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

Home Planet Fund: Of all funding available for working against environmental degradation, one percent or less goes to Indigenous led work addressing nature based solutions for frontline communities. How is Home Planet Fund different from this phenomenon?

Ayisha Siddiqa: The majority of funding flows through large NGOs and multilateral institutions that end up defining metrics that are more based on global north metrics. These frameworks strip nature based solutions of their political and cultural context, and they turn living ecosystems, entire harbors of life, into metrics like carbon accounting tools and so on and so forth. Like you were saying, one of the reasons why one percent or less of the funding actually goes to Indigenous peoples doing this work is because we have contrived metrics for what we think are nature based solutions, as opposed to funding the people who are themselves the nature based solution.

Home Planet Fund is different because we are not trying to build a new system of how we’re going to measure the prosperity of nature. Instead, we are helping Indigenous people and local communities who already have that knowledge. So many other institutions refer to this as peripheral, or like it is an alternative approach. But we are actually putting that approach at the center of taking care of nature the way they have already been doing for generations. It is for this reason that 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is within Indigenous lands. So we are helping propagate what is already successful.

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 is 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?

Ayisha: I think the entire environmental movement is built on a kind of lie. The lie is that protecting nature means removing people from it, and that is why conservation has become a tool for colonialism. It’s become a tool for forced removals and erasure of entire cultures and Indigenous governance. Some of the most intact systems on Earth, which are not pristine in the definition of what the west considers outside of themselves, because wilderness and the natural world, for some odd reason, in the West, is considered outside of the human realm. In Indigenous systems, natural systems are part of their society and their being, and that’s why they have been able to steward it and protect it for generations.

We are not protecting nature. We are nature defending itself. If people truly understood that land and people are not separate, that this is our home, that we belong here, and  not just Indigenous peoples, but all of humanity, and we have a duty to protect it, I think we would have a more inclusive approach to conservation.

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 global environmental degradation?

Ayisha: It’s so simple to me, in the sense of, because they’ve been doing it so long before there were these environmental crises. The current science that we have, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports and the biodiversity assessments, continuously show that Indigenous managed lands experience less degradation and deforestation. Instead they thrive. There’s more diversity in the vegetation and there’s more diversity in the species of plants.

They don’t have monocrops or mono ecosystems. This is one of the reasons why the lack of biodiversity is endangering the world. We’ve reduced the variety of so many species of plants and animals, yet it is the variety that helps them thrive. So they’re not relying on abstract models of metrics. They’re working with nature as it adapts, as it changes, and with place based knowledge. Each of these are so specific, and land has a seasonal memory, and there’s a spiritual responsibility that also plays into it. I know, at least for my people and my grandparents, they knew their little plot of land like the back of their hand. This is due to memory and actually adapting with the land, not trying to force it to be what you want to be.

Indigenous knowledge is a complete worldview, and in order for Indigenous solutions to thrive, they cannot be forced into western constructs.

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

Ayisha: It’s very loaded for me. I sit in so many different intersections. I’m a young Muslim, Indigenous woman who comes from my class background. I don’t talk about it often, but I come from generational poverty, poverty that was forced on us in ways that were about complete annihilation of my people, our values, and our domestic systems. It is a miracle that I am where I am because of all that. Those forces worked against me from being there. But either by chance or destiny, I ended up shifting from protesting outside of the UN to working and advising the highest official in the United Nations. I’ve sat in climate negotiations. I’ve worked on the text that has become policy. At a young age, I’ve grown up in the halls of diplomacy and negotiation.

I’ve grown up in UN halls, and have been in these spaces where people speak of Indigenous people as case studies, as abstractions, and not as human beings who carry out the work of conservation and environmental protection. There was a time where people didn’t even know the geographic location of where I come from. There was a time where the government didn’t recognize my people because they believed we were too small, we’re too poor, we’re not technical enough to lead. But I’ve watched those same communities organize international campaigns to change the world order. The reason why we have the language that we do, a loss and damage fund, conservation plans, and all these technical terms that are now being used for objective metrics, is because of us. The reason why we have the world fighting so hard to protect nature and biodiversity is because our people have been doing it for free for generations, and we didn’t ask for compensation, not even once.

So it’s important for me to be part of this project. I don’t want this to be another version of people just giving money to Indigenous peoples because they are a means to an end of protecting Planet Earth. This is about Indigenous people helping other Indigenous people, and working with shared goals and shared ethos, ethics, and values. 

As the youngest member of this board, I’m part of a generation that is experiencing so many crises. So being able to sit in a place where I see how millions of dollars of funds can tangibly help people is extremely empowering. There is power in moving money in a way that has long, lasting effects.

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

Ayisha: I would like Home Planet Fund to become a center of gravity for ecological finance and Indigenous prosperity. Money is power, and I hope that we, through this work, redistribute some of that power. We are standing hand in hand with the land defenders by virtue of doing this work, and we are working to save things that are on the verge of extinction. And by that I mean not just biodiversity, humans, who are also facing the possibility of extinction. If cultures can stay alive for another generation, we don’t know how much that impact is going to be. We can’t measure it right now. But I’m very confident that it’s going to have impacts for generations to come.