We, Indigenous youth from the seven socio-cultural regions, come together during the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, to continue the path of our ancestors and assert our collective power to protect our lands and territories, uphold our rights, and safeguard life across generations.
Our Peoples have lived in balance with Mother Earth for millennia, even as our territories are among the first and most severely impacted by climate change. For Indigenous youth, climate justice is inseparable from decolonization and the protection of our Peoples, languages, ancestral knowledge, science and collective rights. As Indigenous youth, we envision a world where our sovereignty, cultures, and territories are respected and protected. A world rooted in ancestral knowledge, reciprocity, and ecological balance, where we lead transformational climate action grounded in protection, restoration, not exploitation.
As the world turns its eyes toward Belém do Pará, land of the Amazon, this moment stands as a test and opportunity to honor the commitments made ten years ago in the Paris Agreement, centering the voices of those most affected beyond tokenization of our cultures, and deliver a new course grounded in the rights of Indigenous Peoples and justice-centered outcomes. For this, we make the following recommendations:
Full and Effective Participation of Indigenous Youth in the UNFCCC
We call on Parties and non-state actors to commit to structural changes that guarantee the full, equitable, and effective participation of Indigenous youth in all levels of climate governance, ensuring shared decision-making power and measurable accountability.
To uplift and protect Indigenous Youth, Parties must reaffirm and fully implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and uphold our right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) in all climate-related decisions. The UNFCCC must institutionalize the meaningful inclusion of Indigenous youth across all Convention processes, bodies, and mechanisms, including in future COP Action Agendas.
Guaranteed access to and protection of indigenous knowledge systems
As Indigenous youth, we bear both the responsibility and the honor of protecting and continuing our knowledge systems, practices, sciences, and ways of life that sustain harmony with Mother Earth. Yet, our ability to do so is under grave threat as extractivist industries devastate our lands, territories, violate our rights, and endanger the survival of our Peoples.
Parties must integrate Indigenous Peoples’ governance and knowledge systems into national and international climate frameworks, ensuring they are embedded within Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and Just Transition Pathways.
Protecting Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge requires protecting the Peoples, territories, and ecosystems from which it originates.
Cultural Losses and Damages for Indigenous Youth and Future Generations
For our generation, loss and degradation of our ecosystems is not only a climate and environmental crisis, but it is a profound cultural, spiritual, and historical loss. The destruction of our rivers, forests, mountains, glaciers, and sacred places represents the erasure of our ancestral knowledge, our medicines, our languages, and our collective history. As these ecosystems disappear, so do the living foundations of our identities.
Across our communities, Indigenous youth are witnessing losses that threaten the continuity of our cultures. These losses and damages are irreversible, and their impacts cannot be measured solely in economic terms. They represent the disappearance of our ways of life, our cosmologies, and our intergenerational responsibilities.
We call on Parties to center non-economic and cultural losses and their effects on Indigenous youth and future generations, and to ensure that these dimensions are fully reflected in all Loss and Damage processes and funding arrangements. This must include direct support for Indigenous-led initiatives that protect our territories and knowledge systems, restore our lands, and contribute to the cultural survival of our Peoples. Protecting our cultures requires protection from the destruction of the lands, territories, waters, and ecosystems that sustain us.
Migration and Displacement of Indigenous Youth
Across our territories, extractivist projects, including mining, deforestation, agribusiness, and energy infrastructure, force Indigenous families and youth to migrate as our lands become uninhabitable, contaminated, or violently taken. This displacement tears apart our communities, separates youth from their cultural roots, and disrupts the intergenerational transmission of our languages, knowledge, and identities.
Indigenous youth also face structural barriers to accessing secondary and higher education, both within and near our territories. The absence of intercultural, culturally grounded, and accessible educational opportunities forces many young people to migrate to distant cities or countries to study or to work for sustain their families. This is not a choice, but a form of educational displacement that weakens our communities and places heavy social and economic burdens on us.
Force displacement and migration, whether driven by extractivism, environmental degradation, or lack of educational opportunities, is a direct threat to the continuity of our cultures and the well-being of future generations.
