As the global community grapples with the urgent need to mitigate climate change, Indigenous-led conservation efforts are emerging as a powerful and effective approach. Rooted in millennia-old traditions of sustainable land stewardship, these initiatives not only protect biodiversity and sequester carbon but also revitalize cultural practices and assert Indigenous sovereignty.
The Power of Indigenous Land Stewardship
Indigenous Peoples have been stewards of their lands since time immemorial, developing sophisticated systems of resource management that maintain ecological balance while sustaining communities.
According to Valérie Courtois, who leads the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, the Indigenous perspective on environmental protection goes beyond simply cordoning off natural areas. Instead, she emphasizes that their approach focuses on fostering sustainable and respectful interactions with the environment, including the land, water, and all forms of life. Courtois asserts that this comprehensive and interconnected view of nature is precisely the kind of approach required to effectively tackle the challenges posed by climate change.
Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)
A cornerstone of Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada is the establishment of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs). These are lands and waters where Indigenous governments have the primary role in protecting and conserving ecosystems through Indigenous laws, governance, and knowledge systems.
The Thaidene Nëné Indigenous Protected Area
One prominent example is the Thaidene Nëné Indigenous Protected Area, established by the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Covering 26,376 square kilometers of boreal forest, tundra, and freshwater ecosystems, it represents a new model of conservation that prioritizes Indigenous leadership.
Steven Nitah, Lead Negotiator for the Łutsël K’é Dene First Nation, shares, “Thaidene Nëné isn’t just about protecting the land; it’s about maintaining our way of life and our relationship with the land. By doing so, we’re also contributing to global efforts to combat climate change.”
Carbon Sequestration and Climate Mitigation
Indigenous-led conservation efforts play a crucial role in climate change mitigation by protecting and enhancing natural carbon sinks.
The Great Bear Rainforest Agreement
The Great Bear Rainforest Agreement, led by Coastal First Nations in British Columbia, protects 6.4 million hectares of temperate rainforest. This agreement not only safeguards one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests but also secures significant carbon stores.
Marilyn Slett, Chief Councillor of the Heiltsuk Nation and President of Coastal First Nations, notes, “By protecting these forests, we’re not just preserving our cultural heritage; we’re also keeping millions of tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s a powerful example of how Indigenous stewardship contributes to global climate solutions.”
Restoring Ecosystems, Restoring Balance
Many Indigenous-led conservation initiatives focus on restoring degraded ecosystems, which can significantly enhance carbon sequestration while revitalizing habitats.
The Bloodvein River Watershed Restoration Project
In Manitoba, the Bloodvein First Nation is leading efforts to restore the Bloodvein River watershed. This project combines traditional knowledge with scientific approaches to enhance wetland habitats, improving their capacity to store carbon and mitigate flooding.
Elder Florence Paynter of the Bloodvein First Nation shares, “We’re healing the land, and in doing so, we’re healing ourselves. This work connects us to our ancestors and ensures a healthier future for our children and the planet.”
Traditional Fire Management
Indigenous fire management practices, long suppressed by colonial policies, are being revitalized as an effective tool for both ecosystem management and climate change mitigation.
The Revitalization of Cultural Burning in British Columbia
(Image Credit: Elisabeth Jurenka, Licensed from Unsplash+)
In British Columbia, many First Nations are working to bring back cultural burning practices. These controlled, low-intensity fires reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires while promoting biodiversity and enhancing the land’s carbon storage capacity.
Fire Keeper William Nikolakis of the Tsilhqot’in National Government explains, “Our traditional burning practices create a mosaic of habitats that are more resilient to climate change. By reducing fuel loads, we’re also preventing larger, more intense fires that release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.”
Guardian Programs: Indigenous-Led Monitoring and Management
Indigenous Guardian programs, where community members are employed to monitor and manage their traditional territories, are a crucial component of many conservation efforts.
The Haida Gwaii Watchmen Program
The Haida Nation’s Watchmen Program in British Columbia is one of the oldest and most well-established Guardian programs in Canada. Guardians monitor protected areas, conduct wildlife surveys, and manage tourist activities, ensuring that conservation efforts align with Haida laws and values.
Cindy Boyko, a Haida Watchman, shares, “As Guardians, we’re the eyes and ears on the land. We’re not just collecting data; we’re maintaining our connection to the land and passing on our knowledge to future generations. This work is crucial for both conservation and our cultural continuity.”
Challenges and Opportunities
While Indigenous-led conservation efforts have shown remarkable success, they also face significant challenges.
Funding and Capacity Building
Securing long-term, stable funding for IPCAs and Guardian programs remains a challenge. However, initiatives like the federal government’s Target 1 Challenge and the Indigenous Guardians Pilot Program are providing crucial support.
Reconciling Legal Frameworks
Implementing Indigenous-led conservation within existing colonial legal frameworks can be complex. However, progress is being made in recognizing Indigenous laws and governance systems in conservation efforts.
The Global Impact of Indigenous Conservation
Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada are part of a global movement. Indigenous Peoples manage or have tenure rights over at least ~38 million square kilometres in 87 countries, overlapping with about 40% of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, emphasizes, “Indigenous-led conservation is crucial not just for local ecosystems, but for global climate mitigation efforts. These initiatives demonstrate that respecting Indigenous rights and traditional knowledge is key to effective climate action.”
Policy Implications: Supporting Indigenous-Led Conservation
The success of Indigenous-led conservation efforts has important implications for climate policy at both national and international levels.
Canada’s Commitment to Indigenous-Led Conservation
The Canadian government has committed to supporting Indigenous-led conservation as part of its plan to protect 25% of lands and waters by 2025 and 30% by 2030. This includes funding for IPCAs and Guardian programs.
International Recognition
Internationally, there is growing recognition of the importance of Indigenous-led conservation in global climate strategies. The UN’s post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework explicitly acknowledges the role of Indigenous Peoples in achieving global conservation targets.
Healing the Land, Healing the Climate
Indigenous-led conservation efforts represent a powerful approach to climate change mitigation, one that recognizes the intrinsic link between environmental health, cultural well-being, and Indigenous rights. By protecting and restoring ecosystems, these initiatives not only sequester carbon and preserve biodiversity but also revitalize cultural practices and assert Indigenous sovereignty.
As the world searches for effective climate solutions, Indigenous-led conservation offers a model of stewardship that is both ancient and innovatively relevant to our current crisis. These efforts demonstrate that healing the land and addressing climate change are deeply intertwined processes rooted in respect for Indigenous knowledge and rights.
In the words of Valérie Courtois, “When we heal the land, we heal ourselves, and we contribute to healing the planet. Indigenous-led conservation isn’t just about protecting nature – it’s about restoring right relations between all living things. This is the foundation of true climate resilience.”
As we move forward in our global efforts to mitigate climate change, supporting and learning from Indigenous-led conservation initiatives will be crucial. These efforts offer not just hope for a more sustainable future but also a practical pathway to achieving it – one that honours the deep connections between land, culture, and climate that have sustained Indigenous peoples for millennia.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
(Image Credit: Nathan Anderson, Licensed from Unsplash+)
The post The Healing Land: Indigenous-Led Conservation Efforts as Climate Change Mitigation appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
The Healing Land: Indigenous-Led Conservation Efforts as Climate Change Mitigation
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.