Federal climate funding for Indigenous communities remains crucial. Yet it is still built on a colonial budgetary logic: Ottawa decides priorities, timelines, and reporting cycles, while lands and waters wait for approvals. Programs that support Indigenous-led monitoring, natural climate solutions, and clean energy are vital lifelines, but they do not yet form a new system. They leave power in the same hands and retain a logic of serving human interests over ecological well-being.
What if the land itself were treated as a primary financial actor?
Imagine an economy where a river, forest, or entire watershed is recognized as a rights-bearing entity with its own ongoing claim to revenue, care, and decision-making. Governments, markets, and communities would relate to ecosystems as partners and “shareholders,” not as resources to be managed or used up. Indigenous Nations whose governance systems have always understood the land as a living relative would guide these relationships and decide how value flows across generations.
This is the foundation of ecological finance: a shift from temporary project grants toward Indigenous-governed, land-anchored systems where ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples are co-beneficiaries with enforceable rights to long-term returns.
From Social to Ecological Finance
Social finance seeks to align capital with social outcomes, such as housing, health, and education, through tools like impact investing and community bonds. Ecological finance goes further: under Indigenous jurisdiction, it treats ecosystems as active participants in the circulation and reinvestment of money.
Core ideas include:
- · Ecosystems as rights-holders. Territories, forests, and waterways are recognized as having an inherent right to restoration and ongoing support, with a portion of revenues dedicated to them in perpetuity.
- · Indigenous-governed ecological endowments. Permanent, Indigenous-controlled funds draw from public, philanthropic, and aligned private capital. Earnings sustain guardianship, land planning, youth training, and climate adaptation.
- · Ecological performance as return. Returns are linked to indicators such as species recovery, water quality, and soil health. Investors “earn” only when ecosystems thrive.
Rather than asking how nature can serve finance, ecological finance asks how finance can serve the land.
How This Touches Daily Life
For ecological finance to matter, it must become part of everyday economic practice, a routine way households and communities contribute to the care of their territories. Examples include:
- · Community ecological dividends. A share of energy bills, transit fares, or tourism fees automatically supports Indigenous-governed ecosystem funds tied to the territories that sustain that infrastructure.
- · Indigenous equity in green infrastructure. Renewable projects and conservation areas are co-owned by Indigenous Nations, with dividends flowing first to ecosystem restoration and community well-being.
- · Every day regenerative consumption. Consumers opt into “ecological tithe” pricing, where a small portion of each purchase supports Indigenous-led restoration where goods originate or are consumed.
In each case, transactions become acts of relationship with specific lands and waters, guided by Indigenous laws and responsibilities.
Financial Models from a New Paradigm
Emerging mechanisms already hint at what ecological finance could become:
- · Indigenous Project Finance for Permanence (PFP). One-time capital raises create enduring funds for Indigenous-led conservation, releasing earnings as long-term governance conditions are met.
- · Indigenous Impact Bonds. Investors provide capital for restoration or adaptation; repayment occurs only when Indigenous-defined ecological outcomes are achieved, with a share flowing to permanent ecosystem care.
- · Ecological Sovereign Wealth Funds. Resource revenues and settlements seed Indigenous-governed endowments. Only sustainable returns are drawn each year, turning extractive flows into intergenerational wealth.
- · Shared-prosperity cooperatives. Clean energy and other green assets are co-owned by Indigenous Nations and communities, prioritizing restoration, local livelihoods, and equitable returns.
These approaches don’t abolish finance but redesign who holds value claims, moving ecosystems and Indigenous Nations from the margins of the balance sheet to its center.
Shared Prosperity Beyond Capitalism as Usual
In this context, prosperity is not defined by GDP or job counts but by clean water, thriving territories, revived languages, and lower climate vulnerability. The integrity of relationships within the web of life measures wealth.
By design, ecological finance redistributes capital toward damaged ecosystems and historically marginalized communities. Indigenous laws of reciprocity and responsibility offer ethical guidance for that redistribution grounded in consent and obligations to more-than-human kin.