Just Transition and So-called Critical Mineral Mining
Our generation is living the very beginning of the “Just” Transition, and alongside future generations, we will live through its effects. We assert that a true just transition must respect the inherent right of self- determination in decision-making processes.Large-scale mining project operations of so-called transitional and critical minerals (more accurately described as “profitable minerals”) frequently occur without Indigenous Peoples’ FPIC. These projects are rooted in colonial exploitation and violence, causing cultural, environmental, and spiritual damage. They deplete and pollute water sources, destroy ecosystems, and drive land dispossession, cultural loss, and displacement. A transition is not just if it is built upon violating our rights under UNDRIP. Without our FPIC, we reject the framing of extractive industries as something that can be managed through sufficient safeguards. States and corporations have yet to even honour their obligations to clean up existing toxic spills and sites. Activities that are being proposed or carried out on our lands, ice, waters, and territories without obtaining of our FPIC or which threaten sacred places, cultural practices, Indigenous Peoples’ food sources, and ecosystems, or otherwise violate our distinct and inherent rights, are not a just transition.
Carbon Markets and False Solutions
We express grave concern over the expansion of carbon markets and so-called “cooperative mechanisms” under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, which risk turning our lands, forests, and oceans into tradable carbon commodities. These mechanisms threaten to repeat colonial patterns of exploitation under the guise of climate action, with Indigenous youth and future generations facing the longest-lasting consequences of these decisions.
Carbon offset, geoengineering, and “nature-based solutions” that treat our territories as carbon sinks, undermine the sovereignty of our Peoples and allow polluters to continue emitting elsewhere. Climate justice cannot be achieved by commodifying Mother Earth.
We call on Parties to reject market-based approaches that violate Indigenous rights and to prioritize real emission reductions, land restitution, and direct climate finance for Indigenous-led solutions. Any Article 6.4 activities must fully comply with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), guarantee FPIC, and ensure transparent benefit-sharing with affected communities.
Protection of Indigenous Youth and Defenders
IIYFCC unequivocally supports the actions of our Amazonian relatives that engaged in non-violent direct action to defend their rights in the COP30 venue on November 11th, 2025. The rights and opportunities we, as Indigenous youth, hold today are built upon the intergenerational resistance and courage of land defenders who have risked everything to protect our Peoples and territories.
From fossil fuel extraction to mineral mining, industry, governments and big corporations are rewiring our societies, territories, and lives, deepening inequality, fueling wars and occupations, criminalizing and persecuting Indigenous Peoples, and forcing the displacement of youth from our ancestral lands.
Without our rights of Indigenous Youth and Defenders being honored, the energy transition will reproduce extractive systems that violate Indigenous Peoples’ rights and contradict the principles of a just and sustainable transition. Those who engage in these acts must be held accountable.
From fossil fuel extraction to mineral mining, corporations and governments continue to reconfigure our societies, territories, and lives, deepening inequality, fueling conflict, criminalizing Indigenous Peoples, and forcing the displacement of youth from their ancestral homelands in search of safety, education, and justice. These patterns of violence and repression intensify under the banner of the “energy transition,” which, without rights-based safeguards, threatens to reproduce the same extractive systems that have harmed our communities for generations.
Indigenous youth and defenders must be protected, not persecuted. Any and all climate action must guarantee the safety, dignity, and rights of those who stand on the frontlines of environmental protection. Those who commit violence, repression, or criminalization against Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous youth defenders must be held fully accountable under international human rights standards. In order to uplift our voices and rights, you must first defend our lives.
The UN and its member states have recognized these rights in principle, yet continue to fall short in practice. Words without implementation perpetuate injustice. Honoring Indigenous rights is not optional; it is essential for the survival of our planet and all future generations.
We demand as Indigenous Youth to be considered, included and respected through our own governance process in all consultations and decision making processes. We need to have a seat at the table, as there is no justice climate action without indigenous peoples rights and with indigenous youth voices.