What London Climate Week isn't talking about

London Climate Week arrives this year with a fresh sense of momentum. Renewable energy is growing at surprising speed. The new generation of youth movements is bringing a needed boost of optimism. More and more countries and organizations are interested in committing to a future free of fossil fuels. But there's a tension at the heart of climate action that’s not often discussed at these events. Some of the communities most at risk from the green transition are the ones least likely to be in the room: Indigenous people living in isolation or in the initial stages of contact.

For the past several months, Solutions Insights Lab has been interviewing dozens of experts in Indigenous protection: practitioners, advocates, researchers, and Indigenous leaders across South America and Indonesia. Our partner in this work is GTI-PIACI — the International Working Group of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact, who are known by the Spanish acronym PIACI — and this week they published our insights on the GTI-PIACI website.

PIACI refers to Indigenous peoples who live apart from broader society: some entirely, some recently and partially. The category covers a spectrum of situations, from communities that have had zero outside contact for generations to those in the early, fragile stages of encounter. What they share is a need for legal physical protection from unwanted intrusion, including exposure to diseases to which they have little immunity, and other threats that have often made contact catastrophic.

Their territories tend to be among the most intact forest ecosystems on the planet. This is not coincidence; it is the result of their generations of stewardship. The evidence is now clear that stronger Indigenous land rights produce lower deforestation rates, more stable ecosystems, better biodiversity outcomes.

And yet, as we heard again and again in our interviews, some of the most urgent new threats to these communities are being driven by climate solutions themselves. The minerals required for electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy infrastructure are concentrated in precisely the biologically intact and territorially vulnerable regions where isolated peoples live. Nickel mining for EV batteries is expanding rapidly into Indigenous territories in Indonesia. In South America, the same extraction-driven pressures that have threatened PIACI territories for decades are now arriving with green intentions.

This contradiction — the green transition as both an opportunity and a threat — runs through our findings. Climate and conservation agendas are increasingly recognizing PIACI rights, including, for the first time, within the COP30 just transition framework. But recognition in international forums and protection on the ground are different things. Governments often simultaneously endorse climate goals and permit activities that put isolated peoples' territories at risk.

Our interviewees told us that the most durable protection combines multiple strategies at once: community monitoring and documentation, legal advocacy, transnational collaboration, and supply-chain accountability that targets the economic drivers of extraction. Some organizations have traced commodities from deforested Indigenous territory through global supply chains into European markets, demonstrating that what gets bought in London is connected to what happens in the Amazon and Gran Chaco.

London Climate Week is a great opportunity to ask whether the transition we're building is actually protecting the communities whose forests we're counting on.

Photograph by Juan Arredondo

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Three Ways to Approach Protecting PIACI (Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact)

"Where there are transitional mineral deposits and isolated communities: no mining, period." — Daniel Aristizábal, GTI-PIACI

"Mapping is what proves they have the right to their forest. No one else is allowed to take their forest without permission." — Lenny Patty, AMAN Maluku

"We make connections between everyday products that people consume in the West and the impacts those products are having in the developing world, including the impacts on Indigenous peoples and local communities." — Sam Lawson, Earthsight