Languages of Life: A Global Perspective on Linguistic Priorities for Biodiversity Conservation

Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) play a pivotal role in fostering coordinated actions among nations to mitigate biodiversity loss. However, language barriers hamper the participation of actors in policy negotiations and potentially also in the implementation of decisions made internationally. Using IUCN Red List species distribution data, we assessed the relative importance of languages for global biodiversity policy. We found that the most widely distributed species are associated with Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and Malay, considering the official languages of countries. The pattern differs when examining most spoken languages, with English and French losing importance. Our findings suggest the languages adopted by major MEAs and other global policy fora do not properly cover those spoken where most biodiversity is distributed. We propose a four-tier priority system that can be used to select how MEAs and other fora prioritize key documents for translation into priority languages like Portuguese and Malay, which are currently largely ignored.