Home Planet Fund was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to ask Masego to expand on this perspective for our supporters.

Home Planet Fund: How siloed are nature-based solutions and climate funding communities? And how is Home Planet Fund different from this phenomenon?

Masego Madzwamuse: That’s a really good question. What we tend to see in the climate community are siloed approaches that are framed around the technological fixes of the climate crisis. This is what I tend to categorize as the managerial approach to the climate crisis. It’s this fixation, or rather that hyper focus on interventions that are said to be reducing and removing carbon from the atmosphere, but without looking at the structural drivers that have landed us in the climate crisis.

And this is being done without pushing interventions that are looking at the interface of how the climate crisis impacts livelihoods, nature, and human wellbeing from a much more holistic point of view.

The reason I often critique those technological responses that are siloed is because I think they force us into taking a single issue approach, yet we understand very well that the problem in nature is so complex. There are so many interconnected systems, right? So the collapse of our natural systems, our social systems, of the economic system, these are what is driving the climate crisis.

So when we then come in with a single issue approach, it means that we are going to be fixing the problem in one part of the system and not looking at the knock-on impacts and knock-on effects on the other parts of the system.What I like about the approach Home Planet Fund takes is the starting point around frontline communities and the people who are most affected; and does so not from a victim perspective. It’s also looking at the people who have, in fact, contributed quite significantly to keeping our planetary boundaries intact; like the areas where our health and that of our ecosystems is in good shape, along with the health of species and the maintenance of safe sites that are important for regenerating natural systems. And these are lands that are under the custodianship of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

So, it’s first and foremost, the need to recognize and pay homage to the custodians and the very people that have been holding the system together for us. For me, that is where the promise of solution is, and there hasn’t been adequate attention to understanding what it is that these communities are doing.

Therefore, in the solutions package that we are pushing in climate, what might we learn from what they are doing? We need to start with the people, and there is the acknowledgement that we need to be addressing climate from an intersectional, integrated way, and that we come to this in a way that acknowledges the complexity of the problem.

What is interesting when you start with the people is that they don’t live single issue lives. You then inherently go into the intersectional lens and the intersectional approaches, right? So you’re able to resolve multiple issues because your starting position is with the people and how they live their lives and their interactions.

So that excites me.

The next point is this niche around nature-based solutions and really challenging and pushing the envelope of how we understand nature-based solutions.

One of my favorite examples is when Home Planet Fund talks about protecting grasslands and the rangeland of East African pastoralists. They talk about that as the places that are important for carbon capture. This is true because the way the grasslands have been managed, they are indeed carbon sinks.

Yet, they often are not profiled because they don’t fall under the category of iconic biodiversity areas as is understood in conventional wisdom.

So I like that Home Planet Fund lifts up some of these forgotten yet very, very important solutions that are driven by local people.

HPF: Home Planet Fund pushes the envelope on the predominantly western assumptions of how to care for the planet. The traditional approach towards conservation is to set aside areas of land and waters to protect, but not in a way that includes the Indigenous people who have always lived in stewardship and reciprocity within those places. Yet the Indigenous perspective at that those lands and waters, and the humans, are the same thing. You cannot take care of the land without taking care of the people, and vice versa. They are indeed the same thing. Why is this so important for people to understand?

Masego: When we are talking about climate and people-centered approaches, these are two sides of the same coin. Let’s go back to what I was saying about the interconnectedness of the problem and the complexity of it. It’s also important because when we then invest in people-driven solutions, we are doing two things.

We’re ensuring the durability of the responses, but we are also ensuring that there will not be a social backlash. What we are also doing is we’re responding to the structural drivers that undermine climate responses.

If you’ve got people on your side in the solutions you are driving, it means that we have a much more resilient system. Now, say you just come in from a people side and you’re not thinking about the climate outcomes. If you do that you could be driving solutions that undermine our climate goals, and that could lead to harmful practices.

This is where another thing I appreciate about Home Planet Fund is that by working with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, we are not romanticizing the idea of noble approaches. We are acknowledging that this is about lifting cultural and Indigenous practices that are not harmful, that are the ones that have been proven over time to be good for the environment. These are the ones that are building on positive social and cultural norms around custodianship and the relationship with nature.

So we are really looking at interventions that are delivering outcomes on both sides of the spectrum: bringing carbon emissions down, but also making sure that we’re uplifting the wellbeing of communities on the front lines of the climate crisis.

HPF: From your perspective, how many other organizations, from a donor’s perspective, are doing what Home Planet Fund is doing?

Masego: There are a few, but we need a lot more, and I’ll tell you why a lot more is needed.

If you look at the statistics around climate funding, an example being the Forest Tenure Fund, only one percent of that fund went to Indigenous led organizations. One percent.

When you look at the scale of the lands that are under the territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities, we are talking about significant amounts of land that has the potential for carbon sequestration.

