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
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
-
Pacific islands seek backing for new regional fund ahead of COP31
Pacific leaders will appeal for pledges to a new regional fund designed to swiftly channel climate finance to local communities -
The Pacific made history in the courts – now we must do it in the negotiations
Legal clarity alone will not lead to reduced emissions, more finance or stronger national climate plans – political will is key to meeting states’ obligations -
Civil servants warn fossil fuel exploration could harm New Zealand’s climate reputation
Advice to politicians says revoking a ban on oil and gas drilling could damage relations with Pacific neighbours and risk lawsuits
He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
-
As COP31 co-host, Australia should make its polluters pay for climate damage
With UN climate funds running short on cash, now is the time to start taxing the companies whose emissions are driving harm in the Pacific and other vulnerable parts of the world -
At pre-COP, UN climate chief warns of heat threat to mothers and babies
The spotlight on maternal health came on the first day of the pre-COP31 meeting in Fiji, where Pacific concerns are set to top the agenda as ministers gather for talks
Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the