Afro-descendants’ eco moves in focus

After years of being excluded from global agreements, representatives of people of African descent see the United Nations’ biodiversity summit in Colombia as their best chance yet to be recognised for their role in protecting nature.

Colombia, host nation of the UN COP16 summit, wants a specific reference made to Afro-descendants, who number about 134 million people, or 21% of the total population across Latin America and the Caribbean, in any pledges, declarations and agreements reached at the summit.

The initiative, spearheaded by Francia Márquez, Colombia’s first Black woman vice-president and an environmental activist, has highlighted that existing UN climate and biodiversity conventions omit references to people of African descent.

Campbell, the former first Black female vice-president of Costa Rica, said this marginalisation was due to “systemic racism”.

COP16 could be a key opportunity to boost participation as Colombia has a significant Black population, she said, according to Reuters.

The terms “local communities” and “Indigenous Peoples” used in the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) do not identify people of African descent, making their role in protecting biodiversity in their ancestral lands invisible, rights campaigners say.

Representatives from nearly 200 countries are meeting in the city of Cali until Nov.1 to try to stem the rapid decline of biodiversity, with vertebrate populations falling three-quarters since the 1970s, according to a recent World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report.

Human life depends on biological diversity, from animals to plants to bacteria – along with broad genetic variety and a range of supporting ecosystems.

Getting recognition for the role Black communities play in nature and biodiversity conservation would help bring funding to protect their land from large-scale mining and farming projects.

Colombia’s push to raise the visibility of Afro-descendants at COP16, as well as the importance of securing their collective land rights in protecting biodiversity, is being backed by Brazil, a political ally of Colombia.

Brazil is home to the largest Black population in Latin America, including about 1.3 million descendants of runaway slaves, who live in “quilombo” communities, the Reuters report adds.

The COP16 summit held in the Colombian city of Cali is discussing how to halt the rapid destruction of nature, with Latin America and the Caribbean suffering the steepest loss of biodiversity.

The summit’s key aim is to work out how to implement commitments made at the last UN nature summit in Canada, COP15, where a non-legally binding agreement pledged to protect 30% of land and 30% of coastal and marine areas by 2030.

Afro-Colombians, descended from enslaved people, make up about 10% of Colombia’s population, with a large number living in cities like Cali and along the Pacific coast, home to tropical forests and marine ecosystems rich in biodiversity.

Recognising and enforcing collective land rights for Afro-descendants and valuing their expertise and governance systems, are seen as vital for nature conservation, campaigners say.

Six countries in Latin America – Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras and Nicaragua – have a constitutional and or legal framework that grants land ownership and use to Afro-descendant communities, known as collective land rights.

In the region, Afro-descendants live across 205 million hectares of land, of which only 9.4 million hectares has been granted collective land rights, according to 2024 research by the Coalition of Territorial and Environmental Rights for Afro-descendant Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean.

But despite recent efforts by researchers to identify and map Afro-descendant lands in the region, a lack of information has led to Black communities being marginalised.

In Colombia, collective land rights of Afro-descendant people are recognised under the country’s constitution.

But despite such legal protections, Colombia’s Black communities often live in isolated and impoverished rural areas, and are at high risk of being displaced due to clashes between rebel groups and government troops.

Afro-descendant rights groups are also urging governments and donors at COP16 to develop flexible funding mechanisms to ensure money for projects addressing climate change and biodiversity loss goes directly to grass-roots organisations.