Whose Land Is It? Indigenous Rights and the Nature Finance Moving Toward It
About the session
The world has finally started putting serious money toward protecting nature. Carbon markets, biodiversity finance, conservation investment, and nature-based solutions are all growing. But the land those investments depend on is, in many cases, already home to someone.
Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and local communities are stewards of many of the landscapes critical to the world's remaining forests, biodiversity, and carbon. Their territorial knowledge, governance systems, and long-term relationships with land are fundamental to conservation.
The question is whether the financial and legal systems now flowing toward those landscapes will strengthen or undermine the communities living within them.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has been in place since 2007. Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) is widely referenced across conservation and climate frameworks. Yet there remains a significant gap between these commitments on paper and what happens when projects, governments, investors, and communities meet on the ground.
That gap is becoming more consequential as climate and nature finance grow. As standing forests and healthy ecosystems acquire greater financial value, so can the incentive to control the land beneath them. Communities without formal tenure documentation, legal recognition of customary rights, or access to legal and financial support can find themselves negotiating from profoundly unequal positions.
Meanwhile, Indigenous-led projects can struggle to access the early capital required to reach the point where institutional investors are willing to participate. Financial structures are frequently designed around the requirements of external project developers rather than the communities whose land, knowledge, and governance make conservation outcomes possible.
This session asks what a different model would look like: one in which Indigenous and community land rights are the starting point for climate and nature investment rather than a complication to be managed around.
What does genuine FPIC require in practice? How can capital reach Indigenous-led projects before they are considered “bankable”? What role can Indigenous legal systems and customary governance play alongside formal frameworks? And what must funders, investors, policymakers, and conservation organizations do differently to ensure that money flowing toward nature strengthens rather than displaces the people protecting it?
Discussion Group Leaders
Anahera Nin is Co-Founder at Four Directions Fund (4DF), advancing Indigenous-led climate finance that directs capital toward Indigenous-owned and Indigenous-governed renewable energy.
Hugo Metz is Producer - Board Member at IF NOT US THEN WHO?, advancing Indigenous and Afro-descendant voices in climate and nature storytelling through documentary film and media.
Juliana Tinoco is Executive Coordinator at Alianza Fondos del Sur | The Global South House, advancing Global South leadership in climate and nature finance and locally led funding.
Natalie Klepacova is Advocacy and Policy Manager at Cool Earth, advancing climate finance and policy that put Indigenous Peoples and local communities at the center of rainforest protection.
Heath Cosgrove is Chief Programs Officer at Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), advancing the land, resource, and self-determination rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Nela Cadinanos Gonzalez is Relationships & Partnerships Steward at Earthly Education, fostering youth-led climate action and regenerative systems that support human and ecological well-being.
Chitra Hanstad is Global Ambassador at Landesa, advancing land rights and more equitable access to land for communities globally.
What to expect
A frank conversation grounded in legal, financial, and community realities.
Participants will move between three interconnected questions: what rights frameworks such as UNDRIP and FPIC require in practice; how capital reaches Indigenous and community-led projects and on what terms; and how Indigenous legal systems, customary governance, and territorial rights can be recognized rather than bypassed.
Storytelling and documentary perspectives will help bring ground-level realities into a conversation that can otherwise remain abstract, creating space to examine not only what better climate and nature finance looks like on paper, but what it requires from the institutions deploying it.
Who this is for
This session is for conservation funders and investors, carbon and nature finance practitioners, Indigenous rights advocates and organizations, environmental lawyers, community-led conservation organizations, philanthropists, policymakers, and anyone working at the intersection of climate finance, nature, land rights, and community-led stewardship.
What you will get out of it
A clearer picture of the gap between UNDRIP and FPIC as written and as practiced in conservation and climate finance
Perspectives on what territorial sovereignty and genuine consent require from investors, governments, and conservation organizations
Practical approaches to getting early capital to Indigenous-led climate and conservation projects
A better understanding of how Indigenous legal systems and customary governance can strengthen investment frameworks
A sharper set of questions to ask before deploying capital into landscapes where communities already have rights, governance systems, and long-standing relationships