#indigenous

🇳🇴 Norway · International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry

Rain falling on snow freezes into a lid the reindeer cannot dig through, and a herder can lose a season's animals to one warm afternoon in January.

🇨🇦 Canada · Arctic Eider Society

Elders in Sanikiluaq wanted the sea ice they were watching change to be recorded in their own words, on their own terms — so they built the app themselves.

🇵🇪 Peru · AGUAPAN (Asociación de Guardianes de Papa Nativa del Centro del Perú)

Quechua and mestizo highland farmers organized into a self-governed association to keep thousands of native Andean potato varieties alive in the ground, not just in gene banks.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Amazon Frontlines

A frontline legal and advocacy organization helping Amazonian indigenous nations win court-ordered title to their ancestral territories.

🇺🇸 United States · American Prairie

A grassroots effort to stitch together the largest nature reserve in the continental United States across Montana's shortgrass and mixed-grass prairie.

🇺🇸 United States · American Rivers

The US nonprofit behind the country's biggest-ever dam removal, which reopened 400 miles of the Klamath River to salmon in 2024.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Amazon Conservation Team

Sixty families in Colombia's most deforested department are raising native stingless bees as a sweeter, forest-friendly alternative to cattle ranching and coca.

🇺🇸 United States · Cultural Fire Management Council

Co-founded by Yurok tribal member Margo Robbins, the Cultural Fire Management Council is putting Indigenous-led 'good fire' back into Northern California's forests to restore basket-weaving plants, food sources, and fire-resilient land.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Live & Learn Fiji

From mangrove replanting to cyclone-ready water systems, rural Fijian villages are building their own climate defences with Indigenous knowledge at the core.

🇵🇪 Peru · Nature and Culture International

Harvesters used to cut down a whole aguaje palm to reach one bunch of fruit; in Maijuna territory they now climb it, and the peat swamp underneath stays wet.

🇦🇺 Australia · Clontarf Foundation

Clontarf uses AFL and rugby league academies embedded in schools to keep young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men engaged in education and headed toward jobs.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Green Empowerment

A Portland-based nonprofit partners with grassroots engineers to build community-owned micro-hydro systems that bring reliable, affordable electricity to Indigenous villages in the Philippine highlands.

🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · Tiniguena (Esta Terra É Nossa)

Guinea-Bissau's oldest conservation NGO helped Bijagós islanders create West Africa's first community-run marine protected area and still co-manages it with them.

🇳🇨 New Caledonia · Association pour la Conservation en Cogestion du Mont Panié (Dayu Biik)

Seven Kanak tribes co-manage New Caledonia's highest peak, protecting a critically endangered ancient pine found nowhere else on Earth.

🇦🇺 Australia · Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation

Yolŋu Traditional Owners founded Dhimurru to manage Australia's first jointly declared land and sea Indigenous Protected Area across northeast Arnhem Land.

🇦🇺 Australia · DJAARA (Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation)

DJAARA led the first Aboriginal cultural burn on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in central Victoria in 170 years, reviving Djandak Wi ('Country Fire') to heal box-ironbark forests under the principle of 'right fire, right time.'

🇮🇩 Indonesia · EcoNusa Foundation

EcoNusa helps Indigenous Papuan and Maluku communities map, defend, and sustainably manage their own forests and mangroves against palm oil and logging expansion.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Reforestamos México

Trained ejido brigadistas clear firebreaks by hand and manage post-fire fuels so their communal forests can survive Mexico's worsening dry seasons.

🇦🇺 Australia · Erub Arts

On a tiny Torres Strait island, Indigenous artists weave thousands of abandoned fishing nets into internationally exhibited sculptures that fight ocean plastic and keep sea culture alive.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fondo para la Protección del Agua (FONAG)

The world's first water fund pays to protect and restore Quito's high-Andean páramo grassland, the source of most of the city's drinking water.

🇼🇫 Wallis and Futuna · Faiva Tautai

A handful of worried fishers on Wallis marked out their own no-fishing zone to bring the lagoon's fish back.

🇦🇸 American Samoa · Finafinau

American Samoa's only youth-led environmental nonprofit turned 150 teenagers loose on a single beach and hauled out 4,000 pieces of trash.

🇦🇺 Australia · Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation

An Indigenous-led network is putting traditional 'cool burning' knowledge back into Aboriginal hands to heal Country and cut catastrophic bushfire risk across Australia.

🇺🇸 United States · Amah Mutsun Land Trust

The Amah Mutsun Land Trust is training tribal members as wildland firefighters to bring cultural burning back to California's Central Coast, lighting the first fire of its scale in the Santa Cruz Mountains in roughly two centuries.

🇸🇷 Suriname · Green Heritage Fund Suriname

A Paramaribo nonprofit built Suriname's only wildlife hospital for sloths, anteaters and armadillos while tracking the country's threatened river dolphins.

