Tune in directly to the wisdom of Indigenous leader and recent TED Climate Countdown speaker Nemonte Nenquimo through an Instagram takeover exclusively on Leonardo DiCaprio’s page.

Throughout the Instagram takeover, Nemonte will lead us on a journey into the Amazon rainforest and her home in Waorani territory with on-the-ground storytelling and personal videos and photos. Nemonte’s account is also a call to action, inviting us to amplify her story and support Indigenous defenders on the frontlines.

The Waorani people won a landmark legal victory against Big Oil in 2018. Since then, Nemonte has continued to fight to keep the oil industry from destroying the rainforest that she loves. Today, the Ecuadorian government is threatening to DOUBLE oil and mining in the Amazon.

You can also follow  Nemonte on Instagram @nemonte.nenquimo AND the organizations that she co-founds @amazonfrontlines @alianzaceibo

Ecuador became the first country to enshrine the Rights of Nature into its Constitution in 2008, giving citizens the possibility to sue on behalf of trees, rivers or animals. This case presents an opportunity for the Constitutional Court to recognize, among other things, how the rights of a fragile river ecosystem trump government plans for mining or oil that could destroy that river.

As Sinangoe and Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement’s published statement yesterday says, “The resolution of this case by the Constitutional Court is urgent and extremely important for the moment that Ecuador, and the planet, currently finds itself in.

The hearing took place days after world leaders signed agreements to face climate change and stop deforestation at COP26 in Glasgow, and months after the President of Ecuador Guillermo Lasso promised to double oil extraction and rapidly expand mining in the Amazon, through Presidential Decrees 95 and 151 (which was recently challenged by Indigenous peoples in Court).”

Indigenous peoples take care of 70% of the Ecuadorian Amazon, almost 7 million hectares of the most important rainforest on the planet. Deforestation of just one hectare of our territories represents the equivalent carbon emissions of 160 cars for a whole year.

It is not possible to face climate change without the Amazon, and it is not possible to protect the Amazon without us, Indigenous peoples, and without guaranteeing our rights

World leaders made headlines in Glasgow last week with new commitments to halt deforestation and invest resources in frontline Indigenous communities. Any and all hope of reaching the Paris climate goals and averting worst-case climate scenarios require safeguarding forest landscapes, but a track record of high profile pledges languishing unimplemented has given good reason for skepticism.  In 2014, world leaders made similar commitments in the New York Declaration on Forests, pledging to halve deforestation by 2020. Since that time, deforestation has continued apace, and parts of the vitally important Amazon rainforest have now made the long dreaded shift from carbon sinks to sources of emissions of themselves. With the looming threat of the Amazon near the tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah, the stakes have only increased.

At the very least, these recent commitments signal a growing understanding that the status quo is not sufficient, that greater action, political resolve and resources are needed. But it does beg the question of what is different now, and what lessons have been learned in recent years that will give the Glasgow Declaration hope of a different, more successful fate.  The Glasgow declaration was underpinned by commitments to channel $19 billion in public and private funds towards protecting forests, of which $1.7 billion USD is dedicated for Indigenous peoples and local communities. That is welcome and needed news, but to make real change, financial commitments need to translate into new resources that reach actionable investments in solutions. High-level financial commitments at the climate talks have tended to get mired in bureaucratic obstacles, double-counting and fail to reach those who can deliver results.  It’s not yet clear how these commitments will reach communities who need resources nor how resources committed will shift policies that have relied on forest destruction.

As much as past failures invite skepticism, the stakes have simply become too high to abandon hope. Tropical forests now teeter on the precipice of a dangerous and irrevocable tipping point. Indigenous peoples have been on the frontlines, often laboring in obscurity, without the support they need to make change at the scale they are capable of delivering. As the climate talks wind down, and we get to the hard work of making good on promises made, here are three concrete, immediate steps that can be taken to make the Glasgow Declaration a success where others have failed.

