A new study finds the link between biodiversity and poverty was shaped by colonial history rather than by nature itself—and argues that conservation built on the opposite assumption risks repeating it.

The large-bolled cotton that has clothed the world since the 1700s began with wild plants bred by Indigenous farmers in Mesoamerica, long before Europeans arrived. After colonization, that biological wealth – and the enslaved labor forced to produce it – was turned into plantation monocultures whose profits helped power Europe's industrial rise, while the regions the plants came from grew poorer. Breeders still return to wild cotton species that grow only in the Global South, even as unequal trade keeps pricing power in the North.

What happened with cotton, the authors suggest, was not an isolated case – the same logic applies at a global scale: biological richness drawn from the tropics, its value captured elsewhere. It is the shape of a long-noted paradox, visible across more than 160 countries: the countries richest in biodiversity so often carry the heaviest burden of poverty, even though global policy assumes their natural wealth should ease it. To test why, the authors modeled how fourteen biological, economic, and historical factors interrelate – species richness, colonial history, governance, resource exports, national debt – and found that biodiversity has no direct effect on poverty in either direction. The connection runs through history instead: biodiversity-rich regions were more likely to be colonized, and colonization pushed their economies toward exporting raw materials. That dependence weakened post-colonial era governance, and weak governance went together with debt and entrenched poverty.

The authors call this pattern "systemic bio-inequity." Economists have long described a "resource curse," in which countries rich in oil or minerals often grow poorer rather than richer as outside powers capture the value. Here, the resource is biological diversity itself, and its benefits have been drawn away from the places that hold it.

A second finding sharpens the point. To measure conservation effort, the authors looked at how much of each country's land is under formal protection. That share tracks neither where biodiversity is richest nor where countries can best afford the cost of protecting it. European countries, for instance, have consistently low biodiversity and low poverty, yet they have set aside only a slightly larger share of their landmass for protection than the biodiverse, lower-income countries of Africa, and much less total area. Conservation effort, in other words, is decoupled from both the nature it means to protect and the people who can afford its costs – so the burden often falls on those least able to carry it.

The study was led by Prof. Conor Waldock and brought together an interdisciplinary team of co-authors spanning diverse fields and perspectives, ranging from ecology, evolutionary biology, political ecology, development studies and gender studies. Its co-authors are Prof. Ole Seehausen and Anna Samwel Manyanza, alongside two Wyss Academy researchers, Prof. Margaret Awuor Owuor and Dr. Van Thi Hai Nguyen. Its method is part of its argument: global datasets, the authors show, take on their full meaning only when read against colonial history and the grounded realities of particular places – a way of working the Wyss Academy knows well, rooted in the conviction that protecting biodiversity cannot be separated from governance, livelihoods, and who has a say in decisions.

The more painful implication is that conservation's familiar tools can deepen the inequality they mean to ease. Debt-for-nature swaps, the authors note, trade a country's debt for conservation pledges while leaving unasked why that debt exists in the first place. In many places, communities bear the costs of protected areas while the benefits flow to actors far away. Protection works, the paper argues, only when it is matched by change in those underlying terms – of trade, of debt, of whose stewardship counts – rather than layered on top of them. In peer review, the study was described as one of the few in years to make a novel contribution to the poverty–environment debate. What it asks of conservation is more demanding than inclusion: to treat history as a cause, not a backdrop.

Text: Predrag Tripkovic