The world has agreed on ambitious climate goals and roadmaps to halt deforestation, mobilize $1.3 trillion a year by 2035, and transition away from fossil fuels.
Each one of these commitments land on Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community territories.
Forests stand on community lands. Climate finance succeeds or fails at the last mile. The minerals, power lines, and projects of the transition are located on collective lands.
Where tenure is insecure, a roadmap is a promise on paper. Even a threat. Where rights are recognized, it is a plan that can be delivered.
And delivery will succeed only where the Peoples who govern and sustain the territories have recognized rights, strong livelihoods, direct access to finance, and control over their lands and resources.
COP31 is the moment to move from symbolic inclusion and pledges to rights-based implementation: to recognize land tenure as a climate solution, to ensure that finance reaches communities directly, and to prevent an energy transition that repeats the extraction and dispossession of the past.
Rights are the roadmap.
