As world leaders convened for the UN climate summit, exemplified by the record gathering at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Indigenous communities made an unequivocal stand: “the answer is us”, and emphasized that current global deliberations are fundamentally insufficient. Still, the most proven forms of adaptation are missing from global leaders’ plans.
Everywhere you go, from desert oases to mountain villages, from tropical lowlands to frozen tundra, Indigenous communities have quietly cultivated resilience. Their strategies are not experiments. They are living systems, refined over centuries, rooted in ecosystems, born from necessity. Yet climate policy still overlooks them, preferring shiny new infrastructure and expensive technologies.
The Original Engineers of Resilience
Across continents, Indigenous peoples engineered living systems that harnessed water, soil, fire, and forest long before “climate adaptation” entered the policy vocabulary. In Nagaland, India, the Rüza system collects rainwater in hillside ponds and channels it into terraced rice fields and fish ponds. It is gravity-fed, low-cost and centuries old. Mention climate adaptation at a global summit, and solutions like this are rarely on the agenda.
In Niger, a quiet revolution began in the 1980s. Farmers stopped cutting tree shoots sprouting from their land and nurtured them instead. This simple act, now known as Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), has restored more than five million hectares. It has slowed desertification, revived soils, and supported rural livelihoods. Across the Sahel, from Ethiopia to Senegal, it has become one of the most effective land restoration tools available.
Forests tell a similar story. In Nepal, community forestry groups manage woodlands, improving biodiversity and household income. In Indonesia, social forestry gives villagers the right to steward forests sustainably. These approaches endure because they are anchored in local ownership and knowledge.
Even fire, feared in most policy frameworks, has long been used as a tool. Aboriginal Australians practiced cultural burning for millennia, setting low-intensity fires to renew grasslands and prevent catastrophic blazes. In North America, Indigenous nations are reviving the practice and working with agencies to reduce megafire risks. Governments are re-learning that fire, when guided by tradition, saves lives and restores balance.
From Mexico’s Sierra Norte, where Nahua and Totonaku families maintain forest gardens that feed households and conserve biodiversity, to Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, which began with women planting trees for fuel and grew into a campaign that has put more than 50 million trees in the ground, the evidence is everywhere. In the Peruvian Amazon, the Matsés people are reviving permaculture rooted in ancestral practice to generate income without destroying forests. In Central America, Maya farmers still rotate maize, beans and squash in the milpa system, which keeps soils fertile and diets secure even under harsh conditions.
These are not relics. They are living climate solutions. Yet in most policy spaces they remain invisible, dismissed as “local” or “informal.”Scaling them starts with recognition. National adaptation plans must stop treating Indigenous knowledge as anecdote and begin naming it as adaptation. Practices such as Farmer-Managed Regeneration, milpa farming or cultural burning deserve the same funding, research, and policy space as solar panels or seawalls.
Scaling must also be ethical. Knowledge holders must retain ownership and rights. Models like Indonesia’s social forestry or the Land Back movement in the United States, where tribes restore ancestral territories for ecological regeneration, show how resilience and justice can work together. This is not a choice between tradition and infrastructure. Reforestation is stronger when it builds on Farmer-Managed Regeneration. Fire safety improves when cultural burning is restored. Even urban water systems can learn from floating gardens and raised fields that echo ancient practice, as Julia Watson describes in Lo-TEK. These examples prove that Indigenous practices are capable of achieving climate outcomes that top-down engineering simply cannot match. This approach closes the gap between climate policy and human rights.
Scaling the Proven
Across the world, the calls for a different model are growing louder. Inuit communities in the Arctic, pastoralists in Chad, reindeer herders in Finland, and farmers in the Amazon are not waiting for outside solutions; they are actively working with scientists to co-design sophisticated climate services. From early-warning systems for unpredictable rains, to mapping shifting sea ice, these collaborations demonstrate knowledge flowing in two directions. Satellite data meets centuries of careful, on-the-ground observation, and the result is adaptation that is sharper, more accurate, and immediately practical for the people who need it most. This approach is not a supplement to science; it is an improvement on it.
If we are truly serious about climate adaptation, we must scale what is already proven to work. Indigenous practices have survived centuries of environmental change, political upheaval, and economic pressure. Their longevity is the ultimate proof of concept. They remain uniquely cost-effective because they rely on natural processes, ecological literacy, and human labour rather than capital-intensive, heavy infrastructure that often requires foreign maintenance.
