Biodiversity loss and human rights: a hunter-gatherer case study

Georgina Holmes discusses the implications of biodiversity loss for the Agta, and whether existing frameworks are equipped to protect them.

Image Credit: Jacob Maentz

When we talk about biodiversity loss, we talk about species, habitats, and ecosystems. We rarely talk about the communities whose right to feed themselves, maintain their cultures, and determine their own futures depends entirely on those ecosystems surviving.

Human rights frameworks have long protected civil and political freedoms, and later expanded to cover economic and social ones: education, healthcare, adequate living standards. Environmental rights are the newest addition, recognising that without a healthy environment, the rest become very difficult to fulfil.

For communities whose subsistence, culture, and identity are inseparable from their landscape, the human consequences of biodiversity loss are equally as important as the environmental ones.

The Agta are a forager-horticulturalist people of northeastern Luzon in the Philippines, descendants of the archipelago's first inhabitants, who have lived in and around the Sierra Madre rainforest for somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000 years. Their subsistence knowledge (which resources are available when, and where, and how to access them without depleting them) is part of their culture, transmitted through cultural learning and practice across generations. Today, they hold a third of the seats on the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park's official management board. In a survey of 53 of them conducted during the 2000s, 55% didn't know the park existed.

The culture we're losing

Biodiversity loss is typically measured ecologically: species lost; forest cover; habitat destruction; genetic diversity. There is no doubt these matter immensely, but they describe damage to the natural world in isolation from the human communities embedded within it. In doing so, they miss what is arguably one of the most significant consequences of that destruction: the erasure of knowledge systems that took tens of thousands of years to build, and the displacement of living cultures from the landscapes that feed them, whose food systems, cultural practices, and ways of life have no equivalent in the modern communities they are pushed toward. Living cultures who don't yet know how to, and shouldn't have to, abandon their way of life because they are displaced.

The Agta's seasonal practices illustrate what this knowledge looks like in practice. Dry season fishing relies on familiarity with river conditions e.g. where fish gather when water levels drop and how temperature and clarity shift across the landscape. Wet season foraging is much the same. It is adaptive knowledge, transmitted through social learning as children observe and practise what their parents do. There is no encyclopedia for the Agta and it is not transferable to a landscape constantly changing as it is shaped by logging.

When logging operations degrade the Sierra Madre, that knowledge becomes both harder to pass on and inaccurate. The pools that held fish when water levels dropped no longer behave the same way when the forest regulating water temperature and flow has been cleared, seasonal patterns that dictated foraging decisions shift when the canopy is gone. A degrading ecosystem is constantly in flux, and thus not predictable. When biodiversity loss forces communities to abandon traditional subsistence practices, it undermines the community's right to maintain the culture and the means by which it survives.

Indigenous-managed territories consistently show lower deforestation rates and higher biodiversity outcomes than externally-managed protected areas - holding true across continents and biomes, from the Brazilian Amazon to Southeast Asian rainforests. Over half the world's remaining intact forest landscapes overlap with Indigenous-managed land, but these communities' knowledge is only useful while the ecosystem remains intact. Cultural knowledge is dependent on the landscape and the loss of one causes the tragic loss of the other.

Food security and the limits of universal benchmarks

The Agta's subsistence depends on biological diversity in a way that agricultural communities' does not; a farmer facing a bad season for one crop can substitute another, but a forager whose forest has been logged faces the collapse of their entire food system.

Wet season exposure, which limits fishing access when rivers swell and become turbulent, nearly doubled the odds of growth faltering in Agta children. Camp-level variation in nutritional outcomes ranged enormously depending on proximity to intact forest. It is evident that the environment is intrinsically linked to the bodies of Agta children.

As wild game and fish resources have declined through logging and agricultural encroachment, many Agta have been pushed from foraging into wage labour for lowland farmers, trading meat and fish for rice in the 1960s, trading labour for subsistence by the 1980s. The assumption underlying most development interventions is that sedentarisation and integration into the national economy represents progress. Research by Page, Minter, Viguier and Migliano, examining health outcomes across 415 Agta individuals between 2002 and 2014, found the opposite: mothers in permanent camps experienced a 63.2% increase in child mortality rates compared to those in temporary ones, despite increased access to medical services.

