A rights-based approach is not a concession to nature protection. It is one of the conditions for doing it well.
For too long, “fortress conservation” has imagined that nature is protected when people are kept out: fences, guards, evictions and rules made far from the places they govern. The human cost has fallen most heavily on Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists and rural families whose knowledge and care have shaped many of the landscapes now described as wilderness.
The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment has been direct: exclusionary conservation can violate rights and can fail nature itself. Conservation that displaces or criminalizes people damages trust, ignores local observation and often removes the very stewards whose practices sustained biodiversity.
There is a different path. Begin with land and resource rights, free, prior and informed consent, fair participation in governance and an honest process for remedy when harm has occurred. Fund community institutions, not only outside enforcement. Make room for customary harvest, grazing and seasonal movement where these practices sustain ecosystems. And measure success through both biodiversity outcomes and the security, dignity and decision-making power of the people who live with the work. Protecting nature and protecting rights are not competing goals; they are mutually reinforcing responsibilities.
This approach also asks conservation organizations to be accountable for their own conduct. Are safeguards accessible to people in the places where projects operate? Can someone report harm without risking retaliation? Does funding reach community institutions directly? Are rangers and partner agencies trained in human rights? Is there an independent way to investigate serious complaints? These questions should be normal parts of conservation planning. Nature does not need a model built on dispossession. It needs relationships of care that can survive political change, economic pressure and the long work of restoration.
Rights-based conservation is sometimes dismissed as slow or complicated. It can indeed require patience: listening before designing a project, resolving tenure questions, sharing authority, working through conflict and returning to decisions when circumstances change. Yet exclusion is not simple either. It often creates enforcement costs, resentment, hidden land-use pressure and a cycle of disputes that consumes years. A project that begins with respect for rights may be more demanding at the outset, but it has a better chance of becoming legitimate, durable and locally defended.
The language we use matters here. Calling an inhabited landscape “empty” erases the relationships that have kept it alive: controlled burning, seasonal harvest, grazing rotation, seed saving, fishing practices, sacred responsibilities and informal rules of care. None of these practices is automatically benign, and communities themselves are not uniform. But treating local people as a threat by default guarantees that conservation begins with a false story. It also makes collaboration harder when ecological conditions change and adaptive knowledge is most needed.