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Munduruku indigenous people hold a demonstration at COP30 in Brazil (Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)
Funding and legal authority are short of promises made.
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Climate diplomacy praises Indigenous knowledge but withholds powerClimate diplomacy praises Indigenous knowledge but withholds power
At successive UN climate conferences, two ideas have appeared side by side. Developed countries promise more adaptation and loss-and-damage finance, while official declarations celebrate Indigenous knowledge as essential to planetary survival.
Together, they create an appealing picture of climate justice: historical emitters provide restitution, while communities that have long protected vulnerable ecosystems help guide the response. But this apparent synthesis conceals a deeper failure. Recognition is expanding much faster than either finance or political authority.
The finance gap is stark. The Glasgow Climate Pact called on developed countries to double adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025 – commonly understood as a target of about US$40 billion. Yet theUN Environment Program concluded (Opens in new window) that the target would not be met, while developing countries’ adaptation needs could reach US$310 billion annually by 2035.
The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage presents a similar mismatch. Anofficial board report (Opens in new window) recorded US$788.8 million in pledges but only US$361 million received by June 2025. The fund’s creation carried political weight, but its resources remain far removed from the scale of irreversible losses already confronting climate-vulnerable states.
In this setting, praising Indigenous knowledge becomes inexpensive moral currency. Negotiators can endorse traditional stewardship without resolving harder disputes over historical responsibility, fiscal transfers, land tenure or legal liability. Ceremonial recognition risks becoming a substitute for redistribution.
The burden of conservation remains local, while tradable credits, data and reputational benefits flow elsewhere.
That does not make Indigenous knowledge symbolic or scientifically marginal. Indigenous peoples hold tenure rights over or manage more than a quarter of the world’s land, overlapping with around40% of terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes (Opens in new window). In northern Australia, Indigenous fire management has moved beyond rhetorical recognition. Controlled early dry-season burning is incorporated into Australia’scarbon-credit methodology (Opens in new window), reducing the risk of more destructive late-season fires while supporting Indigenous ranger organisations and carbon enterprises.
But such knowledge is not a technology that can simply be extracted and replicated elsewhere. It is embedded in particular landscapes, languages, institutions and relationships between communities and Country. Knowledge of Australian savannas cannot be detached from its custodians and exported as a generic wildfire-management template. Nor can Amazonian forest knowledge be inserted wholesale into adaptation plans for Pacific atolls or Asian megacities.
The central policy problem is therefore not how to “scale up” Indigenous knowledge. It is how institutions can support locally specific knowledge without stripping away the authority that gives it meaning.
Existing climate funds remain poorly designed for that task. Entry commonly requires accredited intermediaries, fiduciary systems, complex proposal documentation and internationally legible monitoring frameworks. The Green Climate Fund itself acknowledges (Opens in new window) that Indigenous peoples frequently lack equitable access to project benefits and are not always adequately consulted over activities affecting their communities. Its recent efforts to widen accreditation for Indigenous organisations are welcome, but they also reveal how exceptional direct access remains.
The central policy problem is not how to “scale up” Indigenous knowledge but how institutions can support locally specific knowledge without stripping away the authority that gives it meaning (Kiara Worth/UN Climate Change)
Research cited by theWorld Resources Institute (Opens in new window) indicates that less than 1% of development assistance directed towards forests, biodiversity and climate between 2011 and 2020 supported Indigenous and local-community land tenure and forest management. Indigenous representatives may now be visible in plenary halls, but visibility is not fiscal sovereignty.
Worse, poorly governed conservation and carbon projects can produce “green grabbing”: restricting communities’ use of ancestral territories while states, project developers or carbon-market intermediaries control the resulting environmental assets. The burden of conservation remains local, while tradable credits, data and reputational benefits flow elsewhere.
A more credible model requires three institutional changes
First, climate funds should establish direct, simplified funding windows for Indigenous organisations, with trusted fiscal agents providing technical support without acquiring decision-making authority. Second, free, prior and informed consent must include the enforceable right to reject, renegotiate or withdraw from projects, not merely the opportunity to attend consultations. Third, land tenure, ecological data rights and transparent benefit-sharing agreements should be prerequisites for nature-based credits, rather than safeguards added after investment decisions have been made.
Indigenous knowledge does not need further diplomatic veneration. It needs jurisdiction, secure land rights and control over finance. Until international institutions transfer material authority alongside rhetorical recognition, the celebration of Indigenous wisdom will remain a convenient form of symbolic justice, practised by a global order still unwilling to surrender either capital or control.
About the author
Jack Huang
Jack Huang is a former consultant with the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology and founder of the Global SDGs Alliance.
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