Why Indigenous voices are particularly important for Canada at UN climate change negotiations

Now that COP26 in Glasgow has ended, the reactions to the final agreement are still coming in. As a non-Indigenous observer from Canada at COP26, I paid particular attention to Indigenous participants and reactions. Indigenous peoples make up less than five per cent of the global population, but despite the legacy of colonial land dispossession, they manage or hold tenure over 25 per cent of the world’s land surface and support about 80 per cent of global biodiversity. Given Indigenous knowledge of land and intergenerational teachings, they are central to protecting nature and fighting climate change, in addition to the importance of respecting their rights in the face of global mining firms and agribusiness. The centrality of Indigenous teachings for combating climate change was recognized by the UN, for instance in the founding of the The Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform at the COP in 2015. And yet, in Glasgow, many Indigenous communities felt excluded, and indeed angered, by the inclusion of more fossil-fuel industry lobbyists than Indigenous participants, including by Canada. “Indigenous nations were not part of the negotiations despite the fact that 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity survives in our territories,” said Andrea Xieu, a spokesperson for the Mexican collective Futuros Indígenas. Though every party will be adversely affected by the ongoing failure to curb emissions, an exacerbating injustice of climate change is the fact that the emissions as well as the worst outcomes are very unevenly distributed. The major emitters (largely in the Global North) tend to be less affected than those most vulnerable to climate change, such as Small Island Developing States, Least Developed Countries, and Indigenous peoples. This stark inequality has to do with fossil-fueled industrialization and its historical links with colonialism, the slave trade, and the dispossession of Indigenous populations. The links in part explain the feeling among many Indigenous people that locating the climate emergency only in the future betrays a privileged perspective that not all can afford. Indigenous communities in particular have suffered the trauma of a colonialism whose effects are similar to the outcomes now feared by non-Indigenous peoples as a result of global heating, such as forced dispossession and migration, degradation of land, and loss of self-governance. For these reasons—Indigenous land tenure, Indigenous teachings, and unequal vulnerabilities—respecting Indigenous and human rights in the requisite transitioning away from fossil fuels is key to any fair and efficacious COP. And the final agreement does reference respect for Indigenous rights. But the Glasgow deal’s overarching focus on “net zero” and a regulated global carbon trading market—strongly supported by Canada—threatens to do the very opposite. A carbon market allows countries to meet their emission targets in part by carbon offsetting: buying credits that embody reduced emissions by others. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised in Glasgow, Canada would cap oil and gas emissions “at a pace and scale needed to reach net-zero by 2050.” The goal, then, is not zero emissions, but “net zero”—meaning that offsetting emissions could provide a way to keep on investing in fossil fuels. Carbon offsetting usually involves re- and afforestation, hydro-electric dams, and other projects that frequently take place, as is well known in Canada, on Indigenous lands. Investors in such offsetting projects often demand collateral in the form of land titles. In addition, carbon credit schemes tend to work by sequestering land, forests, and rivers needed by Indigenous and local communities for food, water, medicine and spiritual traditions. That is why Indigenous voices at COP26 argued that “net zero” will lead to decreasing Indigenous land tenure; these voices fear what we might call carbon colonialism. The Indigenous Environmental Network, for one, worries that so-called “nature-based solutions,” so widely touted in Glasgow, are “a new form of corporate land grabbing.” Eriel Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action and Indigenous representative in Glasgow, said of the final COP26 agreement: “While we succeeded in getting references to human rights and rights of Indigenous Peoples , it has fallen flat. These references mean little if they are also creating loopholes for dirty corporations and high polluting nations to “offset” their emissions by buying and trading the air and our lands and territories without our consent or participation.” Jade Begay, climate justice campaign director of NDN Collective, similarly complained of Article 6, which promotes carbon markets: “This year, Indigenous Peoples mobilized our efforts to challenge Article 6 in particular because of its severe implications to our land rights. This article promotes carbon market mechanisms which would open up opportunities for land grabs by corporations and governments.” As elsewhere, climate change in Canada of course threatens Indigenous loss of land also more directly, for example as a result of coast line erosion in the Arctic North. That is why Brian Pottle, who attended COP26 as President of the National Inuit Youth Council, concluded: “We Inuit are living this every day. By the time it becomes urgent to other parts of the globe it may be too late.” Matthias Fritsch is a professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal. He is the author ‘The Promise of Memory’ (SUNY Press, 2005), and ‘Taking Turns with the Earth’ (Stanford UP, 2018). He has been a Humboldt Fellow in Frankfurt, visiting research professor in Kyoto, and is senior research fellow at Western Sydney University. The Hill Times