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B a c k g r o u n d
Conservation in concert
The relationships between biological and cultural diversity, and the growing threats they face in common, have drawn increasing attention over the last decade. Building on pioneering scholarship in ethnobiology, ethnobotany, and related fields, the concept of biocultural diversity has taken hold and is being spotlighted more and more. Conservationists, among others, have begun to take the idea on board. This is in line with a two-decadelong trend toward more receptivity to accounting for the needs of people in nature conservation schemes. While by no means universal, this attitude is now a firm part of conservation debates. It is now not unusual to read prominent (though often rather superficial) declarations of the importance of preserving biological and cultural diversity as a central conservation goal. Concerns about these dual realms of diversity have found their way into major international conservation communiqués (e.g., the Durban Accord of the 2003 World Parks Congress) and are enshrined in capstone international instruments, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity.
What is biocultural diversity?
Biocultural diversity (BCD) is the total variety exhibited by the world’s natural and cultural systems. It may be thought of as the sum total of the world’s differences, no matter what their origin. It includes biological diversity at all its levels, from genes to populations to species to ecosystems; cultural diversity in all its manifestations (including linguistic diversity), ranging from individual ideas to entire cultures; the abiotic or geophysical diversity of the earth, including that of its landforms and geological processes, meteorology, and all other inorganic components and processes (e.g., chemical regimes) that provide the setting for life; and, importantly, the interactions among all of these.
A basic premise of first-generation scholarship on BCD has been that the relationships between humans and the world’s non-human species, and between them both and the landscapes they inhabit, do not run on parallel tracks. Rather, these relationships affect each other, in certain cases are closely linked, and sometimes may even be constitutive of each other in important ways. Much of this first-wave scholarship has aimed to establish correlations between biological and cultural/linguistic diversity in terms of (1) geography (e.g., areas of overlap), (2) theory (e.g., how language may be related to long-term environmental management in indigenous communities), and (3) common threats to their continuation. Among the challenges for the next wave of BCD scholars will be to see if the relationships go deeper than mere correlations to something approaching actual coevolution, to elucidate the complexities of how humans and non-human species interact not only with one another but also with abiotic diversity (e.g., through the formation of cultural landscapes), and to deepen the theoretical foundations of BCD research. In all of these aims it would be useful to have baseline data.
The Index of Biocultural Diversity: overview
The Index of Biocultural Diversity (IBCD) is a first step toward developing such data. The IBCD is being developed under the auspices of Terralingua, an international nongovernmental organization that works on several fronts to assess the world’s BCD. The assumption underlying Terralingua’s work is that the state of the world’s BCD is threatened with serious decline.
In brief, the IBCD uses a combination of indicators of BCD to establish rankings for 238 countries and territories. There are five indicators:
the number of (1) languages, (2) religions, and (3) ethnic groups present within each country as a proxy for its cultural diversity; and the number of (4) bird and mammal species (combined) and the number of (5) plant species as a proxy of its biological diversity.
The IBCD has three parts, each of which analyzes these indicators in a complementary way:
A biocultural diversity richness component (BCD-RICH), which is a relative measure of a country’s “raw” BCD using unadjusted counts of the five indicators.
An areal component (BCD-AREA), which adjusts the indicators for land area and therefore measures a country’s BCD relative to its physical extent. This is important to measure because large countries are more likely to have higher biological diversity
than small countries. Nevertheless, some small countries have biological diversity that is high relative to their area, just as some large countries have low biological diversity relative to their area. BCD-POP adjusts the rankings to account for these
situations.
A population component (BCD-POP), which adjusts the indicators for human population and therefore measures a country’s biocultural diversity relative to its population size. This is important to measure because countries with high human populations are more likely to have higher cultural diversity than countries with small
populations. Nevertheless, some countries with small populations have cultural diversity that is high relative to their population size; and, conversely, some countries with high populations have cultural diversity that is low relative to their population size. BCD-POP adjusts the rankings to account for these situations.
BCD-RICH is the most straightforward measure of biocultural diversity, but BCD-AREA and BCD-POP are equally important components of the IBCD because they highlight countries that are small in area and/or population size but which have relatively high biocultural diversity (or vice versa). In effect, they broaden the analysis beyond mere counts of cultural groups and species. As we shall see, there are only a handful of countries that rank highly in all three components.
The IBCD measures the status of and trends in BCD on a country-by-country basis. Organizing the IBCD this way is not ideal from an ecological and ecolinguistic point of view, since species, cultures, and languages usually do not respect national borders. In addition, changes in national boundaries (such as followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or the division of Eritrea and Ethiopia, to take two recent examples) can wreak havoc on trying to establish meaningful time-series data sets. However, most of the global data relevant to the IBCD is organized on a country-level basis, and all global indices are organized this way.
