A partnership aimed at addressing the climate financing gap for Indigenous communities has been launched with the goal of mobilizing $20 billion a year by 2030.

Announced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, the Peoples Forests Partnership is designed to close a gap in carbon financing: Indigenous peoples manage a fifth of global tropical and subtropical forest carbon and conserve 80 percent of all biodiversity, yet receive less than 1 percent of international climate assistance. The partnership, which will include Indigenous organizations, conservation groups, companies, and investors, will direct private funding to community-driven forest conservation and restoration projects and set a high standard for equitable, accessible, and culturally appropriate mechanisms for forest communities to engage with climate finance. To that end, the platform will support performance-based payments, such as for carbon credits, and other climate funding mechanisms, including a financing facility focused on strengthening territorial governance to be managed by Forest Trends. In addition, the partnership will support meaningful contributions toward Paris Agreement targets, voluntary corporate climate commitments, and Nationally Determined Contributions.

In addition to Forest Trends, facilitating members of the partnership include RECOFTC, Wildlife Works Carbon, Everland, and GreenCollar and have secured initial financing for a portfolio of projects that will generate $2 billion in private investment and at least 20 million tons per year of verified emission reductions.

According to the partnership, Indigenous communities have proven to be the world’s most effective guardians against tropical deforestation: Indigenous territories in the Amazon lost less than 0.1 percent of their aboveground carbon stocks between 2003 and 2016, compared with 3.6 percent for other lands. The partnership’s launch follows a pledge announced last week by seventeen funders, in partnership with the UK, Norway, Germany, the U.S., and the Netherlands, to invest $1.7 billion to help Indigenous and local communities protect the biodiverse tropical forests that are vital to mitigating climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemic risk.

"We, the Indigenous peoples of the Colombian Amazon and the South American Amazon are very important for humanity, because we are the bearers of the knowledge to keep nature intact," said Mateo Estrada, coordinator of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC) and lead author of the partnership’s consultation document on Working with Indigenous Peoples, Traditional Owners, and Local Communities on Climate & Conservation Finance Projects. "It is for this reason that Indigenous peoples have decided to coordinate with the Peoples Forests Partnership in their work to drive resources directly to indigenous management, so that [Indigenous peoples] can improve their quality of life, improve their economy, improve their health, improve their vocation, so that women can participate, and so young people can have a better future."

(Photo credit: GettyImages)
Source: PND

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