International Indigenous Women's Forum (FIMI)

COP31 — Antalya, November 2026

We, Indigenous Women, Indigenous Women with Disabilities, and Youth from diverse
territories, communities, and nations across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Arctic, North
America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, gathered on 5–6 November 2026 in Antalya,
Turkey, at our Global Coordination Meeting ahead of COP31. We came together in solidarity
to reflect on our journey, our worldviews and values, and Indigenous Peoples Traditional
Knowledge (IPTK), and to weave our collective agenda toward climate justice.
We affirm that Indigenous Women are agents of change, leaders, defenders, knowledge
holders, political actors, and rights-holders with authority as guardians of our lands,
territories, and ecosystems.

We stand at the intersection of capitalism, colonization, and climate change. These forces
threaten our languages, livelihoods, Indigenous Peoples TK, health, and mental well-being;
erode our cultures and identities; drive the loss of ancestral lands; and deepen our exposure
to disasters, violence, and poverty. Moreover, Indigenous Women with Disabilities and
Youth carry compounded burdens that remain invisible in global climate accounting.
The crisis is here, threatening everything and worsening the realities faced by Indigenous
Peoples:

Melting ice dissolves generations of navigational and seasonal knowledge that no database can recover.

Rising seas are erasing island and coastal sacred geographies that cannot be rebuilt. Oceans,
rivers, and other water bodies are used as dumping grounds for nuclear, mining, and other
waste, taking a toll on the health of Indigenous Peoples and aquatic, coastal, and marine
biodiversity.

In our mountain territories, increasingly extreme, unforeseen, and deadly climate-
intensified floods, glacial lake outburst floods, and landslides are sweeping away entire
communities overnight. Indigenous women, children, Elders, and persons with disabilities
bear the heaviest toll despite having contributed little to the climate crisis.

Across our oasis, forests, pastoral lands, and drylands, drought and erratic rainfall are
dismantling Indigenous livelihoods, food systems, and the seed sovereignty that has
sustained them.

Wildfires, once predictable, now consume ancestral territories that communities have preserved
and protected for millennia.

Violence against Indigenous Women and Girls, including Indigenous Women with
Disabilities, escalates in the wake of every disaster and every new extractive project, as
displacement and economic desperation compound pre-existing patterns of harm. The
mental and spiritual weight of watching one’s homeland disappear is a crisis our
communities carry largely alone, without access to justice.

False climate solutions are reproducing the very dispossession they claim to address. Large-
scale energy transition, climate mitigation, and conservation projects—including solar,
wind, hydro, geothermal, mineral extraction, marine and offshore renewable energy,
carbon offsets, and emerging technologies such as AI data centers—are being imposed on
Indigenous territories without Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), stripping Indigenous
Women of our lands, resources, identities, and the ecosystems we have defended for
generations. A just transition built without FPIC is not a just transition. For Indigenous
Peoples in isolation or initial contact, FPIC alone is not enough: our territories must be
completely off-limits to any form of external intervention or incursion, as it threatens not
only our lands but also our very existence, autonomy, and right to remain isolated.
Indigenous Women environmental defenders continue to be criminalized, displaced, and killed for protecting the very ecosystems that make global climate targets possible.

Our recommendations to COP31

On collective rights, self-determination, and territorial rights, we recommend that
governments and international institutions recognize, respect, protect, and guarantee
Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories, and resources in all global climate
agreements, and that all States adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), CEDAW General Recommendation No. 39 (GR39),
and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as the minimum
rights-based standards for climate action in Indigenous Peoples’ territories. Particular
attention must be given to the protection of territories inhabited by Indigenous Peoples in
isolation and initial contact, recognizing our right to self-determination, our decision to
remain in isolation, and the principle of no contact.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Traditional Knowledge (IPTK), we recommend that IPTK, including
knowledge held by Indigenous Women with Disabilities and Elders, be formally recognized
and meaningfully integrated into the Global Stocktake (GST), including its technical
assessments and outcomes, and into all climate adaptation frameworks. IPTK is science and
must be treated as such. This recognition must translate into localized, context-specific, and
accessible climate education that genuinely embeds IPTK systems and practices, rather than
treating them as supplementary to frameworks that were never built with us in mind.
On climate finance, we recommend that climate finance mechanisms eliminate
bureaucratic barriers to access; establish direct, predictable, equitable, flexible, timely,
intersectional, and gender-responsive funding pathways; and create a dedicated grant
window for Indigenous Women’s organizations and networks in all our diversity,
recognizing Indigenous Women as climate action implementers, not merely as
beneficiaries.

On the just transition, we recommend that all energy transition processes guarantee full
respect for UNDRIP, including FPIC, leaving no room for forced displacement, land grabbing,
extractivism, or sexual violence against women and girls. The energy transition must be
urgently prioritized and accelerated, including the phase-out of coal. Wherever these
processes unfold on or near Indigenous territories, they must be grounded in direct and
meaningful negotiations with Indigenous communities and equitable benefit-sharing
arrangements.

On the Belém Gender Action Plan, we recommend that Indigenous Women, Indigenous
Women with Disabilities, and Youth be explicitly named and tracked in all Gender Action
Plan (GAP) consultations, implementation, and reporting, rather than subsumed under the
general category of “women”; and that national gender action plans and Nationally
Determined Contributions (NDCs) integrate our specific needs, rights, and leadership roles
through disaggregated data and accessible accountability mechanisms. We also call for
adequate financial resources to implement these plans.

On the protection of defenders, we recommend that all States implement GR39 and adopt
enforceable legal protections against violence, criminalization, intimidation, and
displacement of Indigenous Women environmental and human rights defenders, alongside
the allocation of dedicated and sufficient public funds to ensure those protections are
effectively implemented, monitored, and enforced at all levels.

On the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, we recommend significant and rapid
capitalization of the Fund; the formal recognition and operationalization of provisions
addressing non-economic loss, including the erosion of culture, language, spirituality, and
connection to Mother Earth, as well as the irreplaceable IPTK of forest and land
management lost when extreme weather events, including wildfires, consume our
territories; and the establishment of direct-access modalities that do not require resources
to be routed through national governments. All provisions must be designed through an
intersectional lens, with dedicated allocations and safe, accessible information for
Indigenous Women and Girls with Disabilities, who face compounded exposure to climate-
induced loss and disasters.

We call on States, development institutions, international organizations, and climate
finance mechanisms to walk alongside us, not ahead of us.

We raise our collective voices to demand rights, justice, resources, and accountability. With
our ancestral blessings and in solidarity, we reaffirm our commitment to protecting Mother
Earth, and we will not stop until climate justice is real on the ground and in the lives of
Indigenous Women.

We are the rights-holders. We are the agents of change.

Adopted collectively by the delegates of the International Indigenous Women’s Forum
(FIMI).

African Indigenous Women’s Organization (AIWO), the Network of Indigenous Women in
Asia (NIWA), Asian Indigenous Women Network (AIWN), Tebtebba the Asia Indigenous
Peoples Pact (AIPP), Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indígenas de las Americas (ECMIA),
Alianza de Mujeres Indigenas de Centroamerica Y Mexico (AMICAM), Pacific Indigenous
Women’s Network (PIWN), the Sámi Parliament in Sweden, the Inuit Circumpolar Council
(ICC), Sámi Parliament in Norway, Asia Pacific Indigenous Women with Disabilities Network,
Movimiento de Mujeres GATC, and Indigenous Women and Biodiversity Network (IWBN).

Antalya, November 2026.