New guidance on conservation and human rights launched today at United Nations biodiversity conference COP16

It's been really inspiring to be part of a project that brings together Indigenous communities and international conservation scientists, to co-develop guidance that we hope will be useful to both parties in forging a path to more effective and equitable future engagement.

Professor Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland, head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science (ICCS), University of Oxford.

In 2022, nearly 200 countries made a renewed commitment to follow a human rights-based approach in conservation when they adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at CBD COP15. This means recognising and respecting human rights, particularly those of indigenous and local communities. It also means moving away from top-down approaches and externally generated priorities, towards greater support for those who live in biodiverse, vulnerable places to conserve their own nature.

Meeting this commitment will require a fundamental shift in how conservation is done, but one major barrier is that awareness of international human rights law and rights-based approaches is currently very variable amongst conservationists.

To help address this gap, the new publication assembles comprehensive information and case studies on international human rights norms and standards, and how these apply to conservation. It also introduces several practical tools and approaches that can be used by conservation professionals to shift to rights-based conservation.

Ogiek community members and trainer practise using the Mapeo app to gather field data, Mount Elgon, Kenya. Image credit: Rudo Kemper 2022.

The publication explores the concept of human rights-based conservation and presents a comprehensive overview of international human rights instruments and frameworks, discussing how they apply to conservation. It then sets out relevant human rights of three groups of people who are particularly affected by conservation: indigenous peoples and local communities, women, and environmental human rights defenders.

Lastly, it presents a suite of practical tools and approaches to help conservationists apply a human rights-based approach, and explores what a human rights-based approach could mean for two common types of conservation project: projects focusing on community livelihoods, and those focusing on human wildlife conflict.

Our new publication is designed to meet the need amongst conservationists for a better understanding of international human rights law, how it applies to conservation, and what a human rights-based approach means in practice.

Dr Helen Newing, ICCS, University of Oxford.

The publication has been produced as part of the indigenous-led Transformative Pathways project, which is a six-year collaboration between researchers in the Department of Biology, Forest Peoples Programme, indigenous organisations, and others. The project aims to strengthen local actions by indigenous peoples for self-determined sustainable land and resource governance and conservation. As part of the project, researchers at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science at Oxford are co-developing, piloting, and tailoring a suite of new methodological tools and approaches for human rights-based conservation, both for indigenous peoples and for conservationists.

Other outputs of this work have included practical guidance for community-based environmental monitoring and for sustainable customary use of natural resources on indigenous and community lands. The development of these has been led by Dr Stephanie Brittain (Department of Biology) with input from indigenous partners in Kenya and Thailand and working in close collaboration with Tom Rowley at Forest Peoples Programme, who supports community-based mapping and monitoring activities. As part of this work, two indigenous Ogiek from Mount Elgon, Kenya arrived in Oxford in April 2023 for a three-month Biodiversity Fellowship with ICCS, in the Department of Biology.

Anouska Perram, senior human rights lawyer at Forest Peoples Programme and co-author of the publication, said: ‘Conservationists should not think about human rights law first and foremost as a framework that constrains their actions, but as one which can serve as a guide for how to do conservation well and effectively from the bottom up, in collaboration with indigenous peoples and local communities – which also happens to be the most effective form of conservation.’

The publication ‘Conservation and human rights: an introduction’ is available on the ICCS website here. An executive summary is available here.