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Widening the frame: Indigenous land rights and the future of climate policy

February 25, 2026 • 5 min read • views
Widening the frame: Indigenous land rights and the future of climate policy
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View our Twitter (X) feed View our Youtube channel View our Instagram feed View our Substack feed Search What are you curious about? Popular SearchesCritical thinkingPhilosophyEmotional IntelligenceFree Will Latest Videos Latest Articles Widening the frame: Indigenous land rights and the future of climate policy

A growing movement shows that protecting the world’s forests — and the people who have safeguarded them for centuries — is one of the most powerful, and overlooked, tools in the fight against climate change.

by Lee Helland & Carina Mia Wong February 25, 2026 A woman in traditional attire stands among a group of people, next to maps showing global data with colored grids and overlays.
    History and SocietySocial MovementsEnvironmental GovernanceClimate PolicyDeforestation
Made in partnership with the Skoll Foundation. 

A woman stands at the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. Behind her, an explosion of life — thousands of animal species, billions of trees, lush canopy. Ahead, another kind: Humanity. 

People from every corner of the Earth fill the city of Belém, Brazil. It’s a sea of color, music, and emotion as they dance and stomp across asphalt, past highrises in the hot, humid air. A paper snake the length of a city block ripples overhead.

The woman wipes sweat from her temples. Her purple baseball cap is soaked through, its message blunt:

DERECHOS A LA TIERRA ¡YA!

Land rights — now.

An older woman wearing a purple cap holds a microphone, speaking at a protest or gathering, with other people and an overlay of orange graphics in the background.Photo by Natalia Ramírez Gutiérrez

The woman is Joan Carling, a human rights activist and the executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI). The scene unfolded at COP30, the climate summit hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November 2025. A member of the Kankanaey people of the Philippines, Carling was one of at least 5,000 Indigenous representatives in attendance, a more than tenfold increase over recent COPs.

Their message to international climate-action decision makers is simple: Indigenous Peoples have the right to own and manage their ancestral land, and honoring those rights is a crucial lever in climate action. 

In much of the Western world, even well-informed news consumers may find this message unfamiliar, set against the dominant climate script — electrify everything, build green tech, cut emissions. But COP30 made one thing clear: That conversation is beginning to widen.

“Governments need to heed the calls of their constituencies,” Carling says. “Now there is more openness on the international stage, and my expectation is that what [Indigenous Peoples] are saying will matter, and that real actions will come from that.”

A missing chapter in the climate story

The mainstream climate story, especially in the United States, goes like this: To try to meet the Paris Agreement’s ever-more-elusive goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, we must decarbonize energy, electrify systems, and rapidly scale clean technologies like wind and solar.

But many experts point out that this story is incomplete. Limiting warming isn’t just about cleaner technology; it also depends on protecting ecosystems that absorb and store carbon in living biomass and soils. This is all the more crucial since the majority of countries are far off track in their climate-action plans, emissions remain high, and climate-related disasters like drought and fires are already worse than anticipated.

That’s where land rights come in. Indigenous Peoples steward more than a quarter of the planet’s land across 87 countries, including many of the world’s most intact ecosystems, and manage forests that store at least 293 billion metric tons of carbon — roughly 25 years of today’s global emissions.

World map showing in green the areas of remaining intact forests, many of which overlap with Indigenous territories, as stated in the image’s caption.Indigenous lands layer data source: LandMark, 2025. LandMark: The Global Platform of Indigenous and Community Lands. Intact forests layer data source: Greenpeace, University of Maryland, World Resources Institute and Transparent World. “Intact Forest Landscapes. 2000/2013/2016/2020” Accessed through Landmark on 2/13/26. www.landmarkmap.org

If those forests remain intact, they keep carbon stored; if they’re destroyed, emissions rise and one of the planet’s most effective carbon sinks disappears. Today, tropical deforestation accounts for more than 10 percent of annual global CO₂ emissions, according to a report from World Resources Institute, an environmental research and policy nonprofit. 

Indigenous and climate advocates point out that, given the size and unique ecological functions of these lands — and inhabitants’ ability and commitment to protect them — recognizing and protecting Indigenous Peoples’ decision-making power is a smart way to safeguard the land and mitigate climate change.

“The basis of what countries bring to COP should be the result of [Indigenous Peoples’] meaningful participation on the ground and at the national level, but that’s not happening in our countries,” Carling says. “We’re at COP because we are being ignored where we come from.”

Rights on paper, trouble on the ground

Indigenous land rights are written into laws and court rulings all over the world, from the Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act to Brazil’s constitution, where the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld protections for Indigenous territories. The problem is that these rights are not always enforced.

Where land tenure is insecure — meaning Indigenous rights are not honored, and the people who live on the land cannot defend them — forests are often illegally cleared for mining, logging, or other resource extraction. For example, in Brazil, the Yanomami’s constitutionally protected territory was invaded by tens of thousands of illegal gold miners, polluting rivers and stripping forest, activity the community never consented to, and the state struggled to stop.

