Globally, there are an estimated “370 million indigenous peoples occupying 20 percent of the earth’s territory” and embody over 4,000 unique cultures of the 6,000 total cultures worldwide and seventy-five percent of the world’s 6,000 languages (United Nations, 2015). Although Indigenous communities represent the minority of the global population, they paradoxically also constitute the majority of cultural diversity. Additionally, some of the most biologically diverse regions of the world are inhabited by indigenous communities; the Biological 17 is a grouping of seventeen nations that contain more than sixty-five percent of the world’s resources and are populated by indigenous peoples. These countries in the Biological seventeen include “Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Papua New Guinea, the United States of America, and Venezuela'' (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, n.d.). Many of the indigenous populations throughout Central and South America occupy rainforest areas, where there is also a large number of plants and animal species that are distinctive to the regions (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, n.d.).

Subsequently, the indigenous communities rely on their traditional link between the environment and their culture, which sustains a “spiritual, cultural, social and economic relationship with their traditional lands'' (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, n.d.), and creates a continued responsibility to preserve the lands for future generations. Communities are reliant on the protection of their land and resources to continue to the survival of their physical and cultural existence (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, n.d.). The lands that indigenous peoples inhabit account for over a quarter of the global world land area, but UN representatives state that environmental risks are leading to a climate apartheid that could risk communities with “overheating, hunger and conflict” and less socio-econmically advanced classes will be the ones to suffer from the impact of ecosystem changes and quickly degrading local livelihoods becasue of climate change (United Nations Environmental Programme, 2020). The symbiotic relationship between indigenous communities and the environment stands in danger from international, transnational, national, and local levels of resource destruction and threatens many communities’ dependency on the resources provided by the ecosystems (Indigenous Peoples and Their Communities, 2018).