Forest peoples and biodiversity
Much of the world's remaining forest is home to indigenous and tribal peoples. You will learn how forest peoples live, why their lands are often in better condition than others, and what that means for conservation.
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Biodiversity means the variety of living things: species, the differences within each species, and the habitats they form. Tropical forests hold more of it than any other environment on land. The three largest are the Amazon in South America, the Congo Basin in central Africa and the forests of South-East Asia and New Guinea. All three have been lived in for thousands of years.
Who lives in the forest?
- Amazon: hundreds of peoples, including the Yanomami, Kayapó, Asháninka, Tikuna and Shuar.
- Congo Basin: forest hunter-gatherers such as the Baka, Aka and Mbuti, beside farming peoples.
- Borneo: Dayak peoples such as the Iban and Kenyah, and the Penan.
- New Guinea: several hundred peoples, among them the Dani and the Asmat.
- India: Gond, Baiga, Dongria Kondh, Soliga, Kani and many others across the central and southern forests.
The forest as home, store and pharmacy
Forest peoples combine several ways of making a living: small gardens or swidden fields, hunting, fishing, and gathering fruit, nuts, honey, fibres and medicines. In central India, the flowers of the mahua tree are collected for food and drink, tendu leaves for sale, and sal seeds for oil. A family may use hundreds of plant species in the course of a year.
The forest is also a sacred landscape. Particular groves, hills, pools and trees are the homes of deities and ancestors and may not be cut or hunted in. India has many thousands of such sacred groves. Khasi communities in Meghalaya protect groves known as law kyntang, and Adivasi villages in Jharkhand keep a grove called the sarna for worship.
Are forests 'untouched'?
The idea of the forest as wilderness empty of people is mistaken. In the Amazon, researchers have found large areas of dark, fertile soil, known as terra preta, made by past communities who added charcoal, food waste and pottery over centuries. Many forests are rich in fruit and nut trees because people planted and tended them. These are landscapes shaped by human care.
What the evidence shows
Satellite studies in several countries have found that deforestation is generally lower inside indigenous territories than in comparable land outside them, especially where the community has secure legal title. A 2021 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reviewed hundreds of studies from Latin America and reached that conclusion. A global assessment of nature in 2019 likewise noted that nature is declining less rapidly on indigenous lands.
Conservation with or against people
For much of the twentieth century, conservation meant creating parks with no people in them. Around the world, forest communities were moved out to make way for national parks and tiger or gorilla reserves. Critics call this fortress conservation. It caused hardship, and it removed the people who had been watching over the land.
The approach is changing, slowly. International conservation agreements now state that indigenous peoples' rights and territories should be respected in meeting protection targets. In practice, results are mixed. Evictions still occur, while in other places communities run their own protected areas, patrol against illegal loggers and work with scientists as partners.
- People are removed from the park
- Managed by a state agency
- Hunting and gathering made illegal
- Local knowledge sidelined
- People stay and hold rights
- Managed by the community, often with partners
- Customary use continues under agreed rules
- Local knowledge guides decisions
Threats
The main dangers to forest peoples come from outside: logging, cattle ranching, oil palm and soya plantations, mining, dams and roads. People who defend their forests are often threatened and sometimes killed. Securing legal title to land is widely seen as the single most effective step, both for the communities and for the forest. A healthy picture is not guaranteed by title alone, but it rarely happens without it.