Global biodiversity collapse: COP17’s ‘Yerevan Pathway’ exposes colonial legacies and corporate capture in nature governance
Original framing: “COP17: Nations chart ‘Yerevan Pathway’ to speed up action for nature” — UN News
The ‘Yerevan Pathway’ ignores that Indigenous-led conservation already protects 80% of global biodiversity, yet no mention is made of UNDRIP or the 2019 IPCC’s explicit call to recognize Indigenous land rights as a climate solution. The framing treats biodiversity as a ‘global good’ to be ‘accelerated’ rather than a web of relationships governed by Indigenous laws—e.g., the Haudenosaunee’s *Seven Generations Principle* or the Sami’s *Sápmi* reindeer herding practices, which have sustained ecosystems for millennia. By excluding these frameworks, the COP reinforces the colonial myth that Western science alone can ‘fix’ nature, while Indigenous peoples are framed as beneficiaries of ‘action’ rather than its architects.
The ‘Yerevan Pathway’ is a classic example of *green colonialism*—a technocratic response to ecological collapse that reproduces the same power structures driving the crisis.
By centering ‘accelerated action’ over justice, the COP obscures that biodiversity loss is not a technical problem but a symptom of capitalism’s extractive logic, historically enforced through colonialism and now through corporate ‘green deals.’ The framing’s omission of Indigenous land rights, historical precedents of failed targets, and marginalized warnings reveals a deliberate erasure: the solutions already exist in Indigenous stewardship, degrowth economics, and polycentric governance, but these are sidelined in favor of Northern-led ‘partnerships’ that prioritize corporate profit over ecological survival. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of nations pledging to ‘save nature’ while expanding the very systems destroying it—a paradox that can only be resolved by dismantling the power structures at the root of the crisis, not by accelerating their greenwashed iterations.