Source: The Conversation – UK – By Damien Short, Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Reader in Human Rights, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Three environmental defenders – people who take action against the exploitation of natural resources – are murdered or disappeared somewhere in the world every week. The latest report by Global Witness, an NGO that investigates environmental and human rights abuses, has recorded more than 2,250 such cases since 2012.
The vast majority of the 146 land and environmental defenders killed in 2024, according to the report, were murdered in Latin America. Many were opposing large-scale mining, logging or agribusiness projects.
Colombia recorded the highest number of deaths, with 48 defenders killed across the country. But Guatemala proved the most dangerous country per capita, with 20 killings that year. Indigenous people and small-scale farmers in Latin America are particularly exposed. Their lives and livelihoods place them in direct conflict with extractive and criminal interests.
Afro-descendant communities there face the same elevated risk. Many, including Brazil’s Quilombola communities, hold collective ancestral territories and have safeguarded forests and rivers for generations. This custodianship makes them targets.
Women accounted for approximately 10% of victims in 2024, with cases concentrated in Mexico. And multiple attacks killed entire families, including children, suggesting systematic intimidation rather than isolated violence.
Wars and climate change are inextricably linked. Climate change can increase the likelihood of violent conflict by intensifying resource scarcity and displacement, while conflict itself accelerates environmental damage. This article is part of a series, War on climate, which explores the relationship between climate issues and global conflicts.
In a conflict-affected context, or a situation where information is tightly controlled, killings and disappearances are hard to document. Families and witnesses also often stay silent for fear of reprisals. Impunity compounds the problem.
The Global Witness report notes that in Colombia, where environmental defenders have been at risk for decades, only 5% of killings since 2002 have resulted in convictions. Without justice, deterrence is absent, and cycles of violence continue.
Violence against environmental defenders also persists because it works. Removing a community leader, for example, can disrupt resistance for months or years. For corporations, defending against a lawsuit that arises due to violence against environmental defenders costs less than losing a mining concession. And for governments dependent on resource revenues, silencing critics preserves foreign investment.
According to the Global Witness report, nearly one-third of the murders in 2024 were linked to criminal networks. State security forces were directly implicated in others. This dual threat of criminal violence and official complicity is enabled in part by a shrinking ability for people to participate freely in public life.
Civicus, an alliance of civil society organisations that works to strengthen citizen action and civil rights globally, rates more than half of the countries where defenders were killed as “repressed” or “closed”. This means the authorities actively restrict freedoms of association, assembly and expression.
Violence is predictable in such environments. Defenders face not only physical attacks but also criminalisation, harassment and strategic lawsuits designed to exhaust resources and silence dissent. Ecuador demonstrates how quickly this repression can escalate.
In September 2025, the government charged people protesting fuel subsidy cuts and mining expansion with terrorism and froze the bank accounts of dozens of environmental activists without warning. Efraín Fueres, an Indigenous land defender, was shot and killed by security forces during the protests.
The Ecuadorian government is also moving to rewrite the country’s constitution, the world’s only charter recognising nature’s intrinsic rights, ostensibly to combat drug trafficking. But defenders say the real aim is to eliminate legal barriers to extractive industries.
Regional protection
Regional protection mechanisms do exist. But they remain incomplete. The Escazú agreement, a binding treaty signed in 2018 covering Latin America and the Caribbean, requires that states guarantee public access to environmental information, ensure meaningful participation in decisions and actively protect defenders.
Eighteen of the region’s 33 states have ratified the agreement. In April 2024, parties also adopted an action plan that includes free legal aid for defenders, legal training and monitoring through to 2030.
Whether Escazú can reduce killings depends on implementation. Brazil and Guatemala, both high-risk countries where defenders face lethal threats, have not ratified the treaty. Without participation from the deadliest jurisdictions, regional frameworks offer limited protection.
Protection mechanisms frequently fail, not because they are poorly designed but because they operate within systems that structurally favour extractive industries. Police assigned to protect defenders may be drawn from the same units that secure mining sites or suppress protests.
Prosecutors tasked with investigating attacks often depend on governments whose economic prospects rely on the very projects defenders oppose. Judges hearing cases against corporations, for example, may face political pressure when ruling against major investors. Around half of judges in Latin America are political appointees.
Mining and logging companies also fund local employment, infrastructure and sometimes entire regional economies. This creates dependencies that make meaningful accountability nearly impossible. Even well-intentioned protection schemes cannot compensate for the fact that defending land often means obstructing projects that generate revenue for underfunded state institutions.
There is also a critical legal gap at the international level. When severe environmental destruction occurs during peacetime, existing law struggles to hold individuals accountable.
The International Court of Justice addresses state responsibility but cannot prosecute individuals. And while the International Criminal Court prosecutes genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression, environmental harm outside armed conflict falls beyond its reach.
A growing coalition led by Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa is urging recognition of ecocide as a fifth international crime under the Rome Statute. The proposed definition, developed by an independent expert panel in 2021, would criminalise “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge of a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment”.
This would create personal criminal liability for individuals in positions of authority whose decisions lead to mass environmental harm. The theory is that when individual decision-makers face prosecution risk, projects relying on violence and intimidation become personally dangerous to authorise.
Ecocide law would not replace existing regulation or regional treaties but would serve as a backstop when harm reaches catastrophic scale. For defenders, the promise is accountability that reaches beyond hired security to the individuals who profit from or politically enable destruction.
People will always stand up for the places that sustain them. If environmental defenders can operate without fear, everyone benefits. Protecting environmental defenders is not idealism, it is the most pragmatic investment a civilisation can make.
Damien Short is a member of the Green party in the UK.
– ref. Environmental defenders are being killed for protecting our future – the law needs to catch up – https://theconversation.com/environmental-defenders-are-being-killed-for-protecting-our-future-the-law-needs-to-catch-up-266396
