With COP30 having been hosted in the heart of the Amazon, the world had its clearest opportunity yet to confront an uncomfortable contradiction: the communities doing the most to protect our forests receive the least support to do it.

Indigenous Peoples are among the most effective guardians of the natural world, yet they remain consistently underfunded and excluded from the decisions that shape their futures.

According to the World Bank and FAO there are an estimated 476 million Indigenous people living across more than 90 countries, accounting for 6.2% of the global population. They manage or hold tenure rights over roughly a fifth to a quarter of the Earth’s land surface, and the World Bank reports that these lands hold over half of the planet’s remaining intact forests alongside a significant share of its biodiversity.

The evidence on stewardship is difficult to argue with. A landmark FAO and FILAC review found that deforestation rates are significantly lower on Indigenous and tribal territories where collective land rights are formally recognised, in parts of the Amazon running at only one half to one third of the rate on ecologically comparable land. A 2023 study found that Indigenous territories granted full collective property rights in Brazil recorded 66% lower deforestation. Securing land titles is now widely regarded as one of the most cost-effective climate and biodiversity actions available.

And yet Rainforest Foundation Norway has shown that less than 1% of global climate finance reaches Indigenous Peoples and local communities directly, despite their frontline role in protecting forests and the carbon sinks the world depends on. A legacy of inequality and exclusion has left these communities more exposed to climate change and extreme weather, even as they hold many of the solutions to reducing disaster risk and vulnerability.

For Indigenous Peoples, land is not simply territory. It is food, medicine, fuel, shelter, security, culture and spirituality, sustained through thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. That interdependence is precisely what makes their stewardship work, and it is why the decline in intergenerational knowledge transfer should concern all of us.

If we are serious about climate resilience and halting biodiversity loss, the direction is clear. Strengthen Indigenous land rights, decision-making and anticipation in disaster risk reduction and climate decision-making, and move finance directly into the hands of the communities already doing the work.

This is also where my work at C4 EcoSolutions sits. Across adaptation and mitigation programmes in more than 115 countries, the lesson is clear: climate finance is most durable when it reaches people on the ground and is designed with them, not for them. Getting that architecture right, so that capital actually lands where the stewardship happens, is one of the defining challenges of the next decade.