Land use dynamics and the fate of indigenous culture in China’s cultural ecological protection areas

Abstract

With the global expansion of protected areas (PAs) and increasing involvement of indigenous communities, understanding their impacts on indigenous peoples is crucial. This study evaluates the extent to which China’s national cultural ecological protection areas (CEPAs) safeguard indigenous culture, using land-use disturbance as a key metric to assess impacts on cultural keystone species (CKS). We employ a multi-step evaluation framework that reclassifies land use, identifies environment-dependent CKS, and analyzes land-use dynamics by comparing disturbances before and after CEPAs establishment. Our results reveal that, despite overall improvements in land conditions, over 36 % of CEPAs are in land disturbance threat or warning status. All of these sites are indigenous CEPAs, indicating a disproportionate disturbance burden on indigenous communities. Notably, traditional medicinal practices are particularly vulnerable. These findings underscore the urgent need for policies aligning ecological diversity with cultural diversity to support the global commitment to expand PAs to over 30 % of Earth’s land and oceans by 2030.

Keywords

PAs / Land disturbance / Indigenous peoples / Environmental support

Data availability

All data used in this study are publicly accessible, with acquisition methods detailed in the data section.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zihua Chen: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Jiaxin Li: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Haiyang Cui: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Data curation. Xiaowei Li: Writing - review & editing, Methodology. Zhenbo Wang: Supervision, Project administration, Investigation.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the 2023 Key Project of Guizhou Philosophy and Social Science Planning (Grant No. 23GZZD22).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100390.

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