Tracing country commitment to Indigenous peoples in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Abstract

Indigenous peoples (IP) and traditional knowledges have been marginalized in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since its inception, but recent efforts have attempted to better integrate Indigenous perspectives. This paper proposes an empirical method for tracking country representation of IP and traditional knowledges within the UNFCCC, using text analyses of national-determined contributions (NDCs) and official side events. Here we show that while some references to IP exist in NDCs, the language is often found in less substantive portions of the texts. Official side events on Indigenous topics are one-third as likely to have been sponsored by individual countries as events on other topics. Thus, centralized discourses around IP in the UNFCCC do not necessarily translate to individual country priorities and actions on climate change. While larger structural changes are necessary to include IP in the UNFCCC, understanding this insufficient country inclusion of Indigenous topics points to further avenues for increasing Indigenous representation in the UNFCCC.