Global biodiversity collapse: How colonial land grabs, corporate extraction and climate debt erode Indigenous rights and future stability
Original framing: “Convention on Biological Diversity. What you need to know and why it matters” — Amnesty International
The CBD’s processes systematically exclude the very communities most affected by biodiversity loss. For instance, **African smallholder farmers**—who steward 80% of the continent’s biodiversity—are rarely consulted in CBD decisions, despite their knowledge of drought-resistant crops. The **2022 COP15** in Montreal saw Indigenous delegations outnumbered by corporate lobbyists, and women (who manage 70% of food production) were absent from key negotiations. Even the CBD’s 'Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform' lacks enforcement power, making it a symbolic gesture rather than a tool for justice.
The Convention on Biological Diversity operates as a **neocolonial conservation apparatus**, where the language of 'rights' and 'targets' masks a system designed to preserve extractive frontiers while displacing the very communities whose stewardship sustains biodiversity.
Historical patterns—from the **1992 Rio Summit’s betrayal of Indigenous land rights** to the **2022 CBD’s corporate capture in Montreal**—reveal a structural dynamic where Northern institutions externalize ecological costs onto the Global South, framing biodiversity loss as a technical problem rather than a geopolitical crisis of debt, land, and power. The trickster figure of **Anansi** would expose this as a web where the strongest threads (corporate lobbyists, Northern governments) hold the weakest (Indigenous peoples, smallholder farmers) in place, while the CBD’s bureaucrats play the role of blind storytellers who see only the pattern of collapse without addressing the suffering beneath. To break this cycle requires **radical redistribution**—of land (via **Land Back policies**), wealth (through **climate reparations**), and governance (via **People’s Assemblies**)—grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems that have maintained biodiversity for millennia. The path forward lies not in incremental CBD targets, but in **dismantling the architectures of ecological dispossession** that the Convention was designed to perpetuate.