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Purpose of the IBCD
The purpose of any index, including the IBCD, is to gauge current conditions and trends in a particular subject of study—in this case, the world’s BCD. An index is not an indepth analysis. Rather, using a small number of indicators (variables thought to be representative of current conditions and trends) the index “points the way” toward a general understanding of what is happening to the subject. A well-constructed index will also give a sense of where the gaps in knowledge are.
Limitations of the IBCD
Data availability is the ultimate limiting factor for any index. All global environmental and cultural indices are based on datasets that are incomplete or of uneven quality, and possibly out of date as well. There is no widely followed standard for gathering the kinds of data that could indicate the global status of BCD—as opposed to economic or human health data, such as those that form the basis for calculations of Gross National Product or the U.N. Development Program’s widely cited Human Development Index (HDI).
The basic building blocks of data needed to fully determine the global status of BCD are not presently available. Such data would largely have to derive from national censuses (for cultural data) and comprehensive ecosystem inventories (for biological and geophysical data). The obstacles to obtaining these data on a global scale are formidable, to say the least. Not only is there no coordination across countries of the format and timing of censuses, but even if there were there are numerous pitfalls in administering censuses that can bias the results and confound the proper interpretation of respondents’ answers. Nor is it likely that many countries can mount the kind of detailed scientific inventory needed to fully catalogue their biological and geophysical resources.
This is not an unusual situation. All global-level indices rely on simple proxies to measure complex characteristics. For example, the HDI boils down the enormously complicated factors that determine human well-being into three simple metrics: a long and healthy life (as measured by life expectancy), the attainment of knowledge (as measured by school enrollment), and enjoyment of a decent standard of living (as measured by per capita Gross Domestic Product). By definition, the use of proxies oversimplifies the picture.
Despite these problems and limitations, global indices are recognized as valuable sources of information because they offer first-cut guidance about large-scale trends, using the best data available to us now. The authors fully recognize that a complete understanding of BCD can only be attained by analyzing it at all scales, from local on up to international. Obviously, in many countries BCD varies widely from place to place, and this variation will not be apparent at the national-level scale on which the IBCD operates. Such within-country variations are important; thus, like any other global index, the IBCD should not be seen as a substitute for fine-grained studies of local or other subnational conditions. However, it may be possible to apply the IBCD methodology to subnational areas in order to produce nested levels of analysis.
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Indicators of BCD
In broadest terms, there are two types of indicators that can be used to make an index of BCD:
Current-state indicators. These are simple indicators of the existing BCD within a country; e.g., the number of species, the number of languages, the number of religions, etc. Expressed as per capita measures, or per unit of area, they can provide a sense of the “biocultural density” of a country. For example, it is possible to express the linguistic diversity of a country in terms of the total number of languages spoken, or the number of languages spoken per capita (languages divided by population), or the number of languages spoken per square kilometer (languages divided by area.
Each of these three measures would express different perspectives of the linguistic diversity of that country.
Direction-of-change (trend) indicators. For many indicators of biological and cultural diversity, such time-series data as are available are far from precise. Indicators based on these data can provide information on the general direction of change in the
element under consideration, but should not be used to generate rankings of countries that would lead the reader to believe that the rankings are based on data that allow precise gradations among countries. This type of indicator may be thought of as a stand-alone measurement of whether the BCD in a given country is declining, stable, or increasing.
In terms of specific BCD indicators, a few of the many possible indicators of cultural diversity include:
Language richness (i.e., number of languages, dialects, pidgins, creoles, ceremonial languages, deaf languages, linguae franchae)
Language endemicity
Language demographics (i.e., intergenerational transmission data, UNESCO threat status)
Intra-language structure (functional domains, discourse, syntax, morphology, lexicon, phonology)
Social structure
Ethnicity and ethnolinguistic fractionalization
Traditional (environmental) knowledge
Religion and spiritual belief (recognizing that for some groups this transcends culture)
Artistic expression and allied areas (e.g., performing arts, literature, clothing and personal adornment, etc.)
Methods of food production and cultural patterns of consumption (crop and livestock selection; agricultural, pastoral, hunting, and gathering techniques; diet)
An in-depth discussion of these cultural diversity indicators is outside the purposes of this paper. Here, it is enough to note that existing global-level indices of human well-being have almost completely ignored them, some consciously because of a perceived lack of data but most silently, without giving a reason. One of the aims of the IBCD is to fill this gap.
