Listening as Climate Action

An article by Prahelika Deka

As leaders, activists and researchers gather in Belém for COP30, the conference halls echo from the Amazonian rain. Delegates call it nature reminding them why they are there. It is a poetic moment, but also a sobering one. Over decades of negotiations, our climate politics have become increasingly technical: carbon markets, modelling scenarios, and offset baselines dominate the agenda. Yet in the breakout rooms, people are telling stories, singing, and speaking of water, soil, skies, and kinship. They are trying to remind the world that we already know how to live well with the environment. The knowledge is already there, what is missing is our willingness to listen to those who do.

Who gets to participate in shaping policy?

This year, COP30 is taking place in Belém, in the Amazonian Brazil. The COP presidency has framed its approach around a Global Mutirão, a collective effort rooted in listening, cooperation, and ongoing work beyond the two weeks of negotiation. For many communities living with climate impacts every single day, this idea does not feel new but urgent.

As a University of Leeds (online) delegate whose research explores how local communities imagine their alternate climate futures in flood risk zones, I have been following one particular space closely: the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP). Established at COP21, the LCIPP was designed to exchange knowledge in a holistic way. Yet even after almost a decade, COP30 delegates acknowledged clumsy definitions about who counts as local communities that risk recognising their existence and inclusion. Throughout the mandated LCIPP workshops, speaker after speaker said the same thing: we are not stakeholders, we are rights holders and knowledge holders. Stakeholders can be consulted. Rights holders must be respected. Knowledge holders are decision makers and should shape policy, not simply inform it.

That difference matters.

Again and again, participants emphasised knowledge equity. In the opening remarks of the first mandated LCIPP workshop, a delegate reminded the room, ‘Knowledge once shared still belongs to the people it came from’.  That sentence holds a warning.

A representative from pastoralist regions in East Africa described mobility as adaptation and a skilled response to changing landscapes. Yet policymakers often interpret mobility as disorganisation and chaos. Calling this disconnect partly as an evidence problem, he highlighted the importance of ethnographic research, not as an academic exercise, but as a way to send messages ‘from COPs to crowds, and from crowds back to COPs.’ A representative from Timor-Leste highlighted another structural gap. Their country does not have Indigenous Peoples but local communities, who face severe climate impacts with negligible emissions. They experience both economic and non-economic loss and damage but struggle to access promised support.

At the FERISHAM: Indigenous Strategy on Fires and Droughts in the Amazon press conference, an Asháninka representative, from AIDESEP commented that they already have ancestral fire management plans ready, but no funding, no equipment, and no legal power to act. These are not knowledge gaps; they are governance failures. Meanwhile, the Green Climate Fund has pledged 50% of its resources to adaptation, yet most of the spending remains tied to mitigation and market-based mechanisms. Delegates asked a pointed question: what good are climate markets if the forests they depend on are burning?

What would it mean to listen differently?

Knowledge holders from each of the seven UN Indigenous sociocultural regions shared that it would mean treating oral histories and seasonal calendars as environmental data. It would mean financing community-led fire prevention rather than policing after disaster. It would mean involving local communities in decision-making, not just consultation. It would mean co-authorship on technical reports. And crucially, it would mean trusting knowledge that is lived, embodied, and relational. These ideas challenge the assumption that climate adaptation is mostly a technical problem. Many communities already adapt through flexible housing, rotating harvests, festival timing, and mobility.

The COP30 presidency’s language on participatory governance is promising. But implementation will matter far more than inspiration. Communities do not need recognition alone; they need rights and to be respected. They do not need more documents but trust.

All this underscores that we do not lack climate knowledge but the structures willing to hear it. If COP30 is to be remembered as a turning point, it will be because delegates chose to widen who gets to imagine futures, and therefore, what the futures can be.

When we learn to listen differently, the future becomes larger.