As an Australian delegate to this year’s G20 Youth (Y20) Summit, in Washington D.C., I repeatedly found myself defending one word in negotiations: Indigenous.
Youth delegates from the other G20 nations on my Fragility, Conflict and Violence Track questioned the term’s relevance to member countries without an Indigenous population, suggesting ‘local’ as an alternative. I refused to concede on this point.
International policy does not need to apply identically to every country to be relevant to all. Removing Indigenous peoples from the conversation would not make the framework more universal. It would instead erase the experiences of communities whose knowledge underpins our understanding of environmental risk worldwide and impede global progress towards disaster resilience.
Last year’s State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples report found that while accounting for only six per cent of the population, Indigenous peoples manage and protect approximately 80 per cent of the Earth’s biodiversity. Yet, Indigenous peoples are frequently deemed as disproportionately vulnerable to crises, while their expertise remains marginal to the institutions responsible for preventing them, acknowledged as little more than a ‘cultural input’.
This disconnect reveals a deeper contradiction in international disaster governance: governments recognise the importance of resilience but continue to direct substantial resources towards responding to disasters rather than preventing them. Indigenous environmental praxis, grounded in generations of enduring relationships between people and land, challenges this reactive course through an inherently sustainable model.
For the UK, this is not a distant concern. As climate risks increasingly cross borders and the consequences of inadequate preparation mount, Britain must reconsider its role in the global disaster resilience agenda. It need not export place-based Indigenous practices indiscriminately to learn from its’ preventative ideologies and institutionally support the peoples whose expertise is foundational to environmental governance worldwide.
The economics of invisibility
The economic case for investing in international disaster prevention is difficult to ignore. The United Nation’s Global Assessment Report estimates that every dollar invested in disaster risk reduction can generate an average return of $15 in avoided future recovery costs.
Yet disaster financing continues to favour response and recovery, with costly consequences, as the report estimates current annual disaster expenditure exceeding US$2.3 trillion. Governments continue to mobilise resources after homes are destroyed, infrastructure fails and livelihoods are disrupted, while investment in reducing foreseeable risks remains insufficient.
‘Prevention’ is not a new concept in global disaster resilience. It has been time-tested through Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), a cumulative body of environmental practices developed by the world’s Indigenous populations from generations of land stewardship.
The critical role of Indigenous knowledge in tackling disaster risk has been recognised in international policy for over a decade, tracing back to the United Nations’ Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in 2015, where the Sendai Framework was adopted, explicitly calling on governments to engage Indigenous peoples’ in the design and implementation of disaster policies, plans and standards. However, concrete measures to implement this in practice have been notably staggered. Some signatories have begun operationalising their commitments by strengthening disaster planning partnerships with Indigenous populations, namely New Zealand’s Aoetearoa Government expanding Māori inclusion and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency awarding sovereign partner status to tribal nations, as a government-to-government framework in disaster management, rather than a subordinate relation. Yet, there is a persistent disparity between these rhetorical recognitions and meaningful structural inclusion of TEK in national disaster governance, where Indigenous peoples globally receive less than one per cent of environmental management funds.
Australia’s prevention gap
As an Australian Y20 delegate, my domestic mandate centred on advocating for Australia’s opportunity to become a global model for best practice in disaster resilience, particularly given its position as the only G20 member in the South Pacific – the world’s most climate vulnerable region.
Instead, Australia is a microcosm of the international disconnect in disaster governance. Despite being home to one of the world’s oldest continuous living cultures, First Nations communities remain largely absent from the national frameworks intended to strengthen disaster preparedness.
Australia endorsed the Sendai Framework nearly a decade ago and has since made further legislative commitments to First Nations inclusion before, during and after emergencies. Yet a review of 88 local disaster management plans benchmarked against Australia’s Sendai Framework priorities and obligations, found little evidence of Indigenous peoples being incorporated in formal planning.
This is particularly concerning given that TEK-practices such as cultural burning, seasonal observation and species management already inform environmental management at local and community levels across Australia, without equivalent credit to their First Nations origins.
The contradiction is stark. First Nations peoples make up approximately three per cent of Australia’s population, yet they formally care for 57 per cent of the country’s land. They are also disproportionately exposed to disaster risks. The National Indigenous Disaster Resilience program found that disaster-affected local government areas have an average Indigenous population of 14.7 per cent – almost four times the national average.
This comes at a time where overall climate fragility is worsening in Australia, with more frequent and severe disasters. Since 2019, there have been over 200 major disasters, resulting in 1,684 disaster declarations across the country.
A reactive funding model compounds this problem. 97 per cent of our federal disaster funding is spent post-event, on response and recovery, with only three per cent invested in risk mitigation beforehand. Major natural hazards already cost the economy more than $38 billion annually, with those costs projected to reach $73 billion per year by 2060 if the current course continues.
Australia is therefore confronting two connected failures: underinvestment in prevention and the marginalisation of expertise that could contribute to it. First Nations communities are expected to help manage the consequences of disasters without commensurate authority over the systems designed to reduce risk. They are framed primarily as vulnerable populations requiring government assistance rather than as knowledge holders whose generational expertise can strengthen nation-wide resilience.
