Alex Shankland (third right) engaged in work on territorial rights in Brazil

A recent article and accompanying podcast in the journal Nature served as a reminder of the importance of language in research communication around Indigenous people and biodiversity.

The article, published on 4 September 2024, is entitled ‘No basis for claim that 80% of biodiversity is found in Indigenous territories.’ My objection is not to the article itself, or the research shared within, but the way in which the piece is framed. In particular, I find its headline very unhelpful.

The headline seems to debunk the 80% claim, but the main point of the article itself is not to argue that this particular statistic about indigenous territories and biodiversity is wrong – although it does correctly identify the lack of an evidence base for it. Rather, the authors contend that it is wrong to use any single statistic to describe the relationships between indigenous territories and biodiversity.

I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. Most anthropologists would presumably agree with the idea that the simplistic quantification of these relationships is a demeaning reduction of the sophisticated and multidimensional ways in which indigenous people understand their connections with other-than-human life in their territories.

What worries me, though, is that anyone who sees the headline of the article (on their social media feed, for example), is not going to assume that the authors are in fact arguing for a more nuanced approach centred on partnership with Indigenous knowledge-holders. These readers are instead much more likely to assume that the article debunks the broader claim that Indigenous territories are important for biodiversity.

I am all in favour of historically-informed enquiry which exposes the origins of claims about Indigenous peoples and the environment and reveals where these may be misleading. Sussex and IDS colleagues have done a lot of this work. However, I think we need to be more politically savvy about how we talk about this kind of enquiry, given the world of endemic disinformation and whataboutery in which we now live.

Academia may be founded on the principle that any claim should be built on an evidence base that is solid enough to withstand robust challenge, and participating in arguments about evidence may be a core activity for most researchers. But although we may think that we are having these arguments among ourselves, in a world of open-access everything we are actually having them in public.

In this context, we need to realise that part of the audience listening in is actively scanning for talking points that can be fed into an anti-evidence machine that is designed to destroy public trust in any and all academic arguments that may support action on (for example) upholding Indigenous peoples’ land rights or stemming biodiversity loss.

When you are dealing with narratives that justify oppression and exclusion, by all means challenge any baseless statistic they deploy by using headlines of the “no basis for claim” type. But when you are challenging narratives that actually push in the same direction as the available evidence which does support the territorial rights of oppressed and marginalised peoples, surely it’s better to use a different type of framing.

This could be something along the lines of: ‘policymakers and advocates should stop using this evidence-free statistic and start using these more evidence-based ones instead’. Indigenous territories are under rapidly-increasing pressure from new mineral rushes and expanding agricultural frontiers, and the relationship between these territories and biodiversity conservation is set to be an absolutely central issue for CBD COP16, which begins in Cali this month.

So, a call to develop ‘killer statistics’ that can cut through with policymakers and the public while having a solid evidence base to support them is very timely – but the article provides a great example of just how difficult actually doing this is likely to be.

It is vitally important that we thrash out the methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of developing statistics that are meaningful in specific territorial and cultural contexts as well as in decontextualised global policy debates – ideally in a series of discussions where academic researchers engage with Indigenous knowledge holders with an appropriate degree of humility.

However, until we have had those discussions, we are better off putting our energy into expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples’ own rights claims, rather than into fighting academic turf wars in language that risks providing the enemies of Indigenous rights with yet more discursive ammunition.

Alex Shankland is a SSRP Fellow and Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. A social scientist, he has worked for more than two decades on health systems, Indigenous and minority rights, civil society, accountability, political representation and local governance, particularly in Brazil and Mozambique.