Land rights for Indigenous peoples offers a cost effective, immediately scalable solution, and big investments are capable of delivering big results quickly.  The data is clear, and it has been for some time: when the rights of Indigenous Peoples are recognized and secured, rates of deforestation are lower and carbon stocks are higher than in forests managed by others. The world over, Indigenous movements have called for greater investment in efforts to secure formal title to their lands.  While new commitments have been made over the last decade, resources have been slow to reach communities who are engaged in often protracted battles with their governments to seek title, even as “bulldozers are at the gate.” That has to change and it has to change quickly.

In Ecuador, the Indigenous movement is poised to secure massive gains in some of the most carbon rich and biodiverse forests in the world.  Over the last 50 years, the government of Ecuador has unilaterally declared at least 1.4 million hectares of ancestral Indigenous lands as national parks, granting sole ownership to the government. Indigenous peoples who live in these areas are forced to negotiate weak, temporary land-use agreements with the government to access their territories. Even worse, these agreements do not prevent state interests from granting lands to either oil and mining companies, demonstrated most recently by the approval of oil drilling within the Yasuni National Park, which overlaps ancestral Waorani territory. Formal recognition of Indigenous peoples land title will provide a critical and additional layer of protection for the forests and carbon stored in these lands.

Indigenous peoples have not waited for top-down political commitments to continue their struggle to protect their lands and safeguard the climate.  Over the last several years, Indigenous peoples have created an unprecedented window of opportunity to make dramatic and long-lasting changes to policy frameworks that privilege natural resource extraction over Indigenous guardianship and climate protection.  Resources pledged to implement the Glasgow Declaration must support these urgent struggles in the near term.

The Ecuadorian Constitutional Court is poised to create unprecedented new jurisprudence on Indigenous peoples’ right to decide what happens on their lands and territories. In early 2020, the new progressive-leaning Constitutional Court of Ecuador selected the Sinangoe and Waorani court rulings (both brought with legal support from Amazon Frontlines) for review out of thousands of cases, setting up the country’s first real opportunity for national jurisprudence on indigenous rights to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and the Rights of Nature as applied in Indigenous territories. The outcome will determine whether these constitutional rights exist only on paper or are actually applicable in practice.

Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is a vital tool for communities to resist planned extraction on their lands. The rights of indigenous peoples are widely recognized constitutionally and internationally. However, the effective implementation of international legal norms and Constitutional obligations is precarious, as governments continue to promote laws and policies that promote an economic development model based on mining, oil, hydroelectric energy and forestry exploitation. While many indigenous communities enjoy some form of recognition of collective tenure to their lands, the Government of Ecuador retains subsurface rights and continues to grant concession allocations to commercial actors on indigenous-held lands for extraction in violation of their fundamental right to free, prior and informed consent. Increasing protections for Indigenous peoples’ rights to control their lands could safeguard over 7 million hectares of intact rainforest in Ecuador.

The success of the Glasgow Declaration hinges on whether it successfully catalyzes much needed course corrections away from national development policies premised on “extraction at all costs”.  Many countries are facing not only persistent sustainable development challenges, but are now also facing added economic crises arising from the current global health pandemic. The Glasgow Declaration comes at a critical time when many countries are seeking innovative ways to rebound from the COVID health and economic crises.  The signatories to the Glasgow declaration, which covers over 90% of global forest area, have committed to “​​ensuring robust policies and systems are in place to accelerate the transition to an economy that is resilient and advances forest, sustainable land use, biodiversity and climate goals.”  That means that forest countries must re-evaluate existing policy frameworks that do not align with those goals, and certainly means that signatory countries should not pursue new policies that run counter them.

Just months prior to signing this declaration, President Lasso in Ecuador issued Executive Decrees to massively expand new oil and mining extraction, threatening millions of hectares of pristine rainforest and the physical and cultural survival of Indigenous nations. The decrees are part of the new Presidential administration’s public policy strategy to address the country’s crippled economy and its colossal foreign debt by doubling down on extractivism and the exploitation of nature. If implemented, Executive Decrees 95 and 151 will radically transform the government’s policies on oil and mining to favor industry and attract foreign investment.

