For over a decade, Indigenous and local communities have demanded a bigger share of international funding to protect nature and the climate, as well as easier access to that money. But progress has been limited, with only 1-2 percent of such finance reaching them directly, reports show.
Now frustrated Indigenous rights groups are trying a new tactic to speed up change: creating their own funds in a push to boost the flow of money to frontline communities and shift away from what some see as an outdated colonial-style model driven by donors in the Global North.
Since 2020 – and especially last year – more than half a dozen new Indigenous-led funds have sprung up, largely in forest-rich Brazil but also in developing countries from Indonesia to Mexico.
Many are still in a start-up phase, but a few have already begun pushing money to frontline communities. They include the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund (MTF), which invested $1.3 million in 32 projects – from chocolate production to tourism and protecting traditional knowledge – in communities from Mexico to Panama last year.
“We are aiming not only to make the funds reach the real guardians of the forest and the real guardians of mitigating and adapting to climate change, but also to support sustainability, democracy and good governance of all these territories,” said María Pía Hernández, a lawyer and regional manager for the MTF.
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Multilateral funds can take years to approve projects and often struggle to funnel big pots of nature and climate finance into the smaller-scale projects communities need, Indigenous leaders said.
The new funds aim to fill the gap by gathering large amounts of money, distributing it nimbly and leap-frogging the barriers faced by forest communities in dealing with traditional funds, such as onerous paperwork.
“We aim to improve not just the condition of the territories and people who live there but also promote global climatic justice,” Hernández said on the sidelines of last week’s Skoll World Forum, a gathering of social innovators.
Bypassing the giants
As the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hold their Spring Meetings in Washington this week, focused in part on reshaping lending for climate action, Indigenous communities are already rethinking how to better access the resources they need to protect nature and the climate – and to ensure those on the frontline benefit from changes such as new clean energy infrastructure.
Along the way, they are setting up new rules and structures in line with their own traditions and beliefs, after years of chafing against constraints imposed by big donors, some of them former colonial powers.
In Canada, for instance, many Indigenous governing bodies now run their own renewable energy utilities, providing a fifth of Canada’s renewables, said Joan Carling, executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International.
“If we transform the business-as-usual and create the enabling environment and conditions to put Indigenous people at the centre of this, then we can have a truly just, equitable renewable energy for all,” she said.
A new dashboard released last week by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Rainforest Foundation Norway shows climate finance for indigenous and local communities rose between 2020 and 2023 to about $517 million per year, a 36 percent increase over the previous four years.
That increase comes after governments and charitable donors promised $1.7 billion back in 2021 to Indigenous and local communities by 2025 for their role in protecting land and forests, which are considered key to protecting both the climate and biodiversity.
Yet with much new funding still moving through big international environment organisations and other intermediary agencies, rather than directly to communities, “there is no evidence yet indicating a systematic change in funding modalities,” the groups noted in a report.
Connecting communities with cash
Solange Bandiaky-Badji, coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative, said improving direct access to funding is the key issue. At least $10 billion in finance for Indigenous and local communities will be needed to meet a global pledge to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030, she added.
Indigenous-led funds believe they can be pivotal to achieving that ramp-up.
Shandia, established by the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities uniting 35 million people from 24 countries, is still in a start-up phase but aims to serve as a conduit for much larger-scale finance to Indigenous and other frontline groups.
“Millions of dollars are moving in the world. We want to connect claims on the ground to those millions,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, a Shuar indigenous leader from Ecuador and the alliance’s executive secretary, who was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on behalf of Indigenous communities.
Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance similarly in 2023 helped establish the Nusantara Fund, while in Brazil a range of Indigenous-led vehicles, including the Podáali Indigenous Amazonian Fund, were launched last year.
Guardians of the forest – and finance?
Anthony Bebbington, who runs the Ford Foundation’s international natural resources and change change programmes, said the last few years had seen the emergence of substantial new funds, with the potential to grow, that are challenging the traditional ways donors have worked.
“Funds are saying to us, ‘If you trust us to be guardians of the forest – a role for which we are often harassed and sometimes killed – then there is no justification for you to also not trust us to be guardians of the finance’,” he told an event on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum.
In projects backed by the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, for instance, indicators of success are changing from a simple focus on hectares of forest replanted to include things like whether more water is flowing through key rivers, said Hernández, whose fund so far gets 80 percent of its support from philanthropies.
An Indigenous Ramas man lifts a crayfish trap in the Rio Indio river, San Juan de Nicaragua, Nicaragua on February 16, 2022.(Photo: Reuters/Antoine Boureau/Hans Lucas)
The MTF also actively seeks out and helps prepare applications from Indigenous and local communities that could benefit from its support rather than just accepting grant proposals, as traditional donors often do.
David Rothschild, senior director of partnerships for Nia Tero, a US non-profit that works with Indigenous groups, said avoiding heavy paperwork was key to enabling the new funds take off.
“What they don’t want is to become another entity in the system operating in a colonial way. How do they not fall into the same patterns that have been destructive, while still reporting to donors?” he asked.
Hernández said new ways of working are developing, if sometimes too slowly. “We are not asking for blank cheques,” she emphasised. “But we deserve a little bit of consideration.”
(Reporting by Laurie Goering; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance appeared first on Climate Home News.
As donors dither, Indigenous funds seek to decolonise green finance
Delegates will soon gather in the Turkish resort city of Antalya for UN climate negotiations, against a backdrop of war, energy crisis and climate extremes.
