The dual threat posed by biodiversity loss and climate change generates a wide range of reactions—even amongst people who agree it is time for action. Indeed, the urgency felt by influential world leaders who support net-zero targets and biodiversity initiatives is a far cry from the urgency felt in places like the Marshall Islands, which could be entirely swallowed by rising sea levels if we fail to meet global warming targets set almost a decade ago.

When the Paris Climate Agreement was reached in 2015, CNN columnist John D. Sutter published a special report that noted, “Out here in the middle of the Pacific, somewhere between Australia and Hawaii, there’s a place where no one has the luxury of denying the existence of climate change. People here in the Marshall Islands are living it. Have been living it…. They’ve internalized the gravest of predictions—that the Marshall Islands, this loose collection of no-elevation coral atolls, likely will be submerged beneath the waves as humans continue to warm the atmosphere and the oceans continue to rise. They’ve seen their homes flood frequently—seen the tides getting higher, seen their lives threatened.”

The plight of the Marshall Islands and its mostly Indigenous population has been called one of the clearest injustices of climate change. But the Marshallese are not alone when facing this dire situation. The urgency they feel is shared by inhabitants of other low-lying island nations and remote coastal communities affected by environmental challenges, including relocation issues created by natural disasters such as typhoons.

The resilience of Indigenous Peoples should not be underestimated. It can be seen in the hope expressed by Marshallese activist poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner as she writes about “fists rising up” and “petitions blooming from teenage fingertips.” The wisdom of Indigenous Peoples as champions of biodiversity stewardship is equally impressive. And yet, as Indigenous Peoples fight for climate justice, they face significant social and economic issues that intensify their climate-related problems.

• Limited Representation: Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples often leaves them without a voice in decision-making processes, which hinders the formulation of essential policies that address their unique needs and interests. As a result, the environmental challenges they face are further fueled by irresponsible corporate practices, such as illegal logging, which can force relocation for deforestation purposes.
• Restricted Education Access: Although education is crucial for empowerment and economic integration, educational opportunities for Indigenous Peoples are often limited by financial constraints and logistical difficulties.
• Inadequate Financial Services: With their ancestral lands and territories not accepted as collateral and with their frequent lack of a track record in business, Indigenous Peoples are viewed as high-risk by traditional financial service providers, which can push them towards exploitative arrangements with private lenders that trap them in poverty.
• Unregistered Ancestral Lands and Territories: Unregistered ancestral lands and territories are often inadvertently used by businesses, which disrupts traditional lifestyles while leading to conflicts as Indigenous Peoples attempt to defend themselves against injustices.

As advocates for stemming climate change, we engage with Indigenous Peoples while striving to raise awareness of how unsustainable business practices impact their lives. In March last year, we spent three weeks with members of the Daraghuyan tribe on Mindanao island in the Philippines—where the forest and agriculture-based livelihoods of local tribes are seriously threatened by climate change despite their minimal contributions to global emissions.

Building on this visit, this article proposes a new framework for sustainability that aims to bring our planet’s stakeholders together by aligning corporate social responsibility practices with climate justice requirements for Indigenous Peoples.

 Balancing Planet, People & Prosperity

Our Regenerative Business Framework for Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Justice (see Figure 1) was developed to provide a strategic approach to achieving climate justice via a balancing of the needs of “planet, people and prosperity” within a regenerative and distributive economic model.

For Indigenous Peoples, prosperity is deeply interwoven with cultural preservation, environmental harmony, and recognition of their rights. For businesses, prosperity means sustainable growth and innovation. When businesses collaborate with Indigenous populations, they can blend traditional wisdom with modern practices, which leads to mutual benefits. In this partnership, Indigenous Peoples experience prosperity through cultural affirmation and sustainable opportunities, while businesses gain from enriched, sustainable strategies. Together, they can chart a path to shared well-being and growth.

Unfortunately, businesses too often neglect Indigenous Peoples as essential stakeholders, partners, or rights-holders, despite their crucial role as principal guardians of global biodiversity. As things stand, business activity often leads to unjust land grabbing, resource extraction, and the displacement of Indigenous Peoples. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics,” we aim to correct this by integrating the core principle of accountability into decision-making processes built on four pivotal pillars—business, planet, Indigenous Peoples, and government.

