Conflicts between communities and government plans to protect vast swaths of land in line with international conservation policies, such as the “30 by 30” goal of preserving 30% of the world’s land and ocean area by 2030, are already simmering, according to a new study. In Mexico’s Campeche state, a farming community living in the UNESCO-listed Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (CBR) is seeking to redraw its boundaries to allow for daily activities such as growing food and hunting. But the federal government, which has jurisdiction over biosphere reserves, has rejected it, according to José Adalberto Zúñiga Morales, director of the CBR. The argument behind this, according to the study’s authors, was that Mexico needed to comply with one of the Aichi targets — now Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) — which means increasing, not decreasing, the percentage of land under conservation. “This affects us because the reserve is prohibiting us from living, from sustaining ourselves and livelihoods,” Felipe Ramírez, an Indigenous farmer from the community located in the reserve, told Mongabay. “The federal government does not want to let us freely [cultivate] in the reserve, and we do not have documents to guarantee that the land belongs to us.” According to researchers of the new study published in Environmental Science and Policy, overemphasis on easily quantifiable targets, such as percentage of surface area, is hindering attention paid to other elements of the conservation policy, such as socioeconomic factors, equitable management, human rights and the inclusion of Indigenous…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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