Key Biodiversity Areas: A Tool for Tribal Climate Planning?

Today, Indigenous peoples manage 80% of the world’s biodiversity, yet they receive only 0.74% of climate funding to support them in that task (Rainforest Foundation Norway, 2020) Not only that, their voices are largely excluded  from the climate debate, a theme consistent with the long history of erasure of Indigenous peoples’ voices, and data colonialism where information about Indigenous lands is missing, mishandled and misrepresented.

However, at a time where climate planning becomes urgent and global attention is increasingly shifting away from carbon markets and carbon scrubbing tech towards the ability of ecosystems to naturally sequester carbon, indigenous peoples’ land and stewardship practices are gaining  increasing attention as the desired path forward. In an attempt to identify these areas of high importance, an international consortium developed a framework known as Key Biodiversity Areas or KBAs. Here, I explore the possible usefulness and uses of KBAs data for Tribal land climate planning and stewardship.

While peoples are not equally responsible for climate change, it is a global issue which requires international collaboration, and tribes in the US have a key role to play. The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework is a UN initiative which gathers most countries in the world to address the issue of biodiversity loss. It was not ratified by the US, as many environmental agreements, but is considered a key framework to address climate change. It advocates for 30% of terrestrial land, inland water and oceans to be protected by 2030.

Currently in the US, 12% of land is protected (2020 numbers), mostly thanks to national and state parks; an actual down by 2% since 2019. Protected Areas form some legal protection around “a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values” (IUCN). Prior to protecting areas comes the task to recognize areas that need to be protected. These areas are becoming increasingly known worldwide as Key Biodiversity Areas or KBAs. “Many entities are already using the KBA data – some on a daily basis – to influence their decisions. And this use is expanding rapidly” (keybiodiversityareas.org). The KBA data is also a useful indicator for several of the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) towards a healthier planet.

In response to the urgent need for worldwide consolidated datasets to plan for land conservation and biodiversity, the IBAT portal gathers three evolutive datasets for 1) Protected Areas, 2) Key Biodiversity Areas and 3) the Red List for endangered species. Modeled after satellite imagery and bird habitats estimates, KBAs have grown to include diverse criteria, summarized by the recent IUCN publication to try and set a standard for the global community.

Criteria focus on: 

1. Threatened Biodiversity
2. Geographically restricted biodiversity
3. Ecological Integrity
4. Biological Processes
5. Irreplaceability through quantitative analysis

According to the KBA site, Indigenous Peoples and Local Community (IPLC) are recognized as major stakeholders in the management of KBAs. KBA criteria include a provisional “inclusion of a wide range of data sources: for example, drawing from traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and indigenous knowledge (IP) as appropriate.” However, the data is not currently released with clear variables to recognize whether identified KBAs are related to TEK or Native stewardship. In fact, KBA criteria are currently not differentiated in the database, which might be problematic because some criteria assess the ecological importance of areas for biodiversity, while others are about identified scarcity. Nevertheless, comparing KBAs with Native Lands shows some interesting results that could support Native Peoples’ stewardship and their key role in sustainably managing land in the US.