Indigenous people inhabit over 85 percent of the world's protected areas. New proposed protected areas almost invariably include areas claimed as indigenous territories. In some countries, more biodiversity is found in indigenous reserves than in nature preserves. And so it is that, at the end of the twentieth century, conservationists are urgently seeking ways to collaborate with indigenous peoples to preserve biodiversity and expand wildlife habitats for the future. Conservationists have found that such collaboration is not always easy-either locally at the level of communities or regionally at the level of federations.
Collaboration remains a work in progress.
Indigenous groups are suspicious that conservationists intend to alienate their lands from them. While traditional resources management and value systems generally support conservation objectives, indigenous communities often lack people with expertise for monitoring biodiversity levels and planning land use that is compatible with habitat maintenance. They sometimes lack the organizational capacity to interact with outsiders of the manage project funds. They face multiple problems that accompany modernization. They usually have very little political weight at the national level and are sometimes viewed as troublemakers by national governments.