- The creation of the UNESCO-listed Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Mexico’s Campeche region has led to a long-standing conflict with Indigenous residents who argue the government restricted their livelihoods, despite promises of support and land titles by Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT).
- According to researchers, these conflicts are due to a fault in nations’ application of international conservation policy by overemphasizing the expansion of protected areas while paying less attention to socioeconomic factors and equitable management included in these policies.
- Authors underline the importance of adapting international conservation policy, such as the “30 by 30” pledge, which plans to conserve 30% of Earth’s land and sea by 2030, to specific local contexts and needs.
Conflicts between communities and government plans to protect vast swaths of land in line with international conservation policies, such as the “30 by 30” goal of preserving 30% of the world’s land and ocean area by 2030, are already simmering, according to a new study.
In Mexico’s Campeche state, a farming community living in the UNESCO-listed Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (CBR) is seeking to redraw its boundaries to allow for daily activities such as growing food and hunting. But the federal government, which has jurisdiction over biosphere reserves, has rejected it, according to José Adalberto Zúñiga Morales, director of the CBR.
The argument behind this, according to the study’s authors, was that Mexico needed to comply with one of the Aichi targets — now Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) — which means increasing, not decreasing, the percentage of land under conservation.