by Dipayan Dey & Mrinmoyee Naskar (ICARSIS)
Indigenous science infused in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) provide high-impact, cost-effective solutions for climate change mitigation, biodiversity protection, and ecosystem resilience. However, it has been deliberately ignored and intentionally marginalised in sustainable climate practices owing to vested interests of the stewards of consumer economies and corporate lobbies.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage nearly 42% of the Earth's land surface and protect over 36% to 80% of the world's remaining intact forests and vital carbon sinks. Though they do not have the leverages of the carbon economy or biodiversity financing mechanisms as yet. Ecosystems managed by Indigenous communities consistently exhibit higher biodiversity and better ecological health than surrounding non-indigenous lands. Time-tested methods include cultural burning to prevent catastrophic wildfires, agroforestry, drought-resistant crop cultivation, intercropping, and sustainable water management. Multigenerational observations of weather patterns, animal behaviours, and seasonal shifts act as localized early warning systems for environmental changes.
Even then, it has been ignored or marginalized, because of the colonial paradigms, wherein western scientific and policy frameworks have historically treated Indigenous knowledge as anecdotal or secondary, rather than as rigorous science in its own right. Despite managing critical carbon-dense regions, Indigenous Peoples are frequently left out of formal international climate negotiations,
conservation planning, and direct climate financing. More so, academics and corporations have sometimes extracted Indigenous data or traditional knowledge without securing free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) or respecting collective land rights.
Corporate interests often conflict with the rights and safeties of IPLCs and ignores nature conservation because market-driven frameworks prioritize financial risk management and profit protection over direct ecological restoration. Market tools like biodiversity offsets, credits, and green bonds treat nature as a tradable asset, which acce-lerates deterioration of natures goods and services instead of preventing it, thereby impacting the life and livelihood of indigenous communities. More recently, militarization in transborder habitats or within Terre Nuila, the ‘no-man’s lands’ between countries has adversely impacting the rangelands and transhumance. Explicit cases are being heard in Indo-Sino borders, Indo-Myanmar borders, Armenia and Azerbaijan and as well in latin American landscapes.
Voluntary frameworks like the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) frame biodiversity loss as a financial threat to company profits rather than addressing how corporate operations actively destroy ecosystems. UN reports show companies fail to adequately analyze supply chain impacts on biodiversity despite recognizing nature as a top global risk. Heavy reliance on corporate self-reporting and industry-led initiatives allows for superficial compliance while marginalizing Indigenous communities and independent scientific experts.
However, there has been no significant change in global fund allocations in Biodiversity, Land degradation, and for IPLCs. Except for the fact that 20% aspirational target across the GEF Family of Funds has been planned for actions by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, though this is inadvertently missing as a fiscal portfolio. The question that still remains is, how would the IPLCs be mainstreamed to access this resource, will it again be in the hands of corporate mediators or ‘agencies’ who are still far from the socio-ecological production landscapes inhabited by the IPLCs, strategizing resource management in urban context?