Climate Change

Climate change refers to alterations in global or regional weather patterns, primarily driven by increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In 2015, the world’s governments agreed to “limit global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.” Yet, in 2024 – for the first time – global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era. With increasing frequency, the world is witness to extreme weather events wreaking havoc on communities and economies across the globe, as scientific reports continue to highlight rapidly heating oceans, melting glaciers and rising sea-levels.

Why is it relevant to indigenous peoples and forest peoples?   

Despite their miniscule historic responsibility for causing climate change, indigenous peoples and forest peoples are disproportionately impacted by its effects. The climate emergency is  severely disrupting their deeply interconnected environmental, cultural, and economic systems. Droughts, fires and floods can render traditional homelands uninhabitable, causing not only forced displacement and migration, but also the degradation of traditional knowledge, cultural identities and livelihoods which are intrinsically tied to ancestral lands and territories. 

While constituting under 6 per cent of the global population, indigenous peoples manage around 25 per cent of the world’s land which contains much of the planet’s biodiversity and the carbon stored in soil and biomass. Despite this, international and national climate policies and initiatives developed and implemented to date have often marginalised indigenous peoples and forest peoples and failed to uphold their rights, and only a fraction of climate related ODA (under 1% between 2011 and 2020) has gone to support their tenure and forest management. Many indigenous peoples and forest peoples have reported lack of effective consultation and free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) processes, in some cases leading to dispossession and eviction from their ancestral lands, in the development of carbon credit projects and programmes purporting to mitigate climate change. In response, indigenous peoples and forest peoples are calling for all national and international climate policies, funding, and initiatives to respect and protect their rights, cultures and knowledge. They insist that they be acknowledged and compensated as rights holders and as key actors in designing and implementing local, national and global climate solutions.