The indigenous peoples climate action fund
Responding to the scientific and social complexities of the climate crisis requires bringing all of humanity’s wisdom into the room and working in ways that build bridges across traditional boundaries. Foundation leadership 
must deploy a new kind of grantmaking that deliberately bridges the usual divides, insists on inclusiveness, seeks untapped resources and reaches new partners, because philanthropy must mobilize resources and leverage impact if it is to stay relevant in today’s rapidly changing climate, both eco-wise and market-wise. For example, last year’s report on climate change, issued by a coalition of environmental funders, called for a $30 million investment in carbon capture and storage technology. At the same time, one oil company alone already spends $300 million a year on carbon capture and storage technology. Yet I don’t know any environmental funder that has a strategy to mobilize such corporate funding or to leverage a viable scale in this technology.
The Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Action Fund (IPCAF) will structure the $10 million portfolio to deploy ‘bridge grants’ that embody strategies for mobilizing resources and redefining scale. To date, most funders think of reaching scale as growing bigger; however, if we are to tackle climate change, going to scale does not mean a vertical growth of bigger and bigger organizations but rather a horizontal spread of better solutions across neighborhoods, communities, small towns and big cities. How is philanthropy’s new penchant for larger projects going to reach a scale that is viral and not vertical? Case in point: the World Bank did a report on 140 case studies of successful climate change strategies and found that absolutely all of them were done by communities or their local organizations. Not a single successful solution was found within governments or the private sector. The bank readily admitted that their old top-down, big project, big finance model was counterproductive to the kind of innovation, creativity, and practice their research found essential for successful solutions in mitigating and adapting to climate change. They needed a ‘bottom-up’ financing system.
The dual goals of the IPCAF are finding global climate change solutions and going to scale virally by facilitating the spread of local community-based successes across communities, regions and countries and into the policy forums for change. For greatest impact, we will focus on indigenous peoples’ territories, which comprise up to 24 per cent of the earth’s land surface, and their traditional stewardship practices as the source for identifying successful mitigation or adaptation strategies. Evidence is growing that traditional knowledge in land conservation is far more cost-effective than the ‘expert-led’ initiatives of Western-based conservation groups. Grants will support the efficacy of indigenous-managed conservation, combined with dialogues between traditional knowledge keepers and academic, government and private sector scientists, to discover together how traditional knowledge can offer sound, cost-effective solutions for all.
A 2008 study by Rights and Resources found that indigenous-led conservation projects protected the land at a cost of $3.50 per hectare, compared with $3,500 per hectare for projects undertaken by US- and European-based conservation organizations. Bridge grants will deliberately cross these kinds of divides to find synergy. For example, grants will bridge support of indigenous rights for free prior informed consent with shareholder activism to negotiate corporate reform and better business models for the environment.
Bridging the usual divides means we support indigenous stewardship efforts to collaborate with new strategic allies, including corporations with a commitment to social responsibility. These new alliances would use initial philanthropic investments to convene partners with seemingly disparate interests, paving the way for the full promise of self-determination to be realized through access to markets and business deals. The $10 million fund will play a role in bridging communities and corporations who share an interest in developing business ties based on culturally appropriate economic development. One such example is a supply agreement reached between the Yawanawa People, who live deep in the Amazon rainforest, and the personal care product manufacturer Aveda. The two parties met at a World Social Forum gathering and quickly reached a berry supply agreement. The Yawanawa developed new dances and ceremonies for gathering and processing the berries, organizing production in ways that reinvigorated their culture and allowed them to double their territory protected from incursions by illegal industrial developers. The Yawanawa demonstrate that when the earth is protected, it produces, and that which the earth produces is not only good for their small community, but also for the whole earth in the race to protect the climate.
To overcome a false dichotomy when funders only support local grassroots solutions to climate change, or conversely fund only international policy and regulatory solutions, our fund would seek to create bridges between local practitioners and international private sector businesses and global policymakers. Likewise, rather than taking sides and funding only indigenous peoples that oppose development activities or those who are deemed pro-development, strategies that divide indigenous peoples and further threaten indigenous cultures, our fund would seek to be inclusive, uniting the diverse voices with a goal of pursuing development in ways that fully embrace the indigenous paradigm behind the traditional stewardship practice of production-protection.
Much of the climate change policy debate involves paying those whose actions have caused the problems to stop engaging in destructive behaviours. This impulse is behind many carbon finance activities. There is an enormous opportunity to achieve the same results at far lower costs by empowering those who, for millennia, have protected the earth using an innate knowledge of the production-protection principle. After eight years of catalyzing traditional knowledge as an effective means of addressing climate change across governments, academia and the private sector, the fund will effectively leverage resources far beyond our initial $10 million investment, influence reform of corporate and government policies, and create a global network of traditional climate change practitioners – all accomplishments that far exceed what typically is expected from that level of investment.
Rebecca Adamson is founder and president of First Peoples Worldwide. Scott Klinger is the organization’s director of corporate engagement. Email radamson@firstpeoplesworldwide.org or sklinger@firstpeoplesworldwide.org