Our framework is based on an acknowledgment of the rights of Indigenous Peoples along with the value of their wisdom as champions of biodiversity stewardship. It lays the foundation for sustainable capitalism by offering a systematic approach to climate justice that empowers Indigenous populations as agents of businesses seeking the preservation of assets and resources that support a wide range of industries.

Figure 1: Regenerative Business Framework

Ensuring the health of our planet and its resources is vital if we want future generations to thrive. Situated within our framework is an operational zone inspired by Bill Baue’s “An Intro to ThriveAbility: The Next Stage of Development for Sustainability.” Our THRIVEABILITY zone represents a transformative paradigm where businesses and Indigenous Peoples exist in perfect harmony after collaboratively creating a regenerative system that supports a prosperous world for all stakeholders.

In this zone, businesses operate sustainably within ecological and social boundaries while respecting Indigenous Peoples’ rights and valuing their contributions to responsible resource management. This requires a profound reassessment of business practices to focus on seeing Indigenous Peoples as vital and active partners in co-creating a prosperous and sustainable future via the development of inclusive economic opportunities.

Expanding outwards, our framework focuses on nine interlinked planetary boundaries (identified by a group of internationally renowned scientists in 2009) that must not be crossed if we hope to maintain the environmental stability of the past 10,000 years. Each of these boundaries is either influenced by or has an influence on business activities (see Table 1).

Table 1: How Business and Planet Affect Each Other

In our framework, businesses strive to effectively operate within planetary boundaries through a cycle of acknowledgement, action, and accountability/transparency in their interactions with Indigenous Peoples. Since many policies are crafted and implemented at the local level, which gives rise to numerous localized adaptations of the Planetary Boundaries framework, it can be beneficial to establish boundaries that apply to specific regional contexts. This approach—which aligns the Planetary Boundaries framework with the Doughnut Economics concept—accommodates local conditions and is crucial for practical application (see “Planetary Boundaries and the Doughnut frameworks: A review of their local operability”).

The cycle begins with businesses acknowledging Indigenous Peoples as crucial stakeholders and rights-holders. As things stand, adherence to international agreements (such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and International Labour Organization Convention 169) isn’t enough. To lay the foundation for mutually beneficial partnerships, businesses need a much deeper understanding of how Indigenous Peoples differ from other communities and ethnic minorities. By respecting and understanding components integral to Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods—including land, traditional food sources, infrastructure, self-determination, traditional knowledge, culture, language, education, and water access—business can work to help safeguard them.

During the action phase of our cycle, Indigenous Peoples are empowered as businesses operationalize a deeper understanding of their cultures and rights while implementing FPIC (free, prior, and informed consent) processes to ensure Indigenous Peoples play a central role in decision-making. This involves active stakeholder engagement in which Indigenous perspectives and aspirations are heard, which leads to sustainable business activity being collaboratively conducted with permission and respect for Indigenous rights, knowledge, and cultural practices. While acknowledging the importance of sharing resources and benefits, and collaboratively working to operate supply chains that safeguard Indigenous lands and territories, resources, and livelihoods—which necessitates the use of inclusive trade policies—collaborations conducted during this phase of the cycle must support the fair distribution of wealth derived from land use, entrepreneurship, technology development, and knowledge sharing.

The final phase in our cycle encompasses how an organization formulates its strategy and governance structure along with how it manages its performance and evaluates and communicates the impact of business activities on Indigenous Peoples and the planet. In other words, the accountability/transparency phase is where stakeholder positioning within our sustainable THRIVEABILITY zone is maintained and improved as businesses transparently communicate with other stakeholders and proactively respond to concerns regarding their activities, choices, and performance. This requires improved disclosure to ensure businesses can be held accountable for their actions.

While the current sustainability disclosure landscape offers minimal requirements related to Indigenous Peoples, particularly in developing countries, it is possible to identify some good practices. Within the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), for example, the forestry management sustainability accounting standard includes the rights of Indigenous Peoples as a disclosure topic and metric. This needs to extend beyond forestry. As things stand, we believe disclosure should at least cover the aspects listed in Table 2, which is based on the SASB’s forestry standard; GRI 411: Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2016; AA1000 AccountAbility Principles; and recommendations from the World Intellectual Property Organization. These aspects of disclosure should be seen as just a starting point on the journey toward climate justice for our planet’s Indigenous Peoples.

