Risk Without Values: Including Indigenous Perspectives in Climate Risk Assessments

Climate risk assessments (CRAs) increasingly acknowledge Indigenous communities as disproportionately exposed to climate change, yet they rarely engage Indigenous perspectives as distinct ways of understanding risk. In a thematic review of CRAs self-submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) by English-speaking international cities, we examined how Indigenous perspectives, values, and worldviews are represented. Although many reports recognized unequal exposure, few addressed the structural sources of inequity or differences in how risk, consequence, and adaptation are conceptualized. Indigenous knowledge and sociocultural dimensions were typically incorporated within prevailing technocratic frameworks rather than recognized as alternative risk framings. As a result, Indigenous perspectives were translated into dominant institutional paradigms instead of shaping the conceptual foundations of assessment itself. These findings suggest that procedural inclusion is insufficient. Meaningful engagement requires climate risk frameworks capable of accommodating relational, place-based, and Indigenous understandings of risk, rather than subsuming them within existing models.