Unsung Heroes of Voluntary Climate Action - Indigenous and Vulnerable Communities Under Threat in Their Fight for a Just Transition

The establishment of a new subsidiary body at the most recent UN biodiversity COP in Cali, Colombia, acknowledged the important role that indigenous and local communities play as biodiversity defenders on the ground. Already two earlier, in 2022, the term “environmental human rights defenders” (EHRD) had found its way into the new Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Strikingly however, the UN climate regime does not feature a similar degree of institutional or legal acknowledgement of the role of such communities as important agents of voluntary climate action. Beyond the REDD+ mechanism and its social safeguards there is no more comprehensive recognition of their role of defenders of old-growth and biodiversity-rich forests as carbon sinks across the globe. This is even more worrying since such defenders are increasingly exposed to severe threats and assassinations. In our paper a, we first sketch the lack of sufficient recognition of environmental defenders in the UN climate regime. We then zoom into the case of Colombia, the country that currently features the most killings of such defenders globally. We discuss major reasons for these killings (including old and new extractivism, e.g.for copper to be used in electric vehicles), give examples of how these defenders contribute to both climate mitigation and adaptation and explore options for a better protection and acknowledgement across scales of their very particular and important type of climate action.