The Biodiversity Crisis Disproportionately Impacts America's Minority Communities
We are living amid a biodiversity crisis the world has not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. According to a recent study as many as one million species are at risk of extinction worldwide, due in large part to deforestation, hunting, overfishing, climate change, and other human activities.
Only weeks ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported a staggering 23 species — including 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, a bat, and a plant — were officially extinct — a shocking announcement and a “permanent loss to our nation’s natural heritage.”
The effects of this crisis are not just environmental, but also financial. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that the economic value of the services our planet’s biodiversity provides is around $140 trillion a year. But assigning a dollar value to the benefits of living in a healthy environment is virtually unquantifiable.
Nature has been said to be a “great equalizer,” but when nature becomes unbalanced, the results do not impact every community equally. In the United States, minority communities are often the first to feel the consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change. In fact, people of non-European descent are almost three times more likely than people of predominantly European descent to live in a part of the United States that is nature-deprived.
In practical terms, that means these minority-dominant communities, are less likely to have access to safe outdoor spaces, access to clean water, clean air, and a diversity of wildlife.
Human behavior is often slow to change, but thoughtful policy interventions could bend the arc toward sustaining biodiversity, enhancing conversation goals, and remediating social inequities. Steps can be taken to meet critical biodiversity conservation goals.
To that end, President Biden has set an ambitious, yet critically achievable goal to conserve 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030. The America The Beautiful Plan outlines what federal agencies can do to advance conservation efforts and turn the tide on the football field worth of land — 1.32 acres — the U.S. loses every 30 seconds. However, to be successful, the nation’s conservation efforts must expand beyond what the federal government has access to conserve, considering that only 12 percent of our lands and 23 percent of waters currently have permanent protection.
To successfully conserve 30 percent of the US’s land and water requires significant and voluntary participation from private landowners. Recent research published in Conservation Science and Practice and conducted by renowned conservation biologist Dr. Peter Kareiva, presents compelling evidence that this is an successful mechanism to protect biodiversity and high-risk species on privately-owned lands.
Dr. Kareiva and his team explored to what extent private land conservation through conservation easements — voluntary and permanent legal agreements to restrict certain property uses — are effective at protecting parcels of land for which there are documented occurrences of high-priority species. The study analyzed 49 modest-sized private forest and wetland properties in Alabama protected under conservation easements and found 116 high-priority species that scientists have designated as in peril.
To put this into perspective, one acre of easement-protected land had a better than a one in 100 chance of containing a high-priority species, whereas comparable tracks of publicly conserved land revealed less than a one in 1000 chance of containing a high-priority species. These numbers provide empirical evidence that private land conservation through conservation easements could be an order of magnitude more effective at protecting endangered species than public land conservation, depending on the placement of those easements.
Conservation easements are far from perfect, with some raising questions about whether some take improper advantage of federal tax incentives on privately owned properties, and if the tax benefits should be adjusted based on the extent to which they benefit disadvantaged communities and designated areas containing critical habitat or species. Nevertheless, Dr. Kareiva’s research demonstrates how conservation easements are used to achieve the preservation purpose Congress put into law decades ago, while pointing toward the need for private landowners to be incentivized to conserve areas that preserve the environment of our people and the varied species with which we co-inhabit.
While policymakers in Washington squabble over how to protect the environment, minority communities will continue to suffer from land loss and biodiversity deterioration. Every tool in the federal government’s toolbox should be employed to slow environmental degradation. The time is now to preserve the nation’s outdoor spaces and protect its diversity of wildlife for generations to come.
Khalil Abdullah, is a Washington, D.C.-area writer and editor. He was an advisor to the Committee on Transportation and Environment for the National Black Caucus of State Legislators before and a former national editor for San Francisco-based New America Media.
