In the UNFCCC COP 26, various countries, private entities and philanthropic organizations announced their pledges for the forest, for land use and for Indigenous Peoples’ forest tenure. The Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use for instance “reaffirms international financial commitments and significantly increase finance and aims to improve its effectiveness and accessibility, to enable and support for Indigenous Peoples and local communities” (Para 5).

In the Global Stocktake, countries  report collective achievements in terms of increasing national climate policies, increasing finance flows and capacities in terms of developing national adaptation plans and NDCs. However, it is important to note that there remains lack of disaggregated national data that shows how in-country relationships and priorities include the most vulnerable including indigenous peoples, including how much climate finance is accessed and managed by indigenous peoples themselves. Indicators  that measure in-country engagements and priorities of Indigenous peoples, including how Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) are obtained, are also evidently missing in these reports.

On the other hand, parties are already operationalizing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, particularly the CMA 3 decisions that recognize “the importance of protecting, conserving and restoring nature and ecosystems to achieve the Paris Agreement … while ensuring social and environmental safeguards”. Meanwhile, there are a lot of initiatives now both inside and outside the UNFCCC to define market and non-market approaches that obviously will impact how climate finance will be used. This is on top of the stronger push and evident need for financing loss and damage, as being pushed by significant number of countries and constituencies in the UNFCCC.

This brings to the fore how climate finance have benefited indigenous peoples so far and how the different climate financing could be shaped for them to be truly accessible and managed by indigenous peoples.

The overall objective of this side event is to share various discussions and lessons learned of indigenous peoples regarding access to climate finance and how these could inform ongoing initiatives to ensure climate finance could work better for indigenous peoples.