The development paradigm, the authors argue, stems not from evidence but from an ideological dislike of mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyles. At community workshops, the Agta themselves were clear that development measures should be negotiated within their existing lifestyle, not used to overturn it.

When foraging becomes unviable and sedentism follows, the Agta lose the food system their survival depends on, with no equivalent to replace it. The increase in child mortality in permanent camps is what the destruction of a subsistence ecology looks like in practice. That destruction denies a community the most basic thing it can be entitled to: the means to feed itself.

The governance of biodiversity: rights on paper

Over the past three decades, logging operations, legal and illegal, have cleared vast stretches of the Sierra Madre. The Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park, established in 1997 to protect what remains of Luzon's last undisturbed lowland rainforest, covers around 360,000 hectares and contains thirty-five globally threatened species. Supposedly, it is the Philippines' largest protected area. In practice, as researchers at Leiden University documented through seven years of fieldwork and analysis of management board meetings, it is something closer to a 'paper park' (a place where illegal activities are rarely sanctioned, and where the community with the greatest stake in the forest's survival has the least power to protect it).

Under Philippine law, the Agta hold one third of seats on the Park's Protected Area Management Board. Research by Minter and colleagues, published in Human Ecology in 2014, examined what this participation looked like across 39 board meetings between 2001 and 2008. In 57% of discussions directly relevant to the Agta, no Agta board member participated at all. Meeting announcements frequently never reached communities and no funding existed for travel despite legal provisions requiring it. When members did attend and raised concerns about illegal logging, the response was vague citing legal ambiguities and deferring motions.

One Agta man described his encounter with loggers entering his forest: "I have told them that they are not allowed to log here, but they asked me: why can't we log here, was it you who planted the trees? Of course we are not the ones who planted the trees. So we cannot do anything.". The researchers describe this as manipulative participation, representation that creates the appearance of inclusion whilst leaving power structures intact.

Consultation without power

In 2022, the United Nations General Assembly passed an historic vote recognising the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a universal human right. The resolution linked environmental rights to existing human rights law and called on countries, organisations, and businesses to scale up their protection.

Free, prior, and informed consent - the principle enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that communities must be able to give or withhold consent to projects affecting their lands - is supposed to translate that recognition into governance power. Consultation tells communities what is going to happen to their land but it is consent that has the power to determine whether it happens at all. Under Philippine law, the Agta have the former but not the latter. Their board seats allow them to raise objections, and they have, repeatedly, but no legal mechanism requires their agreement before logging proceeds.

Climate change compounds this, as weather patterns have become unpredictable in ways that traditional knowledge no longer reliably accounts for, so the ecological knowledge that took generations to build is being undermined from two directions at once. Deforestation has continued regardless of the Agta's board seats, and it is that biodiversity loss that threatens their rights to land, food, and a way of life that existed in the Sierra Madre years before a boundary was drawn around it

What the Sierra Madre reveals

The Agta have been in the Sierra Madre for somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000 years. They have accumulated knowledge of its ecosystems that no external programme can replicate, hold legal rights over the park's management documented in national and international law, and they have watched their forest be degraded by forces that formal participation structures have been unable to stop. All this, whilst being expected to serve as substitute 'park guards'.

The 2022 UN resolution, the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, and the management board seats are all positive progress. Unfortunately, none of them have redistributed the actual power to refuse work that threaten the forest. This isn't unique to the Philippines, and exists wherever biodiversity loss destroys the ecosystems on which indigenous and traditional communities have built their lives, their food systems, and their knowledge of the world.

Change can happen if conservation frameworks and international rights commitments are willing to treat indigenous communities as rights-holders with decision-making power over the landscapes that are, in the most literal sense, their inheritance.