Patrick Ole Twala (ELP 2024) | Africa Regional Coordinator, Climate Change Adaptation, Department of Wildlife and Range Management, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Nigeria

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our lifetime, and Africa is bearing the highest brunt of climate change effects. Meaningful engagement and involvement of indigenous people and local communities (IPLCs) in climate discussion and negotiation is fundamental to their existence and for successful fight against CC. Indigenous People (IPs) have emerged as the most vulnerable, disadvantaged and marginalised group and have suffered the gravest impacts of Climate Change in Africa.

Climate extremes are being experienced in higher intensity and frequency than they were 2 decades ago; this includes droughts, floods, cold/heat waves, cyclones and typhoons, alongside slow onset impacts such as sea level rise and melting glaciers (IPCC, AR6 WG1). Climate change impacts are exacerbating climate injustices, driving displacement, worsening food insecurity and malnutrition (IPCC, AR6 WG2), and threatening lives and livelihoods of the same communities.

While multilateralism and global partnerships among others are key to the fight against climate change, the fight against climate change should be premised on the important role of communities, as they are on the frontlines on the fight against climate change yet rarely have a voice in the decisions that most affect them. Local actions and models by communities informing global action should be the central nerve of climate change response action. These actions and models recognize the value of local context knowledge and expertise, leverage the strengths of their existing local systems, and respond to historical power imbalances meted over a long time. Indigenous communities need to be an ever-present actor in the high tables of decision making for sustainable climate actions. Short of these, is climate injustices against the IPLCs aided by multilateralism and big emission emitters. Climate negotiations and discussions must equally respect indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights to self-selection, self-determination and self-representation on where, what and how climate actions address structural inequalities faced by women, youth, children, people with disabilities, people who are displaced, Indigenous Peoples and marginalised groups: putting inclusion at the centre of climate adaptation interventions.

[The blog image was published on flikr. Original image by Commonwealth Secretariat. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivs 2.0 Generic.]