On October 18th, 2021, hundreds of Indigenous elders, youth, and leaders arrived in the capital city of Quito, having journeyed from their communities deep in the Amazon rainforest, to challenge Executive Decree 95, which seeks to double the country’s oil production to one million barrels per day by deregulating the operational processes in the oil and gas industry. The decree will profoundly affect Indigenous rainforest territory, as almost all oil reserves are in the Amazon, and almost all untapped reserves are within Indigenous territories.  The lawsuit, brought with the legal support of Amazon Frontlines, challenges what is a clear first step towards a Bolsonaro style plundering of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Additional suits against Executive Decree 151, which aims to relax environmental controls to fast-track the entrance of foreign mining companies in the Amazon, are anticipated in the coming weeks.

Leaders have an important window of opportunity to capitalize on political momentum for reform arising from these pledges to ensure that while the longer process of policy reform is initiated, new harmful policies are scrapped before they lock in untold damage to forests and people.  The vast majority of mining projects are at auction or exploration stage, not production stage, and many new oil concessions have not been auctioned or broken ground yet due to indigenous resistance.  World leaders should come together to review these policies and change course, or risk the same fate of earlier failed declarations.

This editorial was originally published in El Comercio, the most widespread newspaper in Ecuador, by the Waorani leader, Nemonte Nenquimo, and the leader A’i Cofán, Alexandra Narváez.

Over five hundred years ago, the conquistadores invaded Indigenous territories throughout the Americas on their horses, carrying swords, rifles, and a document – they called it the “Requirement”. They read this document to us in Spanish – a language that Indigenous peoples did not understand. The document essentially said: “From now on, let it be known that we are your owners. If you submit to this, then you can live in peace with us, and if not, we are going to wage war against you”. It was a violent document. But that ink on paper satisfied the formalist and bureaucratic needs of the conquerors and in turn, justified the cruel history of conquest that our world knows only too well.

We are two Indigenous women leaders from communities of the Waorani and Kofan nations in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As we write this, we want to tell you that this story of conquest continues today. In Ecuador, the government and companies continue to set new traps to push forward new conquests, like oil and mining extraction. They use formal procedures, which are not so different from the infamous 1513 Spanish Requirement.

In other words, what the Ecuadorian governments and industries call “free, prior and informed consultation” is nothing more than the following: they give us confusing and misleading information about what they want to do in our territories, and if we do not agree, they threaten us by waging war against us again.

The world has heard about our struggles and our victories. In 2018, the Indigenous guardia of the Kofan community of Sinangoe discovered large machinery excavating the shores of one of the country’s most important Amazonian headwaters, the Aguarico River, during a land patrol. It was one of the fifty-two mining concessions granted by the Ecuadorian government for a duration of twenty-five years, without any consultation whatsoever with the community. Although this river is a source of life for us, the State argued that it didn’t need to consult us before granting the concessions. Can you believe the nerve? But later that year, the Provincial court of Sucumbios ruled in favor of our rights, affirming that we, the Kofan, are the ancestral guardians of this territory, and so we must be consulted.

In 2012, government officials traveled to Waorani territory and to the territories of six other Indigenous nations in the central-south Amazon. They came by plane and arrived unannounced, offering us Coca-Cola and bread, and gave quick and impossible to understand presentations about an oil block auction. They tried to lure us in by promising to build schools and football fields. One hour later, they took off into the air again and claimed to have completed their formality of “consultation” – in other words, their justification for the new extractivist conquest. It didn’t matter if we agreed or not: the government had decided that the oil auction was going forward. Or so they thought! But we, the Waorani, have always fiercely defended our territory since time immemorial. In July 2019, we danced and sung as we celebrated our historic legal victory against the Ecuadorian government in the Provincial Court of Pastaza, which recognized that our right to self-determination and free, prior and informed consultation had been violated. The ruling put a halt to the planned expansion of sixteen new oil blocks overlapping one million hectares of Indigenous rainforest territories.

