Time and time again, it’s been proven that Indigenous community leadership and involvement is crucial in the fight against climate change. Nearly half of the land under tribal government jurisdiction in Arizona, for example, is considered a “high preservation priority” by researchers. Indigenous groups could lead the way in Arizona and beyond when it comes to ethical stewardship.

The Indigenous community in Arizona has also done an incredible job challenging harmful developments proposed in areas even outside of their jurisdiction. As the Arizona Republic notes, many of the laws that took Native Americans away from sacred lands were meant to demonize and discriminate against them. The fact that tribes like the Havasupai must fight dangerous, carcinogenic developments like a proposed uranium mine points to the federal and state government’s shortcomings and highlights the generations-long inequity created by colonizers that continues to wreak havoc in the United States and beyond to this day. The study in Nature primarily asks the government to stop overlooking its own land but I know I’d personally want the powers that be to go a step further and truly commit to the term “climate justice” that is so cavalierly thrown around as a buzzword by the current administration. This is land justice. And it’s the only way forward if we want to have a fighting chance against climate change.

“If you look at it from a land justice perspective, we need to support a strengthening and healing of that relationship,” Erin Myers Madeira, director of the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities program for the Nature Conservancy, told Yale Environment in a recent article on the subject. “If you look at it practically, Indigenous people are the original stewards of all the lands and waters in North America, and there’s an extensive knowledge and management practices that date back millennia.”