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How a fake biodiversity statistic took over the world

Published on 14 Comments on How a fake biodiversity statistic took over the world

Here's a timeless story about the way a widely cited pseudo-statistic managed to worm its way into the discourse. It all starts with a brief funding request 20 years ago that describes the outcome of a program among the Kalinga and Umili peoples in the Philippines:

2004: "From 1990-1996, a total of seven indigenous communities in Kalinga — with 1,071 households or families — were served and have benefited from this SIPAT program.... Because of this project, 81% of regional forest lands were maintained in the Province of Kalinga.  For this reason, the old growth forests remain largely intact in Kalinga and continue to contain rich biodiversity."

This is the original claim: one of the benefits of a single small program in the Philippines was maintenance of most of the forest lands in the area. This was picked up the following year in a World Resources Institute report:

2005: "The combination of watershed protection and good irrigation management raised annual incomes for over 1,000 poor families in seven indigenous communities by an average of 27 percent, all while maintaining over 80 percent of the original high-biodiversity forest cover."

This is an accurate enough paraphrase but highlights the fact that the Kalinga forest is rich in biodiversity. This apparently led a World Bank report to go a good bit further:

2008: "Traditional Indigenous Territories...coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity."

We've gone from Kalinga lands in the Philippines to all indigenous territory, and from 81% of the forest to 80% of all biodiversity. After that, things took off:

2008-2023: Grist says, "Indigenous land contains 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity." Amnesty International says, "Although they comprise only 6.2% of the world’s population, Indigenous Peoples safeguard 80% of the planet’s biodiversity." One Earth says, "The territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity."

This is all documented in a Nature article that says the bullshit version of this claim is now everywhere:

2024: "Among the 348 documents that we found to include the 80% claim are 186 peer-reviewed journal articles, including some in BioScience, The Lancet Planetary Health and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and 19 news articles targeted at a specialist audience."

In a classic game of telephone, we went from 81% of regional forest being maintained by the indigenous people of Kalinga to 80% of all biodiversity in the world being maintained by indigenous communities. There's literally nothing to back it up. And just to twist the knife, the authors of the Nature article note that there's no way to measure biodiversity anyway. The 80% thing would be a pointless statistic even if it were based on something. Which it isn't.

What a classic bit of nonsense.

14 thoughts on “How a fake biodiversity statistic took over the world”

  1. Solar

    This is Fox level sleazy reporting on your part Kevin. Shame on you. You've been slowly becoming a hack over the past few years, but I had never seen a such a flat out lie from you as this one.

    There is nothing to suggest that your original 2004 study from the Phillipines is the source of this 80% number other than your imagination. Even the Nature paper you cite claiming the 80% stat has no evidence, states that the earliest mentions they found of that statistic are from 2001 and 2002, years before the one you attribute as the origin. It is also worthwhile mentioning that even in those the number was always attributed to a worldwide biodiversity.

    The number may very well be false, but just as false is your "telephone" story that pretends one statement morphed into another when in reality the statement has always been about the same (even if wrong), and it started earlier than what you think it did.

    1. LactatingAlgore

      the real question is why kevin's tuesday panera lunch buddy was citing the kalinga study to him.

      what bit of foxnews/dailywire/federalist/etc. lore is this?

    2. rick_jones

      As of 1 August, the researchers found the 80% claim mentioned in 186 peer-reviewed journal articles. The earliest mention that they found was in a 2002 United Nations document that said that Indigenous Peoples “nurture 80% of the world’s biodiversity on ancestral lands and territories”, without a citation.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02913-5

      Our search found no reference to the 80% assertion before 2002. A report that year by the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, a body tasked with assessing progress on the commitments agreed at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, stated that Indigenous Peoples “nurture 80% of the world’s biodiversity on ancestral lands and territories”5. Over the next six years, similar unattributed statements were made in four other reports

      https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02811-w which also gives

      On the basis of the citations we tracked in our literature review, the earliest potential source for the 80% claim that we could identify is a chapter in the 2001 edition of the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity7. Three documents cite this publication, including a 2009 report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO)8. It states: “Approximately 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found in indigenous peoples’ territories.” But the encyclopedia actually asserts that “nearly 80% of the terrestrial ecoregions are inhabited by one or more indigenous peoples”7. In other words, the original statement, along with the analysis underpinning it, merely quantified the proportion of the world’s 136 terrestrial ecoregions in which Indigenous Peoples were living.

  2. simplicio

    Reading the Nature article, I think the statistic must come from the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity ("“nearly 80% of the terrestrial ecoregions are inhabited by one or more indigenous peoples”) rather then the World Institute Report bit about the Philippines.

    The Encyclopedia quote actually predates the earliest use of the stat in other publications, and its a lot easier to see how people could get confused and garble its meaning into the fake statistic.

    Think the World Bank just cited the wrong source for their claim.

    1. Coby Beck

      This seems most likely. There's 0 reason to think this was intentional, it is way beyond some kind of misguided embellishment. That report is quite thick too. I couldn't find anything that seemed related to the claim in question, but maybe.

      If this nature article is actually going off over this unserious connection, I'd have serious doubts about its author.

  3. Justin

    Indigenous people are saviors for us creepy moderns. So they must be glorified like the gods… Even if they are barely literate and unskilled…

  4. cephalopod

    This would be an example of the Woozle Effect, where a citation is used heavily, even though it does not say what it is supposed to say. But the repeated citation lends credibility to the claim.

  8. DarkBrandon

    The AI tools can churn through generations of this game of telephone in a few months. Just give them time to feed off one another's bullshit, missed context, and inaccuracies.

    We have freed humans of the burden of missing the point, ignoring qualifying phrases, misreading figurative language, and generally reading at a fifth-grade level even as grown adults with PhDs..

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