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In this episode of Future Perfect | Futures Antérieur, hosts Liliane Umubyeyi and Meghna Abraham welcome Ruth Nyambura, a Kenyan ecofeminist and organiser, to discuss the biodiversity crisis in Africa and its links to colonial and neo-colonial exploitation.

Nyambura explains that biodiversity loss is not just an environmental crisis - it is a political and economic crisis driven by industrial agriculture, extractivism and trade policies that prioritize foreign interests over local communities. Biodiversity loss directly impacts food security, water resources and traditional livelihoods, disproportionately harming local communities, especially women, who are often the primary stewards of land and ecosystems. She highlights the fisheries crisis in Senegal, where EU policies are depleting marine resources and devastating food security and livelihoods.

She criticizes false solutions such as carbon markets and biodiversity credits, which financialise nature while displacing indigenous and local communities. Instead of corporate-led conservation, she calls for anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and feminist approaches that empower communities to protect biodiversity on their own terms.

The episode ends with a powerful message: there can be no biodiversity justice without systemic change. It is not enough to 'conserve' nature while maintaining economic systems that extract, exploit and destroy. For true biodiversity justice, she insists on radical change, including land rights, reparations and grassroots resistance to reclaim ecosystems from exploitative forces.

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Ruth Nyambura is a Kenyan feminist and organizer whose research interests are primarily on the agrarian political economy/ecology of Africa as well as other parts of the Global South. She has previously worked as the head of advocacy for the African Biodiversity Network (ABN).

Nyambura has written extensively on various aspects of the current agrarian transformations in Africa with her overall work focusing on the ideological underpinnings of the ‘New Green Revolution in Africa’ and its ties to philanthrocapitalist organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

Nyambura’s research also analyzes the rapidly changing policy and legislative frameworks across the continent related to biosafety and Trade-Related Aspects of the Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime which are not only criminalizing the rights of small-holder/-peasant farmers to use their traditional/indigenous seeds but are also opening up the space for foreign agri-business companies on the continent.

Nyambura is the founder and convenor of the African Ecofeminists Collective as well as the No REDD in Africa (NRAN) Collective which challenges forest-related carbon markets and documents the impacts of these schemes on local communities in Africa.

She is also a board member of the Climate Justice Fund (CJF).

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