Table 2: Aspects of Disclosure

Taxonomy plays a pivotal role in our Regenerative Business Framework for Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Justice. Enforced since July 2020, the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities provides a clear classification system for identifying “green” activities through mandatory disclosures related to six key environmental objectives. We propose mirroring this systematic approach to benefit Indigenous Peoples by integrating their relationships with businesses into the taxonomy and thereby broadening its scope and facilitating holistic sustainability. This would operationalize the cycle of acknowledgement, action, and accountability/transparency in our framework, with the taxonomy offering clear guidelines for accountability and transparency in interactions with Indigenous Peoples and thereby promoting respectful and sustainable engagements with Indigenous Peoples.

The role of governments is also critical to the creation of our THRIVEABILITY zone. Regulations set corporate boundaries, but governments need to assess and refine them continually to ensure the combination of market regulation, policies, mechanisms, and incentives required to shape a business environment that values environmental sustainability and Indigenous rights. Mechanisms like the Ancestral Domain Registration Unit in Mindanao, for example, bolster the business environment by aiding tasks such as land identification.

When we visited the Philippines to explore ways to align business practices with the concept of climate justice for Indigenous Peoples last year, it was clear that the threats posed by biodiversity loss and climate change were top-of-mind amongst everyone we interviewed. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about politicians and policymakers in influential national capitals—where commitments to address climate change and biodiversity loss are routinely made but rarely kept. As a result of this uneven sense of urgency, the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement no longer seem achievable.

Meanwhile, the world is already falling behind on the much-hyped commitments that were made at the UN Biodiversity Conference in 2022. The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework was billed as a historic step forward in the fight to protect the planet and reverse nature loss, but that hasn’t stopped nations with influence from dragging their feet when it comes to doing what needs to be done.

Simply put, when it comes to mitigating the impact of climate change, time is running out for many Indigenous Peoples—whose land plays host to about 80 per cent of global biodiversity. And as it runs out, insult is being added to injury via a serious lack of representation in decision-making processes. This isn’t just unfair—it makes no sense from a business perspective. After all, sustainability isn’t a zero-sum game. As the World Bank reports, even a partial collapse of ecosystem services, meaning the varied benefits provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems, could “cost 2.3 per cent of global GDP (US$2.7 trillion) by 2030.”

By casting light on mutual interests while tapping into the knowledge and sustainable environmental stewardship practices of Indigenous Peoples, our framework charts a course for aligning corporate social responsibility with requirements for climate justice for Indigenous Peoples. It further enables businesses to operate as an ally in the ongoing fight against climate-induced adversity such as water scarcity and disease proliferation.

By following the cycle of acknowledgement, action, and accountability/transparency in our framework, businesses also gain strategic advantages. Recognizing and honouring Indigenous Peoples’ unique attributes and collective rights, for example, fosters trust and collaboration, which creates a foundation for mutually beneficial partnerships with the potential to open doors to new markets. By understanding Indigenous Peoples’ reliance on collective resources, businesses can also identify and mitigate potential operational risks. Meanwhile, respecting Indigenous Peoples’ traditional knowledge yields valuable insights into sustainable practices, biodiversity, and innovative solutions applicable across various industries. Such respect and understanding, manifested through attentiveness to Indigenous Peoples’ land, culture, and education, enhances corporate social responsibility, which attracts consumers and investors that prioritize ethical and sustainable products and services.

Indigenous Peoples are crucial stewards of nature. Their traditional practices, ranging from farming and fishing to fire management, not only serve their communities—they also preserve ecosystems, mitigate negative climate impacts, promote regeneration, and maintain ecological harmony. Instead of sidelining the people most motivated to address climate change and nature loss, we need to listen to them and work with them to ensure we collectively operate in the THRIVEABILITY zone.

The authors would like to thank the following groups and individuals: Bukidnon Tribes; Merly Omarol Suday, “Basbasunon” Successor of the Bukidnon Tribe in Daraghuyan Tribal Community; Tan Gican, “Basbasunon” Successor of the Bukidnon Tribe in Daraghuyan Tribal Community; Monika Kumar, Sustainable Finance Advisor, ImpactARC; Bill Baue, Senior Director, r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration); Ilaria Carlotta Firmian, Senior Technical Specialist – Indigenous Peoples, in the Environment, Climate, Gender, and Social Inclusion Division in the Strategy and Knowledge Department, IFAD; and Seongyeol Park, Senior Water Resources Manager, K-water.

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