Picture : Ned Tapa (Māori Community Leader) embraces Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca Nation) in the UNFCCC COP30 Blue Zone, November 2025
Think-Film’s socio-political impact campaign aimed to rewrite climate action through co-governance and regeneration, and helped shift thinking from nature as a resource to nature as a subject in top-level climate policy dialogues :
- COP30 Blue Zone Resilience Hub panel event with the Global Alliance on Rights of Nature (GARN) and Women’s Environment and Climate Action Network (WECAN) positioned the film behind rights of nature as a critical legal and ethical framework for national-level climate solutions.
- Sample rights of nature policy language promoted by leading civil society groups urged governments to embed co-governance with Indigenous and local communities into national climate action plans and implementation, and uniquely provided a concrete way for rights of nature to be embedded in binding policy text.
- Panel-inspired cartoons created and shared by influential climate cartoonist Rohan Chakravarty (@green_humour) powerfully helped I Am The River, The River Is Me penetrate the wider COP30 dialogue, and reach 30k+ audiences outside the COP arena.
- Elevating protagonist Ned Tapa and the film demonstrated the importance of inclusion and participation at a critical moment when Indigenous communities are excluded from climate negotiations and under threat globally. In a COP characterised by Indigenous exclusion, our event stood out as bringing a collaborative approach and demand to the policy arena.
Celebrating Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration valuably broadened the scope of what it means to be a champion for nature, and laid key groundwork for long-term impact legacy : re-positioning of nature as an active participant in climate change responses, positive investment into biodiversity and ecosystem protection, each country developing a nature co-governance approach that works for their context and culture.