So if we are not investing in those communities, we are ultimately not investing in those habitats and ecosystems that are an important part of the solution. What I’m essentially saying is we need a lot more of the types of funds like Home Planet Fund. There are others that are adjacent and take similar approaches and do trust-based philanthropy…the Forest Tenure Fund is an example that includes Indigenous peoples, but it is focused primarily on the forest.

Home Planet Fund has been deliberate and intentional in going to the area of nature-based solutions. What excites me about that is nature-based solutions are so crowded with market-based interventions that are only lifting up private and capital interventions. When one applies a critical lens, it’s like you’re really asking the polluters to champion the solutions while overlooking the custodians, and not putting the solutions in the hands of people that have been driving tested and proven solutions for generations and generations.

So Home Planet Fund is actually pushing the envelope in that it is one of the very few, in fact I don’t know of another fund that can claim to be doing what Home Planet Fund is doing from a nature-based solution perspective.

Home Planet Fund centers Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, not false market-based solutions.

Home Planet Fund is building on interventions that are about delivering healthy ecosystems that are not separate from supporting the livelihoods, as well as the physical, spiritual, and social well-being of the humans who are the stewards of those lands and waters.

How we understand human wellbeing is quite holistic because it also pays homage to how Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities themselves define human wellbeing, along with the connections I spoke about earlier.

So there is a very unique niche that Home Planet Fund is filling in this sense. The other is in the ability to move resources to places that are harder to fund, that other funders would not enter because of the geopolitics and political instability. Yet these are ecosystems that are not part of the iconic biodiversity value as understood in conventional wisdom.

That last point about moving resources into areas that are harder to fund is what excites me the most, because I really do not think we can get away with this idea that every transition has tradeoffs, and there are parts of communities that will always be left behind. There should never be anybody who is left behind. We have no excuses for leaving any community behind in our solutions, because we don’t have a shortage of funding.

It’s not a shortage of wealth to be able to distribute, right? This planet has to be healthy for all to be able to live in dignity. So that last part is what excites me the most about the work Home Planet Fund is doing.

HPF: Will you please talk a little more about why Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities and their nature-based solutions are the most effective methods for mitigating and adapting to the climate and biodiversity crises?

Masego: If we were to map important biodiversity areas where it is still largely intact, these are the areas that Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are living in.

So we’ve got the empirical evidence to show us that this is the case.

Now we talk about the potential and the scalability of it. I like to think about the potential and the scalability in terms of connectivity.

An isolated intervention in one community, of course, doesn’t get us far, but when we think about how these puzzles of land come together for us to be able to build scale in terms of geographic coverage as well as scaling deep in terms of durability, this is important. You’ve got communities on the front lines pushing for the solutions, sharpening their expertise around these, improving their methods, sharing ideas with each other, so you get this groundswell that is so important for the social tipping points.

I think that Indigenous peoples are holding the solutions and the moral authority to push these. We are in such a deep crisis that we have a political backlash to climate solutions. We’ve got a political backlash, and we have a social backlash. If we can have people who have been able to keep biodiversity intact, and we can prove that they can continue to live in dignity and thrive, then I think we are able to push solutions that speak to behavioral change in a way that will be non-threatening to the wider society.

HPF:Why is it important for you, personally, to be the Director of the Board of Home Planet Fund at this point in history?

Masego: It’s so important to me because I think the dominant narrative about where solutions are going to be coming from needs to be challenged. We need to shift the narrative and we need to shift the mindset, but you cannot do that without demonstrable examples.

We have been making a case in so many other spaces about the importance of funding and giving resources to Indigenous People’s land and Indigenous Peoples and Local Community-led organizations, right? That if we cannot make those investments and demonstrate that this is doable, then we continue to live in this evidence vacuum that the wider funding community speaks about.

It was an opportunity to shift from critiquing what the system is, to being in a place where we can demonstrate what it could be. It excited me that we, in fact, have an Indigenous woman setting it up and really thinking deeply about the kinds of advisors that you would bring around her to build a fund that really lives up to the values and the promises of Indigenous Peoples’ led solutions.

I think Home Planet Fund is cutting edge. It is really at the cusp of what we need to do in order to implement nature-based solutions on a large scale, instead of the harmful dominance of carbon credits in the way that they’ve been structured.

So it’s almost like going to the heart of the beast to reform a system, but reforming it with values that are so deep. I have a lot of respect for the values that Home Planet Fund moves with and operates with, and what the board would like to model. Because it’s about modeling an alternative system and profiling an alternative model that is going to tend and care for us amidst the climate crisis.

HPF: What do you hope for the future of Home Planet Fund?

Masego: I hope for it to grow into a hundred-million-dollar fund.

Let me remind once again that only one percent of climate funding gets to Indigenous peoples. If we’re able to change this, the scale and the need in the field is massive, yet the potential for Indigenous peoples to actually curb the climate crisis is also quite significant.

We need to get more funders on board. People who care about Indigenous people’s land initiatives. People who care about going to the heart of the structural drivers of the climate crisis. People who want to deal with inequality and put justice at the heart of the transformation and transition that we need at this time.

If we are to seriously address these things, it is funds like Home Planet Fund that we need to be investing in.