🇬🇱 Greenland · PISUNA

Scientists fly in for a season; hunters have been on the same ice for a lifetime. In Greenland the hunters choose what to monitor and the results go to the ministry.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Cuerpo Colegiado de Guardianes del Río Atrato (Comisión de Guardianes del Río Atrato)

Fourteen community-elected guardians from the Chocó rainforest co-represent the Atrato River's legal rights after mercury from illegal mining poisoned it.

🇦🇺 Australia · Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council

Kimberley Traditional Owners govern the Martuwarra Fitzroy River as a living ancestral being with an inalienable right to flow.

🇬🇾 Guyana · Iwokrama International Centre

A one-of-a-kind treaty between Guyana and the Commonwealth put 371,000 hectares of pristine rainforest under community-run, science-based management instead of the chainsaw.

🇬🇺 Guam · Guåhan Sustainable Culture

A BIPOC women-led nonprofit is rebuilding CHamoru food sovereignty on an island that imports over 90% of what it eats.

🇮🇳 India · Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL)

In the cold desert of Ladakh, engineers and villagers freeze winter meltwater into towering "ice stupas" that release irrigation water just when spring-sown crops need it most.

🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated

Nunavut Tunngavik represents 30,000 Inuit as the legal steward of the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history.

🇨🇦 Canada · Indigenous Leadership Initiative

First Nations, Inuit and Metis Guardians are monitoring wildlife, guarding watersheds and reviving language through Canada's fast-growing Indigenous-led land stewardship movement.

🇦🇺 Australia · Indigenous Marathon Foundation

Every year, twelve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander runners train for six months to complete the New York City Marathon, then return home as certified community health leaders.

🇺🇸 United States · Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA)

A national network founded by Mohawk seedkeeper Rowen White that reunites Native American nations with ancestral seeds lost to colonization and helps tribes rebuild their own seed systems.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto Socioambiental (ISA)

A São Paulo-founded institute has spent three decades mapping, litigating for and monitoring the Indigenous territories that science increasingly finds are Brazil's best defense against deforestation.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Jo-Jikum

Marshallese teenagers turn traditional weaving and songwriting into climate advocacy that reaches all the way to COP summits.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Nyae Nyae Development Foundation

Backed by the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation, the Ju/'hoansi San of Namibia's Kalahari run an early-season controlled-burning program that has turned a conservancy once devastated by wildfire into a model of community fire mapping.

🇦🇺 Australia · Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa

Martu Traditional Owners run four ranger teams protecting threatened desert wildlife and culture across millions of hectares of Western Australia's Western Desert.

🇮🇳 India · Ka Synjuk Ki Hima Arliang Wah Umiam Mawphlang Welfare Society

India's first REDD+ project pays indigenous Khasi communities to protect and restore Meghalaya's sacred cloud forests.

🇰🇮 Kiribati · Kiribati Climate Action Network (KiriCAN)

Kiribati's first homegrown climate NGO mobilizes women and youth to replant mangroves and carry i-Kiribati voices into UN climate negotiations.

🇦🇺 Australia · Korin Gamadji Institute

Named 'grow and emerge' by Wurundjeri Elders, Richmond Football Club's Korin Gamadji Institute uses sport and culture to build the next generation of Indigenous leaders.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD)

A Pokhara-based NGO helps Himalayan hill and mountain farmers run their own community seed banks, keeping climate-resilient local rice, taro and yam landraces from disappearing.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN)

Indonesia's largest Indigenous alliance is racing to map millions of hectares of ancestral forest before loggers and plantations get there first.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Marshall Islands Conservation Society (MICS)

Marshallese conservationists are blending traditional atoll knowledge with science to put local communities in charge of their own reefs and fisheries.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Hutukara Associação Yanomami

Illegal gold miners use mercury to bind the gold, the rivers carry it into the fish, and the Yanomami eat the fish — so the association measured its own people's hair to prove it.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Namibian Association of CBNRM Support Organisations (NACSO)

An umbrella alliance supporting Namibia's communal conservancies, which grant rural and indigenous communities legal rights to govern and profit from their own land and wildlife.

🇺🇸 United States · Native Seeds/SEARCH

Native Seeds/SEARCH conserves and freely shares thousands of arid-adapted heirloom seed varieties tied to Indigenous farming traditions of the American Southwest.

🌍 Global · Nia Tero

A global nonprofit that channels funding and support directly to Indigenous peoples defending and governing their own territories.

🇹🇭 Thailand · EnLAWTHAI Foundation

A lead processing plant flushed its waste into the creek a Karen village drank from, and every one of the village's 221 residents was poisoned. Winning took nineteen years.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Northern Rangelands Trust

An alliance of indigenous pastoralist-led community conservancies governing millions of hectares of communally owned rangeland in northern Kenya.

