Why Climate Policy Needs More Indigenous Voices

By Summer Okibe

If you travel across Nigeria, from the floodplains of Benue to the oil-scarred creeks of Ogoniland, you will see the frontlines of the climate crisis. Those most exposed to rising floods, polluted water, and failing harvests are often the people who know the land best. Yet they are also the people farthest from the rooms where decisions about that land and their futures are made. This disconnect is not abstract — it weakens our response to climate change and deepens injustice.

I have seen this gap repeatedly. Nigeria’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution and its Energy Transition Plan speak loudly about decarbonization, renewables, and adaptation. They say almost nothing about who decides or whose knowledge counts. A 2024 review of the country’s adaptation frameworks found that Indigenous knowledge is vital for flood prediction, drought management, and soil fertility. Yet that knowledge rarely makes it into official plans. Too often, Indigenous representatives are invited to consultations only after drafts are finished. Inclusion becomes a box to tick rather than a transfer of power.

This problem is not unique to Nigeria. At UN events and global negotiating tables, I see the same pattern repeated. Indigenous and grassroots leaders are featured on panels and side events but excluded from the rooms where legal texts and budgets are written. Representatives from the Global South are often underfunded, underaccredited, and underrepresented. You can count a room full of people and still find only one voice speaking for the entire Global South. That is not inclusion, it is performance. And it leads to decisions that claim to protect the planet while ignoring those who know how to protect it best.

There are places that prove inclusion is possible when power is genuinely shared. In Canada, Indigenous leadership has been integrated into conservation and revenue-sharing frameworks. It is imperfect, but it shows what happens when authority, resources, and recognition are distributed fairly. The contrast between places where inclusion is practiced and where it is performative reveals what is truly at stake: justice, knowledge, and survival.

Indigenous knowledge is not nostalgia. It is living science. Smallholder farmers in Osun State, for instance, use rainfall and soil indicators that often outperform official forecasts. Riverine communities track flood patterns with precision born of generations of observation. Excluding this knowledge forces policymakers to design solutions in partial darkness.

Exclusion also increases risk. Renewable energy projects, carbon offset schemes, and conservation zones can displace communities, erase sacred sites, and redirect benefits to outside investors. When communities are not part of the design, climate action becomes another form of extraction.

True inclusion strengthens accountability and legitimacy. When policies are co-created with communities, they generate trust and ownership. Projects are maintained not because donors insist, but because people believe in them.

So how does exclusion happen? It is layered. Procedural barriers include meetings held in technical English, short-notice consultations, and formats that expect written submissions rather than oral storytelling. Institutional barriers include legal systems that ignore customary land rights and funding mechanisms that favor large organizations over local actors. Cultural barriers include decision-making that values technical credentials over lived experience.

Funding remains one of the hardest barriers. Climate finance overwhelmingly favors large-scale infrastructure and mitigation, not community-led adaptation. Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan promises billions for clean energy, yet it offers no guarantees that Indigenous communities will see jobs, ownership, or direct access. The result is that those who steward ecosystems benefit the least from protecting them.

If the goal is justice and resilience, inclusion must move beyond symbolism to shared power. That means paying for participation, not just inviting it. It means consultations held in local languages, shaped around community assemblies, storytelling, and participatory mapping. It means embedding free, prior, and informed consent into every project cycle, with space for communities to say no.

It also means securing land and resource rights, because without them, participation is impossible. And it means financing community-led resilience with flexible, long-term funding that strengthens local institutions instead of bypassing them.

My research with Indigenous farming communities in Nigeria showed that climate impacts are not only material. They are emotional. They reshape identity, displace memory, and fracture community life. Resilience must include healing, mental health support, cultural revitalization, and the restoration of dignity alongside the restoration of land.

The Ogoni people of the Niger Delta remind us what happens when power is denied. For over five decades, they have lived with oil spills, poisoned water, and lost livelihoods. Yet their women’s associations and traditional governance systems continue to model ecological restoration and local leadership. Their story is not only one of suffering but of resilience and knowledge that climate policy needs to take seriously.

Climate policy loses its roots when it excludes those who stand closest to the earth. Policymakers must move beyond token consultations to measurable inclusion. This means creating seats for Indigenous and marginalized voices on climate councils, budgeting for their participation, and allowing them to lead monitoring and accountability efforts. Anything less weakens both justice and impact.

At every level, from village meetings to UN summits, climate justice begins with voice. But voice alone is not enough. The next step is power, the power to design, to decide, and to benefit.

We often talk about climate solutions as if they live in policy rooms or conference halls. But we cannot heal the planet by silencing the people who have cared for it the longest. The real work begins when we listen to the farmers who read the soil, the women who watch the rivers, the hands that have never stopped tending the land.

Inclusion is not just about fairness. It is about wisdom, the kind that listens before it acts and restores before it extracts. If climate justice means anything, it must mean this: letting those who live closest to the land shape how we heal it. Because the future we are trying to save is the one they have been protecting all along.

Okibe, an Author and Analyst writes from Canada