A growing body of scientific evidence shows that the lands and territories of Indigenous Peoples, stretching from the forests of the Amazon to the Congo Basin, to the peatlands of South-East Asia, and all the way to the Arctic tundra, are fundamental to safeguarding the global environment, and preventing planetary tipping points. The task for the multilateral system to effectively help Indigenous Peoples continue to protect and defend these territories, requires a concerted effort that brings together governments, international NGOs, and organizations across the UN system to identify new and creative ways to secure the full and effective participation of communities, including a reflection on past injustices resulting from earlier conservation models. Put simply, for Indigenous Peoples to gain direct access to funding from multilateral entities at the global level, requires a high level of capacity to deal with bureaucratic requirements, which can often present insurmountable challenges to many oral cultures. A faster and more expedited process to ensure country-level direct access via national grant-making systems that use national languages, decentralized selection procedures, tailored formats and the like, is evidently needed. As one of the early pioneers working with Indigenous Peoples, the experience of the Small Grants Programme (SGP), funded mainly by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has been repeatedly recognized as one of the “primary modalities of engagement” (IEO 2017) for Indigenous Peoples with the GEF.
