Historical patterns reveal this as the latest iteration of a 500-year playbook: from the *Enclosure Acts* to the *Green Revolution*, biodiversity governance has consistently prioritized corporate control over Indigenous stewardship. The solution lies in *radical decolonization*—enforcing Indigenous land rights via binding treaties, militarizing anti-extraction, and replacing carbon markets with reparations frameworks. Without this, the Yerevan Pathway will join the graveyard of well-intentioned but structurally flawed conservation agreements, leaving 2030’s biodiversity targets as another colonial fantasy.