Global Participation Without Extraction
This vision welcomes global participation but on non-extractive terms. Philanthropy, public institutions, and investors can contribute to Indigenous-governed funds under capped returns and long horizons, recognizing that decisions about lands, benefits, and stewardship belong to Indigenous Nations. Financial institutions can embed Indigenous rights and co-governance into climate strategies, treating Indigenous Peoples as co-architects of just transition pathways rather than peripheral stakeholders.
A New Form of Stewardship
Ecological finance is not a utopia. It acknowledges deep inequities while working to rebalance them through redesigned financial systems. For Indigenous communities and Nations, the invitation is to keep designing models grounded in Indigenous law and ecological ethics.
For governments, institutions, and everyday Canadians, it is time to move beyond line-item funding and support Indigenous-centered, land-governed finance that gives nature a voice and a share. If the
environment is to shape its own future, then finance must learn to listen, and ecological finance is one way of turning that listening into sustained, intergenerational action.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Image Credit : Ardian Pranomo, Unsplash
The post An Ecological Finance Future for Indigenous Climate Action appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
The ongoing “super El Niño” is likely to peak at the end of 2026 and push average global temperatures to record levels next year.
That is according to Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” update, which analyses El Niño forecasts from more than a dozen climate models, as well as six global temperature datasets.
Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, described this year’s El Niño as “simply staggering” when answering questions from CB+ members during a CB Connect “ask me anything” session.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
This year’s El Niño event – which has been underway since June – has already broken a number of records and reshaped the world’s weather, fuelling fires in Indonesia and “super typhoons” in the west Pacific.
The strength of an El Niño is tracked using the “Niño3.4 anomaly”, which is a measure of how much warmer sea surface temperatures are than average in a section of the central Pacific.
Analysis of more than 600 forecasts from 14 different climate models by Hausfather for Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” update shows how models project this year’s El Niño will peak with an anomaly of around 4C. This would be more than a degree above the previous record in 2015-16.
Writing on CB Connect on 5 November, Hausfather wrote:
“This El Niño event is developing so quickly and is reaching sea surface temperatures so warm that it’s simply staggering. We haven’t seen anything like this in the historical record and it may end up being the strongest El Niño event in the past millennium.”
This year’s El Niño has already chalked up a number of milestones.
On 18 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño3.4 region broke the satellite-era record set in 2015 when it reached 3.11C.
Meanwhile, September as a whole recorded the highest monthly Niño3.4 region temperature anomaly – 2.84C – since sea surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.
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Hausfather wrote on CB Connect that this year’s El Niño had been “running well above any prior El Niño event since June, at times by a full degree [Celsius]”.
Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” analysis indicates that El Niño is set to continue to intensify into December, with 10 out of 14 models expecting temperatures in the Niño3.4 region to peak in the final month of this year. The remainder anticipate a November peak.
While human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for almost all of long-term global warming, temperatures in specific years are strongly influenced by El Niño events.
The “state of the climate” analysis explains that this year’s El Niño event will have its largest effect on global temperatures in 2027. This is because global temperatures typically lag warming in the tropical Pacific by around three months.
Carbon Brief projects that the 2027 average global temperature will reach around 1.74C above pre-industrial levels. It calculates a 96% chance that next year will be the warmest on record.
This projection is based on the historical relationship between year-on-year temperature changes and El Niño conditions the preceding autumn. It also factors in uncertainty around how global temperatures will develop across the remainder of 2026.
The post ‘Simply staggering’: Rapidly developing ‘super El Niño’ on track to peak in December appeared first on Carbon Brief.
‘Simply staggering’: Rapidly developing ‘super El Niño’ on track to peak in December
Some things are too precious to risk. And Scott Reef is one of them.
Today, we’re launching a bold new campaign starring iconic Australian actor Michael Caton and a green sea turtle named Sandy to rally Australians behind one simple message: Flip off Woodside to save Scott Reef.
Off the coast of Western Australia, Scott Reef is one of Australia’s most extraordinary marine environments. It is home to vulnerable green sea turtles, endangered pygmy blue whales and thousands of other marine species.
Each year, one thousand endangered green sea turtles return to Scott Reef to nest. It’s where they lay their eggs. It’s where baby turtles hatch. It’s where they make their first brave dash from the sand to the ocean. It’s their home.
