Biodiversity Loss is a Human Rights Issue: Lessons from Forager Communities

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

Image Credit: Jacob Maentz

The Agta are a forager-horticulturalist people of northeastern Luzon in the Philippines, descendants of the first inhabitants. They have lived in and around the Sierra Madre rainforest for somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000 years.

They have generational knowledge about which resources are available when, and where, and how to access them without depleting them. Their subsistence knowledge is part of their culture, culturally learned though years of a continuous relationship with the landscape, transmitted through practice.

Today, the Agta 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.

Over the past three decades, logging operations, legal and illegal, have cleared vast stretches of that landscape. 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's 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). This raises a question that environmental, social, and governance frameworks are increasingly forced to address: when does environmental destruction become a human rights violation?

The Knowledge Systems We're Losing

Biodiversity loss is typically measured ecologically: species lost; forest cover; habitat destruction; genetic diversity. 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 food 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 water temperature and clarity change across the landscape. Wet season foraging is much the same. This is adaptive knowledge, transmitted through social learning as children observe and practise what their parents do, it is not recorded in an encyclopedia and not transferable to a different landscape shaped by logging.

When logging operations fragment and degrade the Sierra Madre, knowledge becomes 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. The seasonal patterns that structured foraging decisions shift when the canopy that shaped them is gone. A degrading ecosystem is constantly changing, and thus not predictable.

This is also why the evidence linking Indigenous land stewardship to better conservation outcomes makes intuitive sense. 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. Communities whose knowledge is only useful while the ecosystem remains intact have every reason to protect it. Cultural knowledge and the landscape are not separable, if you destroy one you destroy both.

Food Security, Ecological Constraint, and the Limits of Universal Benchmarks

The relationship between biodiversity and human rights becomes evident when you examine what ecological degradation does to food security in forager communities. 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 for another, but a forager whose forest has been logged faces the collapse of their entire food system.

Research examining growth patterns in Agta children - whose nutritional status reflects the food security of their communities - found significant variation tied to ecological conditions. Wet season exposure, which limits fishing access when rivers swell and become turbulent, nearly doubled the odds of growth faltering. Camp-level variation in nutritional outcomes ranged enormously depending on proximity to intact forest and local ecological conditions. The physical record of what ecological degradation does to communities whose food security is inseparable from biodiversity is stark.

The consequences extend further when you consider how global health institutions respond to this data. World Health Organization child growth standards - developed using children from Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman, and the United States under conditions designed to minimise environmental constraints - classify the majority of Agta children as stunted, yet their weight-for-height ratios remain normal. The growth patterns reflect ecological constraint and physiological adaptation rather than just clinically defined malnutrition. When adaptive growth is pathologised and policy suggests nutritional intervention, resources are directed toward correcting statistical deviations from inappropriate benchmarks rather than the actual driver: the destruction of the ecosystems that Agta food security depends on.

Simply put: a community that has fed itself from a landscape for tens of thousands of years, that has no equivalent food system to turn to and no cultural framework for abandoning the one it has, is not experiencing an ecological disaster with human consequences. It is experiencing the destruction of its most fundamental condition of survival - one that no nutritional intervention programme, however well-resourced, can substitute for. The forest is Agta subsistence, and its destruction is a violation of the most basic thing a community can be entitled to: the means to feed itself.

The Governance of Biodiversity: Rights on Paper

The Agta's situation within the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park offers a precise case study in the gap between formal rights and actual sway. Under Philippine law, the Agta hold one third of seats on the Park's Protected Area Management Board (the body responsible for governing the country's largest protected area). This legal provision reflects over two decades of progressive indigenous rights legislation, including the National Integrated Protected Areas System Act and the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, both of which formally recognise the Agta's stake in the area's management.

Research by Minter and colleagues, published in Human Ecology in 2014, examined what this formal participation looked like across 39 management 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, no funding existed for travel to meetings despite legal provisions requiring it. When Agta members did attend and raised concerns - primarily about illegal logging destroying their fishing and hunting grounds - the response was vague citing legal ambiguities and resulting in deferred motions. In a survey of 53 Agta adults conducted during this period, 55% were unaware the park even existed.

Outside the meeting room, the situation is even more bleak. In the study, 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.

The Gap Between Recognition and Power

Human rights frameworks traditionally focused on civil and political freedoms. Over time, these expanded to include economic and social rights: access to education, healthcare, adequate living standards. Environmental rights are the latest addition, recognising that without a healthy environment, other rights become meaningless.

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, adopted by 161 votes with none against. This resolution explicitly linked environmental rights to existing human rights law, and called on countries, organisations, and businesses to scale up efforts to ensure its protection.

The Agta case poses direct questions about what that requires in practice. 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 environmental rights into governance power. The gap between that principle and the reality documented in the Sierra Madre suggests that rights recognition, without the redistribution of actual decision-making power, changes very little.

Consultation tells communities what is going to happen to their land, but it is consent that gives them the power to determine whether it happens at all. Under Philippine law, the Agta have the former but not the latter. Their seats on the management board allow them to raise objections (and they have, repeatedly) but no legal mechanism exists that requires their agreement before logging operations proceed. Free, prior, and informed consent remains a principle of international law without domestic enforcement. The Agta have been consulted, represented, and formally included in governance structures for over two decades. Yet, research by scientists from the University of the Philippines and NASA documented increasing forest loss in the Sierra Madre between 2011 and 2015, though with improvement from 2016 to 2018. Deforestation continued in spite of the Agta's formal board representation.

The Question the Sierra Madre Poses

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. They hold legal rights over the park's management that are documented in national and international law. And they have watched their forest be degraded by forces that formal participation structures have been unable to restrain, while being expected - as researchers dryly noted - to serve as substitute park guards, burdened with responsibilities for which they are neither equipped nor compensated.

The 2022 UN resolution, the Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act, and the management board seats are all still essential. But none of them have been sufficient to protect the forest, because none of them have redistributed the actual power to refuse the operations that threaten it. The question is whether those rights translate into the kind of governance power that allows them to say no to the loggers, to the land conversion, to the slow erosion of the ecological conditions their survival depends on.

That question isn't unique to the Philippines, it is important wherever biodiversity loss is destroying the ecosystems on which indigenous and traditional communities have built their lives, their food systems, and their knowledge of the world. It will only be answered, or perhaps not, by whether conservation frameworks, governance structures, and international rights commitments are willing to treat indigenous communities as rights-holders with authority over the landscapes that are, in the most literal sense, their inheritance.