Our ancestors used to fight carrying spears on their shoulders. Today, we are fighting with documents written in Montecristi (birthplace of the current Ecuadorian Constitution) and Geneva in our hand, documents that recognize our right to free, prior, and informed consent and self-determination.

Now our cases sit before the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, which has a historic opportunity to make it clear that the government, oil companies, miners and loggers cannot impose their projects in our territories without our consent. Our rights, our territories, our decision!

But we cannot carry on waiting. Too much is at stake. The very future of the Amazon and our climate is at risk. The Constitutional Court must convoke a public hearing on the case now. The Court must rule on Indigenous people’s right to decide in Ecuador and guarantee that our right to decide over the future of our territories and cultures is respected. It is a necessary step for this pluri-national country and a clear sign that we have left the conquest in the past. This is our “Requirement.”

After a long journey from the Amazon traveling by foot, by canoe and by road, hundreds of indigenous peoples arrived in Ecuador’s capital city last week to mobilize in support of the Waorani and Kofan nations, whose historic victories against oil and mining interests have inspired hundreds of indigenous communities across the Amazon in their resistance against extractivism.

United with other indigenous nations from the Ecuadorian Amazon including the Kichwa, Sapara, Shiwiar, Shuar, Siekopai, and Siona, who face similar rights violations and threats in their territories, indigenous youth and elders took to the streets of Quito in song and dance and staged powerful mobilizations outside several State institutions to denounce the government’s ongoing complicity in Amazon destruction and its failure to comply with their court rulings. The Waorani and Kofan notably met with Ecuador’s Supreme Court, which has accepted the Kofan of Sinangoe’s case for review – an important feat for indigenous peoples in Ecuador, which could also mark the country’s first ever Supreme Court ruling on prior consultation and the right to self-determination as applied to indigenous peoples.

The Waorani and Kofan know the stakes are high, and that their victories present invaluable opportunities to advance the law and indigenous rights not only in Ecuador, but across the region. Yet despite their important triumphs against big oil and mining and the recognition of the importance of their cases by Ecuador’s Supreme Court and the United Nations, the government’s extractive agenda continues full throttle. Recent announcements reveal plans to expand oil and mining concessions in the Amazon in order to repay the country’s crushing debt to China, imperiling our world’s most important forest, indigenous territories, and our planet’s climate.

In 2018 and 2019, the Kofan and Waorani won unprecedented legal battles against the Ecuadorian government, protecting hundreds of thousands of pristine megabiodiverse rainforest, and setting invaluable legal precedents for indigenous rights in the country and the Amazon region. In the months ahead, the Waorani and Kofan will continue to ramp up the pressure to ensure that the Ecuadorian government respects indigenous rights and territories.

It is said that the Amazon invites cliché and resists hyperbole. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the bounty of the Amazon’s plant and animal life. Accounting for a tenth of all known species on the planet, the Amazon is an ecosystem without equal. It is also an ecosystem full of mysteries yet to be discovered. Much of the modern pharmacopeia derives from Amazonian plants, and longstanding medical mysteries may yet be solved by researching the flora of a healthy forest.

The indigenous nations of the Ecuadorian Amazon understand themselves to share a common struggle. Collectively they are the guardians of 70% of the entire Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Many of these peoples joined the Waorani in solidarity outside the courtroom, traveling from distant communities in the country’s north and south. They marched with the Waorani in the streets; they submitted amicus briefs; and they returned to their communities to share what they had learned to better organize for the future. “We have united with our Waorani brothers and sisters because we share the same struggle and dream: to protect our forest and to continue being who we are, as indigenous peoples,” said Alex Lucitante, a Kofan leader. “We will continue to unite forces and build strength between our peoples to resist the threats to our territories. Without unity, there can be no triumph.”