Systemic climate solutions marginalise Indigenous leadership despite 80% of biodiversity protection on their lands
Original framing: “Efforts to combat climate change often exclude Indigenous people – and they may not have any recourse” — bing news
Indigenous peoples manage 28% of the world’s land, which contains 80% of biodiversity and stores 24% of above-ground carbon in tropical forests alone. Their exclusion from climate policy is not accidental but a continuation of colonial erasure, where knowledge systems are deemed 'unscientific' despite peer-reviewed evidence of their efficacy. The 'Fortress Conservation' model, which criminalizes Indigenous land use, has been directly linked to increased deforestation in protected areas like the Congo Basin.
The exclusion of Indigenous peoples from climate solutions is not an oversight but a structural feature of colonial modernity, where land is reduced to extractable capital and knowledge is measured by Western scientific metrics.
Historical patterns—from British India’s 'scientific forestry' to the UNFCCC’s market-based REDD+—reveal how Indigenous stewardship has been systematically displaced by state and corporate interests, despite evidence that their lands hold the highest biodiversity and carbon storage. The cross-cultural lens exposes alternative frameworks: Māori 'kaitiakitanga,' Adivasi sacred groves, and Sámi 'duodji' demonstrate that climate resilience is inseparable from cultural revitalization and land restitution. The trickster’s inversion—where carbon credits and 'green' tech become tools of dispossession—highlights the absurdity of a system that claims to save the planet while silencing its most effective stewards. Solution pathways must therefore center legal land rights, direct funding, and decolonial science, not as charity but as reparative justice, recognizing that Indigenous knowledge is not a supplement to climate action but its foundation.