The governments of four countries, along with several philanthropies and donors, have renewed a $1.8 billion pledge over the next five years to help recognize, manage and protect Indigenous and other traditional community land.
The Forest and Land Tenure Pledge, first made in Glasgow at the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference, provided $1.86 billion in funding from 2021-2024, with one year of the pledge remaining. About 7.6% of the funding in 2024 went directly to Indigenous peoples and local community organizations, rather than through intermediaries.
In the renewed pledge, which will run from 2026-2030, donors committed to increase the share of direct funding toward these communities.
“Despite threats to their lives and rights to their territories, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant communities lead much of the global effort to mitigate and adapt to climate change and to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” the signatories wrote in the new pledge, announced in Belém, Brazil, ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP30, on Nov. 6.
“We will continue efforts to increase the share of direct, long-term, and flexible financing, ensuring communities have genuine decision-making power and influence over how funds are used,” they added.
Each donor reports its spending independently to the Forest and Land Tenure Funders Group, which oversees the pledge. The group then publishes aggregate data of the details; a breakdown of donation amounts by funders or recipients isn’t made publicly available.
Dozens of donors are listed among the signatories, but the group’s latest report states that 80% of the money in 2024 came from just four: the governments of Norway, the U.K., the Netherlands and Germany. The U.S. stopped participating in 2025 with the freeze on USAID funding, and hasn’t signed the renewed pledge.
The 2024 annual report says that 32% of funds went to international NGOs, 20% to multilateral agencies (like U.N. bodies), 18% to governments and 16% to national NGOs.
In 2024, 112 Indigenous and other local community organizations were reportedly supported worldwide by the funds, up from 22 in 2021.
Not all the $1.8 billion consists of fresh funding. Several ongoing projects, such as the decades-long Norwegian Indigenous Peoples Programme, were incorporated into the pledge, to help the donors track progress on land tenure support and increase donations toward this goal.
A study by the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Rainforest Foundation Norway, both of which are sponsored by some of the fund’s donors, found that yearly disbursements toward tenure rights for Indigenous people increased by 36% since the pledge began in 2021. It also found that 72% of the increase came from the signatories of the Forest and Land Tenure Pledge.
Banner image: Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre with Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. Image courtesy of Ricardo Stuckert.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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