Will COP16 summit give a voice to Black nature defenders?

• Afro-descendants want bigger voice, recognition at COP16
• Push for Afro-descendants to be included in climate conventions
• Summit underway in Colombia to tackle biodiversity crisis

CALI, Colombia - 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 U.N. 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 U.N. climate and biodiversity conventions omit references to people of African descent.

"Despite the fact that people of African descent live in communities and places that are nature paradises with high levels of biodiversity, they haven't been taken into account," Epsy Campbell, chair of the U.N. Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, told Context.

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.

The terms "local communities" and "Indigenous Peoples" used in the U.N.'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.

"COP16 shall demonstrate that there are millions of Afro-descendants, who... have been guardians of nature, particularly women, who have amazing knowledge to protect and conserve biodiversity in a sustainable way," said Campbell.

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.

"We celebrate the initiative shown by the Colombian and Brazil governments because here [COP16], there's a direct space given to people of African descent and communities," said Francileia Paula de Castro, a researcher with the National Coordination for the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ).

Passed down over generations, Brazil's Quilombolas protect biodiversity by using sustainable farming practices free of pesticides and conserve a broad genetic variety of food crops, including varieties of maize from centuries ago, de Castro said.

Land ownership

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 U.N. 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.

"We want the Pacific region to have a voice, so that we can make visible all that the communities do to conserve this biodiversity, as well as the challenges we have," Marquez, who hails from the region, said in a statement.

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.

"The lack of systematic and comprehensive data on ancestral lands (of Afro-descendant Peoples) renders invisible their important contributions to biodiversity protection and their efforts to address the impacts of climate change," said José Luis Rengifo, a Coalition spokesperson.

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.

"These lands are at threat from deforestation, industrial-scale mining and indiscriminate fishing," said John Antón Sanchez, a researcher and leader at Black Communities Process (PCN), a rights group in Colombia.

"We see that there are very few efforts being made to include people of African descent in global reforestation programs, which is attracting significant interest," said Sanchez.

He said international donors are backing forest conservation initiatives, but little funding reaches Black communities.

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.

José Absalón Suárez, a PCN leader, hopes COP16 will help shift the focus toward the important contribution and role Afro-descendants in the region have in biodiversity protection, allowing them to boost their influence in decision making.

"We are 134 million people who have an incredible accumulation of ancestral knowledge connected to biodiversity conservation, so we cannot afford ourselves the luxury of leaving all these people out of the conversation," he said.

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney; Editing by Jack Graham and Ayla Jean Yackley.)