Indigenous Peoples protect and manage vast lands critical to nature and climate, yet bear most of the costs and risks.
When governments gather in Yerevan, Armenia, for the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP17), they will argue over a familiar set of numbers: how much is spent on nature, how much more is needed and who should pay the difference. However, one group of investors will be missing from the ledger.
Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage, use or occupy as little as 18% and up to 48% of the world's land area. Moreover, Indigenous territories hold more than a third of Earth's irrecoverable carbon, which are indispensable to climate stability and impossible to restore within the timeframe required to meet global climate targets.
Yet only 18.6% of these lands are legally recognized as Indigenous territories and Indigenous waters remain largely invisible in global data.
The irony is striking. The primary threats to Indigenous territories and waters come from mining, agriculture and logging – the same sectors now receiving trillions in transition finance.
Rooted in culture, spirituality and knowledge systems, stewardship of land and nature is largely overlooked in discussions of biodiversity (and climate) finance. Yet it is not free.
Indigenous Peoples bear the financial costs and personal risks of defending their territories and actively manage their lands to sustain the ecosystems and resources on which communities and economies depend. What flows back in support is drastically insufficient.
None of this appears in the biodiversity finance figures governments will debate at COP17.
Indigenous Peoples invest in nature every day. The question now for delegates at Yerevan is whether anyone intends to count it.
How public money has fallen short
The limited public data available tells a consistent story.
In 2023, just 0.82% of official development finance (government aid in its broadest measure), $3.3 billion, explicitly targeted Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Only 0.04%, $143 million, gave Indigenous organizations a say in how it was spent.
That second number measures direct access: money that reaches Indigenous organizations to spend on their own priorities, rather than passing through intermediaries.
Look back over a longer period and the pattern holds. New analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development of aid projects tagged for biodiversity between 2011 and 2024 finds that a third of project titles and descriptions mention the local level but only 0.28% describe the work as locally led. Just 2.24% refer to Indigenous Peoples at all, and 0.001% of that is actually Indigenous-led.
Adaptation finance is no better. Of $5.9 billion in international adaptation finance for the least developed countries in 2021, around 1% was intended to engage Indigenous Peoples.
There is some good news. The 2025-2026 Forest Tenure Funders Group report shows that direct financing can be scaled. Since 2021, direct funding to Indigenous Peoples and local communities has quadrupled and the number of organizations receiving funds has risen from 22 to 135.
The tools to track this money already exist. Charapa Consult and the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities have developed common reporting parameters for funds reaching Indigenous Peoples.
Donors took the question up with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Assistance Committee in November 2023; the body that brings together the main aid donors and the UN's inter-agency support group on Indigenous Peoples now has a working group on access to finance.
Additional efforts track funding flows, including the Path to Scale dashboard. However, OECD countries are not obligated to use them.
Private finance is limited
Indigenous Peoples’ direct access to private finance is not measured at all.
Where it does flow, the few documented deals show a pattern that should trouble any investor. Communities keep a fraction of the revenue while carrying the risks that are hardest to price.
A systematic review for Southern Africa showed that communities living in wildlife areas earn only about one-tenth (10%) of the revenue generated from wildlife compared to adjacent private land, and of that, they keep just half (5%) that smaller share. Indigenous Peoples face risks to livelihood and even life without the de-risking that investors in the same deals take for granted.
Investors will say the obstacles are real: deals are small, land rights are often unresolved and returns are hard to measure. Those are reasons to build the pipeline, the tenure security and the metrics but not reasons to leave the people doing the work unpaid.
Better models already exist. Indigenous-led biodiversity credits from Savimbo in Latin America show what it looks like when communities set the terms. The Bank of Montreal in Canada released an Indigenous Bond directly earmarked for First Nations and Inuit.
With the Biodiversity Credits Alliance, the WEF has worked on High-Level Principles to Guide the Biodiversity Credit Market, which emphasise these points.
Reprioritize biodiversity impacts on Indigenous Peoples
Public nature funds have started setting targets for direct access for Indigenous Peoples and local communities: 50% for the Cali Fund, which collects contributions from companies that use genetic information from nature and 20% for the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, the main public fund behind the 2022 global biodiversity agreement.
Neither fund is yet sufficiently capitalized for those percentages to mean much on the ground. For private capital, there are no targets at all.
Here are three things participants at COP17 can commit to so the true cost to Indigenous Peoples is accounted for:
Count Indigenous Peoples as investors in nature. Governments should commit to reporting direct access to finance, public and private, in the 2029 national reports under the Convention on Biological Diversity. What is not measured does not get funded.
Capitalize the funds that already carry direct access targets. A 50% target in the Cali Fund means very little until the fund behind it is capitalized.
Set direct access targets for private finance. That means equity rather than token revenue shares, longer leases that give communities the security to invest and insurance designed for the risks of nature stewardship rather than only the risks of the investor.
Indigenous Peoples are already investing in nature. Yerevan is the moment for their contributions to be fully counted.
