Partnering with California’s longstanding native tribes and restoring stewardship can bolster solutions to today’s climate challenges. We spoke to Geneva EB Thompson, Deputy Secretary for Tribal Affairs, who explained how traditional ecological knowledge can reduce risks of natural disasters while promoting biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
As climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, traditional land and water management approaches are proving insufficient to protect ecosystems and communities. Restoring tribal stewardship by re-establishing Indigenous leadership, returning ancestral lands, and applying Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) offers a holistic climate solution. By working with nature through practices like cultural fires, wetland restoration, and natural carbon capture, tribal stewardship builds ecosystem resilience, reduces wildfire and flood risks, and enhances natural carbon sequestration across California.
Before European colonization, Native communities managed California’s ecosystems for millennia through practices rooted in place-based TEK. Settler colonialism displaced those communities and severed TEK from ecosystem management. In California, this included the criminalization of cultural burning practices and the non-ratification of 18 negotiated federal treaties in the 1850s, which broke promises to reserve 7.5 million acres of permanent tribal homelands. Decades of fire suppression and environmental degradation have left forests overgrown with dry biomass and ecosystems vulnerable to hazards such as severe wildfires, flooding, and biodiversity loss.
To begin addressing these historical wrongs and build climate resilience, in March of 2026 the California Natural Resources Agency launched a policy aimed at restoring meaningful tribal stewardship across at least 7.5 million acres of land and coastal waters. The policy outlines three pathways:
The main advantage of tribal stewardship is its ability to proactively mitigate extreme climate risks and restore ecosystems. Low-intensity cultural burning clears out woody biomass and dry plant material, preventing severe fuel buildup and slowing down catastrophic wildfires. In water ecosystems, restoring native wetland species like tule beds slows down floodwaters, enhances groundwater infiltration, and stabilizes freshwater ecosystems. Similarly, restoration of coastal kelp forests protects critical natural carbon sinks while cooling ocean waters.
Likewise, facilitating tribal stewardship can promote Indigenous-led initiatives such as clean energy microgrids, which can provide surrounding rural communities with emergency power, shelter, and resources during climate-induced disasters. Ultimately, grounding land return targets in historical treaty obligations takes concrete, tangible steps toward truth, healing, and repairing historical injustices committed against Native communities.
A current constraint of implementing tribal stewardship at scale is the ongoing challenge of securing durable, long-term funding for land reacquisition and management, especially when relying on fluctuating state budget cycles or bond measures. Negotiating co-management agreements also presents deep administrative challenges, as navigating complex, siloed legal structures across federal, state, local, and private landowning entities requires significant time and institutional coordination.
Additionally, given that landscapes have suffered from severe degradation and artificial fire suppression, safely reintroducing controlled cultural practices requires intensive labor, resources, and careful planning to avoid runaway risks in overgrown forests. Finally, non-tribal government entities often struggle to integrate traditional knowledge because they aren’t designed to blend Indigenous expertise with their laws and policies.
Geneva EB Thompson views tribal stewardship not only as a conservation strategy, but as an essential framework for climate resilience and environmental justice. For her, empowering tribes to steward land and water ecosystems creates a positive ripple effect that yields healthier, safer, and more resilient communities for all Californians. She emphasizes that all of California is ancestral Indigenous territory, and that centering Native leadership and place-based expertise in ecosystem management is vital for addressing interconnected climate hazards.
Geneva EB Thompson is the Deputy Secretary for Tribal Affairs at the California Natural Resources Agency.
For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/approaching-climate-change-through-tribal-stewardship-with-geneva-eb-thompson/
Ethan: I’m Ethan Elkind, and you’re listening to Climate Break– climate solutions in a hurry. Today’s proposal? Supporting California Tribes to make the state more resilient to extreme weather events like wildfires and flooding through their stewardship of land and water. We spoke to Geneva EB Thompson, Deputy Secretary for Tribal Affairs at the California Natural Resources Agency.
Geneva: Cultural fire is a type of beneficial fire that is laid out on the ground to burn off woody biomass or other drier plant material, right? That builds up the resiliency of a landscape and slows down catastrophic fires.
Ethan: California long criminalized Indigenous land management practices like cultural fires, but now the state’s tribal stewardship policy aims to bring them back, and that extends to water ecosystems, too. Thompson highlights how restoring native wetland plants can protect communities from flooding.
Geneva: Tule beds are a great way of slowing water down and helping water sink back in. Tribes have known this for a while, right? They have been in relationship with them in a way that the tule can thrive. That expertise can be used to reduce flooding risk.
Ethan: Thompson says partnering with tribes to work with nature, such as through natural forms of carbon capture, is key to tackling climate challenges.
Geneva: We know kelp beds are critical as we think about cooling the ocean waters, sequestering carbon, and tribes have been relying on kelp beds off of their ancestral shores for a very long time. We need to think what plant communities, what animal communities are gonna be helpful in these climate solutions and that tribes know where they’ve historically been.
Ethan: To learn more about tribal stewardship policy, visit climatebreak.org.