Why Indigenous land rights are key for saving the planet

Biodiversity conservation has a dark colonial history. We often hear about the climate crisis and how close we're getting to a point of no return if no considerable action is taken. But there is another crisis going hand in hand with it that is considerably less known by the wider public: the biodiversity crisis. Indigenous communities protect over 80% of the world's biodiversity, yet they have been historically marginalised and in many ways continue to do so today. Why? In this opinion piece, Jocelyn Longdon, an environmental PhD student at Cambridge, further contemplates this issue and why fast action is needed to solve it.