But this remarkable ecosystem is under threat from Woodside’s plans to drill for gas, with up to 57 toxic wells proposed around the reef.
Turtles can’t speak up for their home, so we’re asking Australians to make their voices heard instead.
From one Aussie icon to another
At the heart of our new campaign is an iconic Australian voice, Michael Caton. Caton is using his voice to speak out for, what will soon be, another Australian icon – Scott Reef.
In a cinematic courtroom showdown, Caton lends his unmistakable voice to one of Scott Reef’s most vulnerable inhabitants: a green sea turtle fighting to protect her home from corporate destruction.
As Sandy the turtle defiantly flips her flippers at Woodside, Caton delivers a message that every Australian can get behind.
“Some things are too precious to risk.”
Because when it comes to protecting our natural environment, sometimes being polite just isn’t enough.
Turning a gesture into a movement
We’ve launching a campaign designed to do more than grab attention. We want to turn public concern into meaningful action.
The idea is simple: flip off Woodside and make sure our political leaders know exactly where Australians stand.
We’re calling on people across the country to share the campaign, get involved on social media and, most importantly, tag their local MPs.
We need Environment Minister Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to hear loud and clear that Australians want Scott Reef protected, not sacrificed for another gas project.
China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 3.1% in the third quarter of 2026, as the Hormuz crisis continued to hit oil demand and coal use also dropped.
This guest post is by:
Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
This was the largest quarterly reduction since the 2022 Covid lockdowns and means that China’s CO2 emissions have now fallen by an estimated 0.5% in the year to date.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows that coal use fell by 3% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2026, while oil was down 4%.
The main drivers were a fall in power-sector coal consumption, a continued sharp reduction in transport oil consumption and slowing growth in the coal-to-chemical industry.
The sharp decline in China’s CO2 emissions extends a “flat or falling” trend that began in March 2024 and has now lasted more than two years, as shown in the figure below.
The outlook for China’s CO2 emissions depends on the balance between rising energy demand, clean-energy growth and the government response to a GDP slowdown.
Decline drivers
Key drivers of the fall in CO2 in the third quarter of 2026 included a 3.3% drop in coal-power generation, after demand growth slowed and the amount of “wasted” wind and solar fell.
Power generation from solar, wind and nuclear increased by 110 terawatt hours (TWh) year-on-year, more than twice as much as the growth in total electricity demand. This added clean-power generation equal to Germany’s total power output in the same time period.
The fall in coal-power output and CO2 emissions came despite the fact that China continues to build new coal-power capacity at near-record rates. This means that average running hours for coal plants are falling even faster than total generation, eroding their profits.
Meanwhile, transport oil consumption continued to fall sharply, down 9% year-on-year in the third quarter of 2026. Electric vehicles (EVs) continued to gain market share, hitting a record 67% of passenger car sales and 50% of heavy trucks in September.
The amount of electricity used by EVs grew by 53%, much faster than the number of EVs on the road, showing increased usage of the existing fleet in preference to fuelled vehicles.
Elsewhere, growth in the coal-to-chemical industry continued to slow down in the third quarter of 2026. The sector has been a key source of emissions growth, but high coal prices have weakened profitability and higher output prices hurt downstream demand.
Finally, CO2 emissions from cement and steel production continued to fall in the third quarter, as the contraction in construction volumes accelerated.
Outlook for emissions
Energy consumption growth has been falling after a period of exceptionally high growth during Covid, while clean-power growth has been robust.
This makes it likely that the growth in clean-power generation will exceed total energy demand growth this year, maintaining the structural fall in fossil-fuel use.
Looking ahead, this balance also relies on progress in removing barriers to new solar and wind power being added to the grid, which result in some clean electricity being “wasted”.
The recent slowdown in energy demand growth is partly – but not fully – explained by exceptionally mild weather in the third quarter.
Another key factor is weaker GDP growth. Since reported GDP growth remains within target, however, there is reduced pressure for further stimulus policies.
The focus of the economic stimulus announced to date is “six networks”, which includes the power grid and the transportation network.
These networks are highly relevant for energy and emissions – and they are already covered by policies that emphasise “green” and zero-carbon solutions.
