In the face of unprecedented climate change, Canada’s Indigenous communities are turning to their most revered knowledge keepers: the Elders. These respected individuals, with their deep understanding of the land and generations of accumulated wisdom, are playing a crucial role in guiding their communities through the challenges of a changing climate. Their insights, rooted in centuries of observation and spiritual connection to the land, offer unique and valuable perspectives on climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Traditional Knowledge and Climate Observations
Elders serve as living archives of environmental knowledge, their memories stretching back decades and their teachings encompassing centuries of collective experience. This long-term perspective is invaluable in understanding the subtle shifts in climate that might escape modern scientific observation.
In the James Bay region, Cree Elders have been noting changes in wildlife patterns for years. Moses Neepin, an Elder from York Factory First Nation, shares, “The caribou don’t come as far south as they used to. The ice freezes later and breaks up earlier. These changes affect our hunting and our way of life.” Such observations not only inform local adaptation strategies but also provide crucial data points for climate scientists studying long-term trends.
Elders’ ability to interpret natural signs and seasonal changes offers a nuanced understanding of local ecosystems. For instance, Anishinaabe Elders in Ontario have observed changes in maple sap harvesting seasons, noting shifts that impact traditional sugar bush practices. This knowledge helps communities adapt their harvesting techniques while also serving as an early warning system for broader ecosystem changes.
Guiding Sustainable Practices
(Image Credit: Rafael Albornoz, Unsplash)
One of the most significant contributions of Elders in climate change mitigation is their guidance on sustainable practices. Drawing on traditional ecological knowledge, Elders teach younger generations how to live in harmony with the land, a principle that’s becoming increasingly crucial in the fight against climate change.
On Haida Gwaii, Elders have been instrumental in guiding sustainable forestry practices. Guujaaw, a respected Haida leader and Elder, explains, “Our traditional laws teach us to take only what we need and to think of the future generations. This wisdom is helping us manage our forests in a way that both respects our culture and addresses climate concerns.”
These sustainable practices extend beyond forestry. In many communities, Elders are reviving traditional agricultural methods that are proving to be more resilient to changing climate conditions. For example, in the Okanagan Valley, Syilx Elders are sharing knowledge about drought-resistant plants and water conservation techniques that have been used for generations.
Cultural Continuity in the Face of Climate Change
As the climate changes, so too must some cultural practices. Elders play a vital role in ensuring cultural continuity by adapting traditional practices to new environmental realities while maintaining their core spiritual and cultural significance.
Language preservation is a crucial part of this effort. Many Indigenous languages have specific terms related to weather patterns, ice conditions, and animal behaviours that don’t have direct translations in English or French. By preserving these languages, Elders are also preserving a wealth of climate-related knowledge.
Elder Eli Enns from the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation emphasizes this point: “Our language connects us to the land. When we lose words, we lose ways of understanding our environment. Keeping our language alive is part of our climate action.”
Elders in Climate Policy and Decision-Making
(Image Credit: Alan Emery, Unsplash)
Increasingly, Indigenous communities and government bodies are recognizing the importance of including Elders in climate policy and decision-making processes. Their involvement ensures that traditional knowledge is considered alongside scientific data in developing comprehensive climate strategies.
In Nunavut, Inuit Elders play a significant role in the territory’s Climate Change Centre. Their observations of changing sea ice conditions, wildlife migrations, and weather patterns inform policy decisions and adaptation strategies. Elder Jayko Oweetaluktuk shares, “We’ve lived on this land for thousands of years. Our knowledge is not separate from science – it complements it. Together, we can find better solutions.”
Many environmental assessment processes now include consultations with Elders, recognizing that their deep understanding of local ecosystems is crucial for accurately predicting and mitigating the impacts of development projects in a changing climate.
Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer
Perhaps one of the most important roles Elders play is in transferring knowledge to younger generations. This intergenerational learning is vital for building long-term community resilience to climate change.
Across Canada, communities are establishing programs that bring Elders and youth together on the land. In the Northwest Territories, Dene Elders teach young people traditional ice safety techniques, adapting age-old knowledge to account for increasingly unpredictable ice conditions due to climate change.
Sarah Ponask, a youth from Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, reflects on her experience: “Learning from our Elders isn’t just about the past – it’s about our future. They teach us how to read the land, how to respect it, and how to protect it. This knowledge is crucial for us as we face climate change.”
Challenges and Opportunities
While the role of Elders in climate change mitigation is increasingly recognized, challenges remain. Documenting and preserving Elder knowledge, especially as it relates to changing environmental conditions, is an ongoing task. Many communities are using digital technologies to record Elders’ stories and observations, creating living archives of climate knowledge.
Integrating Elder wisdom with scientific climate data also presents both challenges and opportunities. Projects like the SIKU app, which combines Inuit knowledge with satellite imagery to track sea ice conditions, show the potential of blending traditional and modern approaches to climate monitoring.
The Wisdom of the Elders, A Guiding Light in Climate Action
As Canada grapples with the realities of climate change, the wisdom of Indigenous Elders shines as a beacon of hope and guidance. Their deep connection to the land, their long-term perspective, and their holistic understanding of ecosystems offer invaluable insights for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The involvement of Elders in climate initiatives does more than just inform strategies – it strengthens cultural resilience, empowers communities, and ensures that climate actions are rooted in respect for the land and future generations.
As we move forward in our collective fight against climate change, amplifying the voices of Indigenous Elders and heeding their wisdom will be crucial. Their teachings remind us that effective climate action is not just about technological solutions but about fostering a deeper, more respectful relationship with the Earth – a lesson that all Canadians, and indeed the world, would do well to embrace.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
(Header Image Credit: Getty Images, licensed under Unsplash)
The post The Role of Elders in Guiding Climate Change Mitigation: Wisdom from Canada’s First Nations appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
The Role of Elders in Guiding Climate Change Mitigation: Wisdom from Canada’s First Nations
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by internatio