From Commitments to Action: Advancing Community Rights-Based Approaches to Achieve Climate and Conservation Goals

Abstract

A large proportion of the world’s remaining high-biodiversity and carbon-rich lands, forests and waters are held by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples, and a robust body of evidence demonstrates the positive environmental outcomes of their governance of these resources. Growing recognition of these roles and contributions is reflected in a range of international commitments, such as the new language on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities adopted in the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), commitments regarding Indigenous and community rights in international forest and climate initiatives, and significant funding pledges from climate and conservation donors. However, translating this emerging support into tangible actions with clear and practical meaning for local peoples remains a serious challenge. Long histories of colonialism, dispossession and fortress conservation have marginalized the rights, governance and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, leaving persistent structural barriers that risk undermining global efforts to advance human rights-based approaches to climate and conservation. While paradigms have begun to change, more deliberate and concerted actions will be needed to overcome these barriers and elevate rights and community leadership in responses to the global environmental crisis. Without such transformations, the push to achieve climate and biodiversity goals risks following well-established top-down pathways, leading to further marginalization of those on the front lines, the continued infringement of their rights, and failure to stem climate change and biodiversity loss.