The Permanent Forum recommends that the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, university research centres and relevant United Nations agencies conduct further studies on the impacts of climate change and climate change responses on indigenous peoples who are living in highly fragile ecosystems, such as low-lying coastal areas and small island States; semi-arid and arid lands and dry and sub-humid lands (grasslands); tropical and subtropical forests; and high mountain areas.
OHCHR, the secretariat of the Permanent Forum, ILO, the World Bank Group and other relevant United Nations entities, including United Nations country teams, should focus on increasing the understanding of indigenous peoples’ underlying material rights to land and the need to give material rights priority over process rights. These agencies should undertake analytical work on how the intensity and exclusivity criteria that are commonly encompassed in domestic property rights systems could be understood in the context of international human rights standards related to indigenous property rights.
The Permanent Forum calls on the Government of Canada to fully implement the recommendations emanating from its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Permanent Forum calls on the United States of America to formalize the establishment of a truth and reconciliation mechanism on the boarding school crisis.
In the discussion on reconciliation and intergenerational trauma, there was agreement that healing requires a return to culture and a relationship with the land. The Permanent Forum recommends that Governments support programmes led by indigenous peoples to address intergenerational trauma as a way of moving towards true reconciliation.