Of Black Pots and Flawed Climate COPs

Environmental justice practitioners have long accepted the centrality of indigenous knowledge. Global events converged to level the playing field, setting the stage for the diplomatic emancipation of the global South. Whether it be the fire that blazed the UN COP30 complex in Belém, Brazil, or indigenous communities who disrupted the event by protesting oil extraction in the Amazon, such dramatic responses to contemporary challenges in environmental governance frameworks have revived global interest in indigenous knowledge.

2025 delivered a masterclass in international diplomatic relations and categorically laid bare the changing global order using the G20 Summit, multiple COPs, and the now infamous visit of President Zelensky to the White House without a tie – God forbid. The rise in global temperatures from 1.5 to 2.5 degrees has not buoyed narrative sovereignty. If anything, it has forced us to acknowledge that colonialists, historians and nationalists alike served their own interests in recounting history.

The need to decolonise environmental discourse and legitimise indigenous knowledge is now as apparent as the conflict between extractive and preservation values. Conservation ethnography – the study of how communities, landscapes, and cultural knowledge shape one another under pressure from conservation, development, and climate change- is equally at work debunking environmental mythologies towards greater ecological justice narratives. In the January 2026 edition of ETHNOMAD, Dr Tom Corcoran described the current pursuit of rigorous investigation like this: Across much of the world today, conservation is treated as a moral absolute.

[paywall]

Protect nature. Save biodiversity. Establish reserves.

Enforce regulations. These aims are rarely questioned, and when they are, the questioning is often dismissed as obstruction or ignorance. It is experienced as disruption, negotiation, loss, and quiet resentment that rarely reaches policy rooms.

Where science argued that precolonial Africans were ignorant of the sustainable use of natural resources, indigenous knowledge highlights the dominance of both conservation and co-existence from a moral perspective in the African experience. However, as with religion and politics, much of the value of indigenous knowledge has been eroded by the struggles of identity and tribal superiority.

[/paywall]