🌍 Global · Saami Council

Sápmi is one homeland with four national borders drawn across it, and the reindeer do not recognise any of them.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Pgakenyaw Association for Sustainable Development (PASD)

A Karen (Pga k'nyau) indigenous community association defending traditional rotational farming and customary forest stewardship in northern Thailand.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Piku Biodiversity Network

Papua New Guinean schoolkids-turned-rangers from seven tribes now guard the pig-nosed turtles their communities once hunted.

🇵🇪 Peru · Asociación ANDES (Asociación para la Naturaleza y el Desarrollo Sostenible)

A Quechua-led biocultural park in the Peruvian Andes where six indigenous communities collectively steward more than a thousand native potato varieties in their original mountain landscape.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Namati

Community paralegals trained by Namati are helping Sierra Leonean villages fight exploitative land leases and win back territory signed away without their consent.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Aves Uruguay

Uruguay's oldest bird conservation NGO maps and defends the grasslands and wetlands that keep 450 species aloft.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Radio Sucumbíos

For over three decades this community radio station has been the only daily source of news for six Indigenous nationalities in Ecuador's oil-scarred Amazon, turning listener call-ins about contaminated rivers and deforestation into some of the region's only sustained environmental journalism.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto SOS Pantanal

After record wildfires torched a quarter of the Pantanal wetland, this Brazilian NGO is paying Indigenous communities to grow and plant native seedlings that heal burned springs and riverbanks.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Rede de Sementes do Cerrado (RSC)

A Brasília-based seed network pays indigenous, family-farmer and urban collectors to harvest native Cerrado grasses and wildflowers, turning them back into standing savanna.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · HUTAN

A grassroots NGO run largely by the local Orang Sungai community has replanted over 246,000 trees to stitch Borneo's fragmented rainforest back together for wild orangutans.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · PanNature (People and Nature Reconciliation / Trung tâm Con người và Thiên nhiên)

A Vietnamese conservation NGO is replanting native trees to stitch two protected forests back together into one wildlife corridor for the endangered white-cheeked gibbon.

🇺🇸 United States · Sogorea Te' Land Trust

The first urban Indigenous women-led land trust in the US is quietly buying and receiving back parcels of Ohlone territory across the San Francisco Bay Area, acre by acre.

🇮🇶 Iraq · Nature Iraq

Iraq's first conservation NGO fights to keep the Garden of Eden's marshes alive as upstream dams and drought squeeze the water that sustains the Marsh Arabs.

🇦🇺 Australia · Cape York Land Council

Since 1990, this Traditional Owner-run legal service has helped hand native title over four-fifths of the Cape York Peninsula back to its Aboriginal custodians.

🇵🇪 Peru · Instituto de Montaña (The Mountain Institute Peru)

As tropical glaciers retreat, Andean communities are digging out 1,000-year-old canals and reservoirs to keep water flowing through the dry season.

🇨🇦 Canada · Gathering Voices Society

Gathering Voices Society partners with Yunesit'in and Xeni Gwet'in First Nations to bring seasonal cultural burning back to the Tsilhqot'in Chilcotin region of British Columbia, one of the fastest-warming, most fire-prone landscapes in Canada.

🌍 Global · Ríos to Rivers

A youth exchange nonprofit whose trainees made the first-ever 310-mile descent of the newly free-flowing Klamath River.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo)

A grassroots, almost entirely Ifugao-run movement that keeps the 2,000-year-old, UNESCO-listed Cordillera rice terraces alive by getting mountain farmers and youth back onto abandoned paddies.

🇾🇪 Yemen · Socotra Dragon Blood Tree Association

French and Socotri islanders are raising community tree nurseries, beehives and water pipelines to save Socotra's iconic, storm-battered dragon blood trees.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Pastoral Women's Council

Founded by ten Maasai women in 1997, the Pastoral Women's Council has helped over a thousand Maasai women win formal title to rangeland in a culture where women traditionally could not own land.

🇨🇦 Canada · Secwepemcúl'ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society (SRSS)

Eight Secwépemc communities formed their own restoration society to replant nearly 200,000 scorched hectares after British Columbia's Elephant Hill wildfire, blending Indigenous knowledge with forestry science.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto Aritana

Instituto Aritana unites 16 Indigenous peoples of Brazil's Xingu Indigenous Territory around community-built fire management plans that pair ancestral burning knowledge with modern brigades to keep megafires out of the forest.

🇫🇮 Finland · Snowchange Cooperative

A Finnish cooperative buys up ruined peat-mining land and lets local and Sámi communities rewild it back into carbon-storing wetlands.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fundación Kara Solar

Indigenous Achuar communities in Ecuador's Amazon build and pilot solar-powered river canoes that replace gasoline outboard motors.

🇺🇸 United States · Native Renewables

An Indigenous-led nonprofit installs off-grid solar and battery systems for Navajo and Hopi families still living without electricity.

