Climate, Country, and Our Future

Climate, Country, and Our Future is a knowledge paper produced by First Nations Affairs (FNA) in collaboration with Celeste Ackerly.

It is the culminating resource of a First Nations Peer Learning & Support Community convened by FNA, which brought together representatives from Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) working at the intersection of culture, environment, and climate action. The learning community focused on embedding cultural governance in climate decision-making, building organisational capability in climate-related programs, and supporting ACCOs in rural and remote areas to strengthen community wellbeing through climate-aligned initiatives.

This paper synthesises findings from three national workshops held between October 2025 and February 2026 with members of Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs). Participants were from Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and New South Wales, spanning remote, rural, and regional contexts.

The findings describe what First Nations communities are already doing in climate governance, the barriers that limit their ability to lead on their own terms, and what needs to change.

Four consistent themes emerged across the series. First, the structural conditions facing ACCOs in policy fragmentation, extractive engagement models, under-resourced reporting requirements, and the bypassing of cultural authority as central to climate governance failure. Second, communities are already doing climate work. Cultural land management, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and on-Country ecological practice constitute active and ongoing climate governance. These contributions are largely invisible to the funding and policy systems that claim to support First Nations climate leadership. Third, current data systems extract from communities without reciprocity. Deficit-framed measurement, the commodification of Traditional Ecological Knowledge without consent, and administrative reporting burdens consume organisational capacity that would otherwise go toward Country care. Fourth, wellbeing as communities described it as being relational, ecological, and grounded in cultural continuity, has no adequate counterpart in the metrics that currently govern climate program design and evaluation.