New Indigenous Fund Has Local Focus -- Sound Familiar?

Days after climate adaptation projects aiding and led by Indigenous Peoples won nine awards at the DM2009 competition (Nov. 10-13), the worldwide indigenous community took a major step toward becoming a key player in the international climate change debate.

First Peoples Worldwide, with the help of the World Bank's Social Development Department, is setting up an Indigenous Peoples Climate Action Fund in part "to strengthen the capacity of Indigenous Peoples’ communities to influence decision-making and to engage in dialogue on climate change at the national and international level."

The US$10 million Fund will also finance small-scale adaptation projects in indigenous communities, and then seek to scale them "across communties, regions, and countries" -- the ultimate goal of many of DM2009's early-stage finalist projects.  The new Fund aims to use indigenous communities' traditional knowledge to launch projects that will buffer the poor and vulnerable against the impacts of destructive weather, conserve their sensitive environments, and improve faltering local indigenous economies -- also the objectives of DM2009 projects.

At a Nov. 18 roundtable in Washington announcing the Fund, World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick offered several examples of how the knowledge and experience of Indigenous Peoples are proving successful in blunting the worst of climate change.  In parts of Africa, he said, plantings of Red bush tea can survive the drier climate.  In Vietnam, plantings of dense mangroves protect the coastline from the waves of tropical storms.

The roundtable included, besides leaders of First Peoples Worldwide and the World Bank, "Indigenous Peoples representatives from around the world as well as other non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and bilateral and international organizations [who came together] to exchange ideas, forge partnerships, and create synergies to map the way forward for [the] Indigenous Peoples Climate Action Fund," according to a World Bank news release.