At COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, DTEC organized a panel discussion addressing the critical need to have indigenous and local communities at the centre of design and governance of nature-based climate change mitigation projects and programs.
There was a consensus that major governance challenges and lack of recognition of Indigenous Peoples rights and title and smallholder land tenure are key limiting factors that absolutely need to be addressed and that FPIC (free prior and informed consent) is not enough. It was also shared that indigenous communities and smallholder cooperatives need to be allowed to strengthen their capacity so they can ‘drive the bus’ on their own pathway to resilience.
