Conservation efforts that exclude Indigenous Peoples and rural communities risk repeating colonial injustices and undermining global biodiversity goals, Wildlife Conservation Action founder Dr Moreangels Mbizah has warned.
In a strongly argued intervention, Dr Mbizah said conservation has historically been implemented in ways that marginalised the very communities living closest to nature, particularly across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“Conservation has long been presented as a moral imperative, a noble effort to safeguard the planet’s biodiversity, yet it has too often marginalised the very people who live closest to nature and depend on it most,” said Dr Mbizah.
She traced modern conservation practices to colonial-era models that separated people from land, often creating protected areas through forced removals, loss of land and erosion of cultural practices.
“From its origins in the colonial era, modern conservation was shaped by ideas that portrayed landscapes as ‘pristine wilderness’ only when Indigenous Peoples and local communities were excluded,” she said.
Dr Mbizah warned that current global targets, including the ambition to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030, could entrench old injustices if human rights are treated as secondary concerns.
“Conservation cannot succeed if it is built on the displacement, silencing or suffering of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, particularly in the Global South,” she said.
Dr Mbizah described a troubling imbalance in international advocacy, where wildlife deaths provoke global outrage while human suffering linked to conservation often goes unnoticed.
“When wildlife is killed, global outrage is swift and loud, but when rural farmers lose children, livelihoods or lives to wildlife, the silence is often deafening.”
Dr Mbizah said this disparity reflects deeper patterns of exclusion rather than genuine concern for nature.
“This imbalance reveals deeper patterns of othering, where some human lives are implicitly deemed less worthy of empathy and protection.”
She stressed that her critique was not an attack on conservation itself but a call for a fundamental shift in how it is practised.
“This is not an argument against conservation or against caring deeply for wildlife, but a call to do conservation differently,” said Dr Mbizah.
Drawing on global evidence, she said conservation outcomes improve when communities have secure rights and decision-making power, proposing a framework built on Rights, Agency, Challenge and Education (RACE).
“Human rights, including land, resource and cultural rights, must be non-negotiable because they are the bedrock of sustainable conservation,” she said.
Focusing on Zimbabwe, Dr Mbizah noted that rural communities continue to bear the costs of conservation through human-wildlife conflict, while benefits are enjoyed elsewhere.
“If conservation is to be truly sustainable, it must also be fair, leaving communities safer, more empowered and more hopeful than before,” she said.
Dr Mbizah said that justice-centred conservation is not only a moral imperative but a practical necessity in a rapidly changing world.