🇺🇸 United States · Soul Fire Farm

On 80 acres in upstate New York, a Black- and Indigenous-led farm is training a new generation of farmers of color while feeding families locked out of the food system.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Kiwis Against Seabed Mining

A plan to suck 50 million tonnes of seabed a year off the Taranaki coast met a volunteer coalition of surfers, fishers and iwi — who took it to the Supreme Court and won.

🇬🇾 Guyana · Caiman House

An Indigenous-owned research station in the Rupununi runs one of only two black caiman research projects on Earth, funding a village library with every visitor.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Pou Tupua

After a 140-year campaign by Whanganui Maori, New Zealand's third-longest river became the first river on Earth recognized in law as a living being with its own rights.

🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Te Ipukarea Society (TIS)

The Cook Islands' longest-running environmental watchdog pairs traditional raui reef closures with modern science to defend a 1.9-million-square-kilometre ocean nation.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust

Since 1982, whānau-run Kōhanga Reo language nests have immersed tens of thousands of Māori children in te reo Māori from birth, reviving a language once on the brink of loss.

🇰🇪 Kenya · International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)

Kenya's first all-women ranger unit, made up of young Maasai women, patrols the wildlife corridor between Amboseli and Tsavo to stop poaching and defuse human-elephant conflict.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Tenkile Conservation Alliance

In Papua New Guinea's remote Torricelli Mountains, a community-run alliance turned a hunting moratorium into a tripling of the critically endangered tenkile tree kangaroo.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Tetepare Descendants' Association

Tetepare Descendants' Association is an indigenous landowner group protecting the largest uninhabited, unlogged island in the South Pacific.

🇨🇦 Canada · Mushkegowuk Council

The Omushkego Cree call the James Bay peatlands the Breathing Lands, and they are pushing to protect a carbon store that dwarfs most of the world's forests before mining reaches it.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Alliance of Solwara Warriors

Papua New Guinea granted the world's first deep-sea mining licence in its own Bismarck Sea; the coastal clans who fish those waters spent eight years making the project unfinanceable.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Porgera Red Wara (River) Women's Association

Only a handful of industrial mines on Earth still tip their tailings straight into a river. Three of them are in Papua New Guinea, and the women downstream named theirs the Red River.

🇺🇸 United States · Alaska Institute for Justice

Thawing permafrost, vanished sea ice and storms with nothing to break them are taking Alaska Native villages house by house — and no US agency has the job of relocating a community.

🌍 Global · International Land Coalition (ILC)

Hosted by IFAD in Rome, ILC unites more than 300 civil society and intergovernmental members across 86 countries to fight land grabbing and secure tenure rights for farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples and women.

🇵🇪 Peru · Rainforest Foundation US

A legal title is often the only thing standing between an Indigenous Amazon community and the bulldozers, so this program puts mapping tools and titling paperwork directly in communities' hands.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT)

UCRT helps Maasai, Hadzabe, Datoga and other pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities in northern Tanzania win legally binding titles to the rangeland their livelihoods depend on.

🇳🇺 Niue · Tofia Niue

A tiny raised-coral nation partnered with its own community NGO to put its entire ocean territory under protection.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Union de Cooperativas Tosepan

Tens of thousands of Nahua and Totonac families in Mexico's Sierra Norte de Puebla run their own cooperative economy, organic coffee, community finance, housing and forests, outside the reach of intermediaries.

🇮🇳 India · South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP)

A Delhi-based network of river researchers scrutinizes every major dam in South Asia to expose the flooding, displacement and biodiversity loss they cause.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Vídeo nas Aldeias

Since 1986, this Brazilian collective has put cameras in the hands of Indigenous filmmakers so their own footage becomes evidence and armor in the fight to keep Amazonian territories standing.

🇫🇲 Micronesia · Waa'gey

Master carvers on Yap's remote outer islands are teaching the next generation to hand-build ocean-going canoes and navigate by the stars, keeping millennia-old wayfinding knowledge alive.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Waan Aelõñ in Majel (WAM)

A Majuro boatyard turns at-risk Marshallese youth into master canoe builders, reviving ancient seafaring skills as a path to jobs and cultural pride.

🇦🇺 Australia · ALFA (NT) Limited

Aboriginal-owned ALFA (NT) Limited pays Traditional Owners to burn Arnhem Land the old way, turning ancient fire knowledge into carbon credits that fund rangers and community programs.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Waihora Co-Governance Group

Te Waihora was Ngāi Tahu's great food basket before drainage and dairy runoff turned it into one of New Zealand's most polluted lakes; iwi and regional council now run its recovery together.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program (Woodland Park Zoo)

Papua New Guinea's first conservation area protects a cloud-forested mountain range as the last stronghold of the endangered Matschie's tree kangaroo.