Often, governments themselves undermine Indigenous land rights in the name of development. In Peru in 2009, President Alan García’s administration fast-tracked oil and logging projects in the Amazon without consulting Indigenous communities, sparking deadly clashes. In Indonesia, the watchdog group Walhi has documented corruption, including the downgrading of protected land and the sale of permits in exchange for illegal concessions and bribes.

Advocates like Carling have long pushed for Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) — the right to accept or reject projects on Indigenous lands — along with direct control over decision-making and climate finance. Those demands came to a head at COP30, where Indigenous groups pressed for a binding deforestation roadmap, explicit land-rights protections in climate policy, and a shift from mere consultation to Indigenous-led authority over their territories.

Even as the value of Indigenous lands and centuries of stewardship gains recognition, progress in recognizing rights and tenure remain challenging.

“The challenge isn’t rhetoric, but rather implementation and institutional constraints,” says Hansika Agrawal, a legal researcher at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. “Global climate governance generally prioritizes high-level targets or national reporting frameworks. But protecting Indigenous land rights is a very complicated, multidimensional process. There’s complex governance challenges that don’t always sit very neatly with traditional climate policy tools.”

And in some cases, Indigenous activists like Carling are dismissed, criminalized, branded as terrorists, and even murdered.

“Those in power are using their might to further marginalize us instead of recognizing the role that we do in protecting our environment,” Carling says. “We need leaders that will be with us in the front when we continue to defend our rights, to defend our land, to defend the resources that all of us rely on.”

The measurable case for land rights

Indigenous land rights can be seen as a moral issue, but the data make a second argument: They’re also measurable climate policy.

Across regions, forests under Indigenous governance consistently fare better than surrounding areas — with research showing deforestation rates two to three times lower where land rights are recognized and enforced. And a widely cited scientific analysis from researchers at The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, VA finds that “natural climate solutions” — protecting forests, restoring degraded lands, and improving land management — could deliver up to 37 percent of the cost-effective emissions reductions needed by 2030 to stay on track with the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals.

Funding doesn’t match the evidence: Indigenous Peoples and local communities receive about $270 million a year for land tenure and forest management — less than 1 percent of climate-related development aid, according to Rainforest Foundation Norway.

Infographic showing Indigenous Peoples comprise 5% of the population, manage 25% of land, store 17% of carbon, and protect 80% of biodiversity.

A new center of gravity?

While Indigenous leaders welcomed greater openness to their presence at COP30, the barriers they face were still on full display. The convention center’s bare white corridors and vast interior — one Big Think producer logged more than eight miles a day just walking inside — felt worlds away from nature, and business interests dominated the space. One in every 25 participants represented the fossil fuel industry, outnumbering nearly every national delegation, according to a report from Kick Big Polluters Out, an international collaborative of environmental advocacy groups.

Even still, COP30 resulted in real progress for Indigenous Peoples: the Forest Tenure Funders Group, a collective of countries and philanthropies including the Skoll Foundation, pledged $1.8 billion to support local communities’ tenure rights, formally recognizing their role in climate resilience. Germany pledged nearly $1.2 billion to Brazil’s flagship Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), which supports global conservation of endangered forests.

The COP30 final agreement acknowledged Indigenous Peoples, their land rights, and traditional knowledge, and made reference to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent for the shift to renewable energy. But it stopped short of guaranteeing Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination as a binding obligation within the UNFCCC text.

“There is no language that shows exactly how [Indigenous Peoples’] rights would be respected,” Agrawal says. “That creates an accountability gap, because if that language doesn’t exist, then it’s very hard to hold global leaders accountable for commitments that have been made.”

So was COP30 a turning point? 

Agrawal says representation is a start. But — echoing one of Carling’s points — perhaps even more important than COP is what’s happening in domestic contexts.

“Often, discussions around Nationally Determined Contributions, or energy transition plans, or conservation frameworks don’t involve Indigenous communities, or it’s tokenistic in nature,” Agrawal says. “When a government is trying to [for example] assess environmental impacts before making investments, it would be very helpful to have Indigenous communities in the room to help guide that process. Indigenous Peoples need to be co-creators.”

As for Carling’s take on COP30: “I’m happy that this exchange took place, but I also feel like it’s not enough,” she says. “I keep hope alive because I see people are persisting in defending their lands and their ways of life. The Western system should not be imposed on us. We self-determine how we will progress.”

This article was produced in partnership with the Skoll Foundation. Through their support of social entrepreneurs tackling society’s most urgent challenges, they’re collaborating to create lasting, systemic change for those who need it most. Visit Skoll.org to explore more stories of impact.

    History and SocietySocial MovementsEnvironmental GovernanceClimate PolicyDeforestation
Lee Helland Lee Helland is the Lead Content Editor for Big Think Creative Studio. Full Profile A woman with blonde hair sits in a light-colored chair, wearing a white sweater and jeans, resting her hand on her chin and looking at the camera. Carina Mia Wong Carina Mia Wong is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. Full Profile Monthly Issue February 2026 Biology’s New Era In this monthly issue, we explore the bleeding edge of biotech, as well as the scientists, writers, and philosophers whose efforts helped get us here. 1 video 10 articles Abstract collage of human profiles, DNA sequences, cell patterns, molecular structures, and geometric shapes on an orange background.

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