The broader principle extends beyond Australia: Indigenous knowledge must be treated as a substantive component of public resilience infrastructure, not an optional cultural consideration incorporated after the fact. Without meaningful implementation, the Australian Government risks falling short of its disaster risk reduction commitments while missing a strategic opportunity to demonstrate TEK’s centrality to global climate governance.
The UK’s role in resilience
Climate change and disaster resilience are no longer challenges confined to the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. The United Kingdom experienced its hottest summer on record this year, with heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires resulting in 24 million working hours lost and a subsequent £1.15 billion hit to the economy. As global warming increases, so too will the rate and intensity of such extreme weather events.
Despite being the first G20 nation to establish a binding net-zero target, through its landmark Climate Change Act 2008, the UK’s disaster governance mirrors Australia’s structural disconnect, prioritising recovery over prevention, albeit with different terminology. Climate policy in the UK is divided between ‘mitigation’ – responding to existing greenhouse gas emissions to achieve net zero by 2050 – and ‘adaptation’ – preparing for climate change consequences, which is widely known as the ‘poorer’ tenet. While the former has a dedicated government department, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, responsibility for the latter is dispersed across multiple departments, local authorities, and infrastructure operators. This fragmentation creates serious accountability gaps where the Office for Budget Responsibility has observed difficulty in assessing government expenditure on adaptation, without a unified framework for reporting public investments amid decentralised responsibilities.
As disasters are becoming increasingly transnational in nature, efforts to strengthen resilience should do the same. The Australian case offers a warning about the consequences of failing to translate commitments into practice before disaster frequency accelerates.
The UK must therefore respond on two fronts: turn its adaptation commitments into accountable and sustained investment at home, while supporting Indigenous-led resilience internationally.
First, the Treasury should treat climate adaptation as a core question of economic performance and value for money. Climate risks should be embedded in infrastructure assessments and spending decisions, clarifying departmental responsibilities and establishing consistent reporting on investment and outcomes, so the government may be held accountable for delivery.
Second, the UK should redirect its international climate finance and development programmes to support Indigenous-led resilience. Global knowledge repositories, such as PreventionWeb, managed by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, can facilitate the exchange of TEK-research, policy and practices, including expert contributions from various Indigenous populations worldwide. But sharing knowledge is only one part of the task. Governments must also adequately resource the communities that sustain this expertise and ensure they exercise meaningful decision-making authority over the design and implementation of projects.
The wider lesson applies beyond countries with Indigenous populations. The UK need not adopt Indigenous knowledge as a universal toolkit to recognise the value of its underlying challenge to reactive governance: understanding environmental risks, investing in preparedness and respecting the relationships between communities and the places they depend on. In this sense, the TEK-approach can be adapted to frontline rural and farming communities, whose place-based ecological traditions have been cultivated through generations of working and living on the land, yet remain underrepresented in formal disaster management institutions – often concentrated in the UK’s urban hubs. Integrating local expertise into planning and decision-making would not only ensure that disaster resilience reflects those most affected, but also strengthen nation-wide preparedness for the extremities of climate change.
Recognition without extraction
There is a danger in making the case for Indigenous inclusion in political decision-making, solely on economic grounds. If governments value it only because it can reduce disaster losses, Indigenous expertise risks becoming another resource for institutions to exploit. Indigenous knowledge has long been appropriated through colonial research, commercialisation and environmental management, often without meaningful consent or benefits returning to the communities that developed it.
Knowledge sovereignty must therefore underpin any policy response. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognises Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage and traditional knowledge.
For the UK, financing Indigenous-led adaptation cannot mean requiring communities to disclose knowledge, surrender control of data, or translate their practices into externally defined indicators in return for funding. Projects must establish meaningful consent, community control over documentation, fair benefit-sharing and the right to withhold knowledge where disclosure conflicts with cultural protocols or community interests. Consultation is insufficient if decisions have already been made. Indigenous peoples must have meaningful determination at every stage of a project, from shaping priorities through to its evaluation. Without these safeguards, resilience initiatives risk reproducing the very power imbalances that have historically excluded Indigenous peoples.
Beyond rhetorical recognition
At the Y20, removing the word Indigenous was presented as a way to enhance the universality of disaster policy. However, excluding a group because its experience is not shared by every country is not neutrality, but rather a choice about whose knowledge counts. Governments must move beyond rhetorically acknowledging the criticality of Indigenous expertise, to changing their funding and decision-making systems to accommodate it.
For the United Kingdom, this means operationalising its commitments to adaptation through meaningful investment in preventative action for disaster resilience. While many TEK practices are place-specific, the principles at the heart of this knowledge system – prioritising the rights of the land, managing resources sustainably and anticipating risks before they become crises – must be shared universally. A world serious about disaster resilience must acknowledge that Indigenous peoples are not peripheral contributors to the global response to climate change; they are foundational knowledge holders on environmental stewardship from generations of living responsibly with the land. The global fight against climate change must therefore center TEK and ensure Indigenous peoples have the authority to shape the policies affecting their ancestral lands, to successfully shift from recovery to prevention.