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Indigenous people: true guardians of land and oceans

December 30, 2022

If the earth were a company, who'd you pick to run its assets?

For Hindou Ibrahim, co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, it should be Indigenous people, who have been protecting the land and the oceans far longer than governments. That's what makes them the true guardians of ecosystems.

"We cannot sustain and protect this biodiversity if we do not recognize and respect the rights of indigenous peoples to their land tenure" and access to finance, Ibrahim says in a Global Stage livestream conversation hosted by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft.

Corporations have CEOs. The planet, she adds, should appoint Indigenous peoples as "chief ecological officers" so all "the funding can go to us directly. And we can decide it our way."

Watch the full Global Stage livestream conversation "The Road to 2030: Getting Global Goals Back on Track" .

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