At COP31, nations will try to find agreement on various issues, including climate finance for developing countries and a global “just transition” towards a cleaner economy.
This summit is unusual due to its joint presidency, which means that Australia is leading the negotiations while Turkey hosts the conference.
Outside the formal negotiations, Turkey is also pushing its own priorities as part of a wider “action agenda”, including electrification, oceans and “green industrialisation”.
In order to track parties’ positions on key negotiating points and wider issues at COP31, Carbon Brief has analysed around 100 documents and captured them in the interactive table below.
The first column shows the countries and UN negotiating blocs, the second shows the topics up for debate and the third indicates specific issues within those topics.
The final column indicates the positions that the parties have expressed on each topic. These range from “priority” – meaning the party is likely to be pushing the issue – to “oppose”, meaning it is likely to push against it.
This is a “living document” that will be updated over the course of COP31.
Please get in touch if you would like to offer additions by emailing policy@carbonbrief.org.
Brief explanations of the key issues and jargon-filled language that permeate the talks can be found below the interactive table.
Just transition
At COP30 in Brazil in 2025, nations agreed to establish a practical mechanism to help drive a “just transition” to a low-carbon economy.
Key aspects of this “Belém-Antalya mechanism” (BAM) – often referred to as the “just transition mechanism” (JTM) – were agreed during the June climate negotiations this year, but many details are missing and dividing lines remain between parties.
Parties have disagreed about the scope of the mechanism and whether it should be tied to the provision of finance.
Nevertheless, following progress in June within the “just transition work programme” (JTWP), civil society groups highlighted that getting the mechanism up and running is a “key expected outcome” from COP31.
Climate finance
Climate finance is always a highly contested issue at UN climate negotiations.
Developing countries have successfully pushed for a “work programme” on climate finance to feature on the conference agenda.
These parties see this programme as a way to pressure developed countries into providing more funding from their public coffers, specifically under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement. Some are even proposing a “burden sharing” arrangement for climate-finance provision.
This comes against a backdrop of major donors cutting their aid budgets and the Trump administration in the US pressuring multilateral development banks (MDBs) to drop their climate objectives.
Developed countries, which have traditionally been responsible for providing finance, would prefer to keep a broader focus on issues such as improving access to existing finance and broadening the range of donors. Some developing countries, such as small-island states, also support these goals.
Nations have also been discussing Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement under the “Veredas dialogue”. This focuses on making all global “financial flows” consistent with climate action.
Countries have different views about what this involves, with developing countries again hoping to keep the focus on developed countries’ responsibilities to financially support them.
Adaptation and mitigation
At negotiations in June, parties were unable to agree on the details of a “global goal on adaptation” (GGA), which is intended to drive climate adaptation worldwide.
Having agreed at COP30 on a list of 59 “indicators” – ways to assess progress towards the GGA – nations now need to refine these before COP32 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This is a highly technical process that involves a taskforce working out how to use and track these indicators.
Broadly, developing countries stress the importance of finance to fund adaptation efforts, rather than simply to track progress. They also want reassurances about a pledge made last year to “triple adaptation finance”.
At the June climate negotiations, negotiators also failed to make any progress when discussing the mitigation work programme (MWP) – the only formal agenda item that concerns cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Among other things, parties disagreed on whether the MWP should continue running over the next few years, or simply be brought to a close.
Global stocktake and NDCs
Back in 2023, the first “global stocktake” (GST) of the Paris Agreement set out the state of climate action and what needed to be done to set the world on course.
On mitigation, nations agreed to a package of measures, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, tripling renewable energy and “halting and reversing deforestation” by 2030.
Some of these outcomes remain contentious among certain parties, particularly large, developing countries and those with economies that rely on fossil-fuel exports.
Developing countries have persistently argued that they need more climate finance to implement the global stocktake outcomes.
Parties were meant to update their climate plans under the Paris Agreement, informed by the first global stocktake, by 2025. These plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), cover the period out to 2035.
So far, only 150 parties – responsible for three-quarters of global emissions – have submitted new NDCs.
Iran, Vietnam, Egypt and Argentina are among those without new NDCs – and the US has withdrawn its climate plan under the Trump administration.
Some parties, such as the EU, have stressed the need for countries to submit their new NDCs ahead of COP31 – and to ensure they are aligned with the 1.5C temperature limit.
COP31 will also see the launch of the second global stocktake, which will conclude in 2028.
Action agenda and other issues
Turkey will be pushing its “action agenda” priorities at COP31, including global targets for electrification, reducing waste and reducing building-sector emissions.
(The Australian “presidency of negotiations” is intending to pursue a “cover text” decision at COP31 that may capture some of these wider targets, such as the electrification goal.)
The action agenda is meant to provide a complementary track to the formal negotiations, where governments and non-state actors can advance specific, real-world solutions.
A new COP31 presidency effort dubbed the “climate implementation bridge” is also meant to complement these ambitions by turning NDC goals into an “investable project portfolio”
Some parties have explicitly signalled their support for various elements beyond the formal negotiations, in the run-up to COP31.
For example, a joint letter signed by 105 parties called for COP31 to “put the ocean at the heart of climate action” by embedding ocean-based climate action in the UNFCCC architecture.
The post Interactive: Who wants what at the COP31 climate change summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Who wants what at the COP31 climate change summit
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