Climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face today—no one individual, community or sector can solve it alone. It’s going to take collective action, collaboration and innovation to secure a sustainable and equitable future for the planet. That future will run on the power of partnerships.

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Indigenous peoples, traditional communities and other forest-dependent communities are important partners in the fight to slow climate change. Indigenous peoples and local communities own or have designated use rights to approximately 18% of the world’s tropical forests and maintain 20% of the total above ground carbon stored in the world’s major tropical forest regions (Indonesia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mesoamerica, Amazon Basin).

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Subnational governments have increasingly recognized the role of indigenous peoples and local communities in realizing commitments to halt deforestation. In 2014, members of the Governors’ Climate and Forest (GCF) Task Force signed the Rio Branco Declaration, committing themselves to reduce deforestation by 80% by 2020 and to sharing the benefits from these efforts with indigenous peoples and local communities. This unique network of 38 subnational governments encompasses over one-third of the world’s tropical forests.

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The GCF Global Committee on Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities was formed in 2016 with the overarching goal of strengthening partnerships between subnational governments and indigenous peoples and local communities to help move the Rio Branco Declaration from pledge into practice. This global movement has helped spark regional dialogues between subnational governments and forest-based communities—in Brazil, Peru, Indonesia and other places where GCF membership is strong.

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To date, the Global Committee has convened knowledge sharing events around some of the most powerful examples of partnerships between subnational jurisdictions, indigenous peoples and local communities to date. The group convened its first meeting in Northern California to learn about the Yurok Tribal Government’s partnership with the California government through the State Forestry Offset Program, which has helped advance the Tribal Government’s goals of re-acquistion of ancestral lands, economic development and cultural preservation. Regionally, as in the case of Brazil, GCF Task Force Members and indigenous leaders gathered in the State of Acre to understand the potential for replicating the state’s groundbreaking institutional platforms for the participation of indigenous peoples in decision-making around forests and benefits from forest conservation.

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The GCF Global Committee on Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities seeks to demonstrate the potential of partnerships to contribute to national and subnational forest conservation goals, while also advancing the agendas of indigenous peoples and local communities. Learning, collective action and collaboration are key. 

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As committee member Francisca Arará from Acre’s Association of Indigenous Professors puts it: “We don’t want governments to come and do things for us; we want to work together.”