War, climate change and AI: What’s at stake at this year’s UN Indigenous forum – CP24
April 20, 2026
Hundreds of delegates are arriving at the United Nations this week for the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous peoples. But they arrive against an increasingly hostile global backdrop, facing an artificial intelligence boom driving new extraction on ancestral lands, a U.S. administration that has made it increasingly difficult for Global South delegates to secure visas to attend, and the twin challenges of climate change and green energy projects that have frequently run afoul of Indigenous land rights.
This year’s United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is focused on the grim topic of survival in the midst of war, with its official theme “Ensuring Indigenous Peoples’ health, including in the context of conflict.” Experts emphasize that Indigenous peoples already face health inequities from colonialism and climate change, and these harms are compounded by armed conflicts and militarization that risk ecological degradation and further displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Experts say that health for Indigenous peoples is directly tied to the environment, land, and sovereignty, and can’t be siloed into clinical discussions about medicine or public health. Warfare isn’t the only concern — advocates are seeing the extraction of critical minerals for the green transition drive Indigenous rights violations, and are echoing a long-standing call to make climate financing directly available to their communities, instead of through state or foreign intermediaries.