More importantly, these Indigenous methods are regenerative. They strengthen social ties and local economies, which are essential elements of resilience in times of crisis. By contrast, most mainstream adaptation projects (e.g., seawalls, desalination plants, solar farms, etc.) tend to deliver what looks like progress but often leave communities no stronger once the ribbon is cut. Jobs vanish when construction ends, as maintenance mostly depends on outside contractors. The promise of resilience turns into dependence, and the social fabric that sustains real recovery frays quietly due to rising tensions and conflicting interests.
Indigenous systems move differently. They do not just build things; they rebuild relationships. In Nepal, community forestry groups have restored degraded hillsides while creating local institutions where women and landless farmers share power and income. In the Sahel, Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration revives both trees and trust, as neighbors work together to protect shoots and share the benefits. In Mexico’s milpa fields, maize, beans, and squash still grow side by side through communal labor traditions like tequio, which keep value circulating within the village and reciprocity alive across generations.
These are not just environmental practices; they are social contracts. They make adaptation something lived, not engineered; something that renews ecosystems and the bonds that hold a community together. Where mainstream projects often end when the budget does, these systems endure because they are rooted in belonging, not procurement.
Hence, recognizing and investing in these qualities is not an act of charity or mere cultural appreciation; it is smart, science-based, risk-mitigating policy.
Ethical Scaling and Investment
Yet most global climate finance still moves slowly, toward large-scale infrastructure projects managed by distant governments or multinational corporations. This architecture consistently leaves nimble, community-led solutions struggling for the necessary support. To treat this proven expertise as an anecdote and not as an investment is a profound policy failure that is slowing down the world's ability to adapt. These systems can be framed in the very language that shapes modern adaptation finance: efficiency, scalability, and measurable impact. When national planners or donors weigh projects, they ask familiar questions: What is the cost per beneficiary? How sustainable is the benefit once funding ends? Who maintains the infrastructure? Indigenous systems already answer these questions; only more quietly, through outcomes that endure.
Farmer-Managed Regeneration in Niger restores land for less than twenty dollars per hectare, compared to hundreds for conventional tree-planting schemes. Community forestry in Nepal has improved forest cover and household income while costing a fraction of state-led reforestation programs. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement created both ecological restoration and steady income for rural women, something few large infrastructure projects can claim. These examples show that Indigenous approaches meet every metric, including cost-effectiveness, long-term maintenance, and social inclusion decision-taking stakeholders value; yet they are rarely counted because they are not yet understood as scalable and highly effective interventions.
Recognizing them as such would transform climate finance itself. If adaptation funds measured success not only in kilometers of embankment or megawatts installed but in ecosystems restored, livelihoods secured, and governance strengthened, these living systems would immediately rise to the top of every priority list.
Scaling this knowledge is not a simple matter of copying techniques from one place and pasting them onto another. It demands sustained investment, fair and equitable partnerships, and, most critically, unwavering respect for land and resource rights. But unfortunately, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development, less than 10% of climate finance ever reaches local communities directly.
Funding must reach the people who hold and practice the knowledge, not just pass through layers of intermediaries, consultants and contractors, and bloated administrative structures. When governments or donors treat Indigenous expertise as merely "traditional" or as a disposable resource to be extracted for a project, they undermine the very social and political systems that keep the knowledge alive. This approach destroys the resilience they claim to be building. Global frameworks, like the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), clearly set the standards for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), but implementation continues to lag critically behind the rhetoric. The challenge is not writing new policy, but enacting existing justice.
Indigenous knowledge is not folklore or a quaint survival of a simpler past. It is vital infrastructure for life on a changing planet that is real, necessary, and as sophisticated as levees, power grids, or modern medicine. In a world already in crisis, integrating these living systems may be one of the fastest, fairest, and most powerful ways to secure a future for humanity; if only global societies are willing to recognize their true value, invest directly in their future, and uphold the rights of those who have kept them alive for millennia. The question is not whether Indigenous knowledge can scale because it already has. The question is whether global policymakers will stop pretending not to see it.
A Senior Analyst at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Sharan Mahbub Ul Hassan researches the critical nexus of climate adaptation & migration. He also contributes to Poverty, WASH, and Integrated Development analysis for the BRAC UPG. Author attests their piece was written without AI.