For biological diversity, some of the possible indicators include:
Species richness and population numbers
Area and quality of natural habitat
Genetic variety of subspecies or breeds
Threat status of species (e.g., IUCN Red List status)
Extent of nature reserves and protected areas
Species richness is the most frequently used measure of biodiversity: it is easily quantified, data exist, and it captures the essence of biodiversity. The species is the basic unit of biodiversity, and species extinction is the most basic expression of biodiversity loss. The other components of biodiversity—ecosystem diversity and genetic diversity—are far more difficult to measure. Measures relating to habitats or ecosystems are complex because, firstly, there is no internationally accepted classification of ecosystem types as there is for species, and secondly, apart from forest cover, data on habitat area are very patchy and not available for many parts of the world (and data on habitat quality are almost non-existent). Genetic diversity is difficult to quantify and measure for even a single species, let alone an entire biotic community.
What makes an indicator a feasible choice for a global index such as the IBCD?
1. There must be a worldwide dataset for the proposed indicator, or a reasonable likelihood that global data could be developed for it from existing sources of information.
2. There must be a way of quantifying the indicator’s dataset.
3. The proposed indicator must have theoretical significance, be capable of being mapped, and be capable of being tracked over time.
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Scoring and weighting of indicators
Two fundamental decisions facing the developers of any index are (1) how to score the indicators and (2) whether to assign components of the index different weighted values or leave them unweighted.
Any number of scoring methods is possible. We chose a 0–1 scale to match that of several of the most widely used indices, such as the HDI, various ethnolinguistic fractionalization indices, and the Greenberg A Index of linguistic diversity.
Another decision that presents itself is whether to weight indicators. Weighting is simply a way of changing the calculation method based on the considered judgment of the index compilers. For instance, in a weighted index the value for a particular factor that is considered preponderantly important by the compilers might be assigned a two-thirds weight in the overall calculation, with a second and third factor each getting a one-sixth weight. In an unweighted index, all three of these factors would get an equal weight (i.e., each would count one-third toward the overall calculation). Although weighting methods can be useful in situations where data are abundant and basic knowledge is settled so that only the significance of details is in dispute, in other cases weighting boils down to a more-or-less arbitrary judgment of the compilers. Because the state of BCD is just beginning to be analyzed, we have left all the indicators unweighted in the IBCD.
Measuring diversity: some technical and theoretical considerations
When measuring diversity, it immediately becomes apparent that the objects of measurement—i.e., the components of diversity, whether they be species, languages, ethnic groups, or whatever—are not distributed evenly. Studies typically uncover a lot of information about widely distributed, common, or numerically large components within a given class, yet overall diversity is usually determined by the presence of many narrowly distributed, uncommon, and numerically small components. For example, an all-taxa biodiversity inventory of Great Smoky Mountains National Park (USA) has uncovered a number of small, rare microhabitats (such as waterfall spray zones, high-elevation cliff seeps) that are hard to inventory and so are not well known. Researchers in the park believe that “a substantial fraction of this landscape’s ‘biodiversity’ may be tied to habitats that are small and often subsumed into larger habitat categories”. More generally, in sampling species richness “we often find we have the most information where it is the least useful. That is, a few classes account for most of the observations, whereas a few observations are scattered over most of the classes”. The same considerations, the authors add, apply beyond the bounds of biology.
The distribution of the world’s languages provides an excellent illustration of this. When classed according to the number of mother-tongue speakers per language, the distribution is radically skewed toward the dozen or so largest languages. These languages are spoken by more than 95% of the world’s people, yet they represent far fewer than 1% of the world’s 6,800+ languages. So most of the world’s linguistic diversity, as measured by the proxy of language richness, is found in very small endemic languages that, like small rare habitats, tend to be lumped into larger categories (such as being listed under the generic category “native languages” or “other small languages’ in country-level reference works aimed at non-specialists) where their individuality is lost. Nevertheless, most of the information we have about languages is derived from the largest, most widely distributed ones—precisely the phenomenon described above. As we shall see, this has important ramifications for the construction of the cultural diversity component of the IBCD.
These considerations bring forth a fundamental question: when we talk about measuring diversity, just what do we mean? There are two basic ways to gauge diversity:
1. Calculate the raw richness of the components of diversity being measured. This simply means figuring out the raw number of discrete components present through some kind of survey (or, failing that, applying an estimation model). In the case of the IBCD, these components are languages, religions, and ethnic groups (for cultural diversity) and bird/mammal and plant species (for biological diversity).
2. Calculate the distribution of the components of diversity being measured, taking into account the relative abundance of each one (species, language, etc). Because calculating a distribution depends on richness data, we can consider richness to be the
fundamental measure of diversity. And, in fact, most measures of diversity, whether biological or cultural, rely on richness data.
The index presented here is based on richness data only. A more sophisticated analysis would take abundance distributions into consideration, but the lack of data on relative abundance of species, language speakers, etc., precludes this possibility at present.
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