Defenders of the Earth

During Global Exchanges week, Ali Hines spoke Wednesday afternoon. Her subject, ‘Defending the Defenders of the Earth’. Between 2002 and 2013, 908 people were killed for environmental activism. In 2017 alone, 207 people were killed, a year deadlier than any on record.

She spoke about illegal logging in Cambodia where environmental defenders are under threat of blackmail, violent attacks, death threats, sexual harassment and are being killed for defending their land and campaigning against the logging projects.The police and military are involved in these killings and the companies involved have government complicity. 24 Cambodian defenders were killed in 2017.

Berta Cáceres, a political activist who campaigned to protect the land rights of indigenous people, was murdered in 2016, almost a year after she’d won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work campaigning. She’d been protesting the building of the Agua Zarca dam, being built by a Honduran company DESA with funding from the Dutch development bank FMO.

Cáceres and the defenders in Cambodia are not the only people who have lost their lives. In 2017, 57 defenders were killed in Brazil, 48 in the Philippines and of the 17 killed in Africa, 12 were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Global Witness are campaigning in defence of these environmental defenders, recording all loss of life in defence of the environment and pushing for the voices and stories of these environmental defenders to be heard.

For more information visit Global Witness. 


Amelie Rowlands