Why aren’t countries reporting environmental defender killings?

December 19, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By Carole Excell and Eva Hershaw, World Resources Institute (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

It’s been nearly 10 years since Chut Wutty, an environmental investigator and activist from Cambodia, was murdered while trying to halt an illegal logging operation.

His death prompted widespread indignation and inspired the civil society organization Global Witness to begin documenting the killing of land and environmental defenders worldwide. This led to the publication of “Deadly Environment,” in 2014, a landmark report that would become an annual account of killings against such activists worldwide. In its first report, Global Witness noted that killings were “notoriously under-reported” by governments.

A year later, in 2015, the question was taken up by the United Nations, which adopted Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 to achieve peace, justice and transparent institutions. The framework included a specific benchmark — indicator 16.10.1 — calling on countries to monitor killings of all human rights defenders and protect them.

But in the six years since the SDGs were approved, violence perpetrated against human rights defenders, specifically land and environmental defenders, has continued unabated. In fact, despite growing international attention, the overwhelming majority of governments have failed to take meaningful steps to better protect them.

Governments aren’t tracking and reporting violence against environmental defenders

For years, land and environmental defenders have served as our first line of defense against the destruction of vital natural resources, livelihoods and territories that have mitigated an impending climate disaster. They have exercised their fundamental rights to challenge companies, governments and private actors who have driven destruction of the water, land, biodiversity and climate on which we all depend.

Their crucial contribution has made environmental activists an unequalled target for violence, yet states have failed to monitor their situation in a meaningful and systematic way.

The recent Crucial Gap report, released by the Alliance for Land Indigenous and Environmental Defenders (ALLIED coalition), of which WRI is a member, details the concerning extent to which official data on land and environmental defenders is missing.

Since 2015, only 14 countries* have reported any cases of violence against human rights defenders to the U.N., whether through Voluntary National Reviews — progress reports, presented by states at the High Level Political Forum — or other mechanisms. Of the 162 countries that submitted Voluntary National Reviews since 2015, just three countries — Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Palestine, fewer than 2% — indicated that at least one human rights defender had been killed or attacked. Seven countries reported no cases of violence, while 94% of countries did not report at all.

The low numbers presented by governments at the High Level Political Forum comes in stark contrast to the widespread violence against these defenders, well documented by civil society groups and non-profits. In its recently published report, Last Line of Defence, Global Witness reported 227 land and environmental defenders murdered in 2020 alone, the highest number of lethal attacks ever recorded. Front Line Defenders, reporting cases from the Human Rights Defenders Memorial, noted that 331 human rights defenders, including land and environmental defenders, were killed during the same period.

The U.N. has also recognized the extent of violence beyond that reported by governments. In his 2020 SDG Progress Report, the Secretary-General stated that the U.N. had verified at least 1,940 killings of defenders from 81 between 2015 and 2019 — cases that largely came from civil society reporting. The dataset published by the U.N. remains limited to killings (and enforced disappearances) of human rights defenders by region and sex. The agency does not release country-level data, nor specific figures for land and environmental defenders, ethnicity or affiliation with indigenous groups.

For years, civil society has been working to cover this crucial reporting gap, but they cannot stand in for the state. Ultimately, it is the government that bears the responsibility for guaranteeing fundamental rights to all citizens, protecting them from harm, and upholding binding commitments made in regional and global human rights mechanisms.

How to better document violence against environmental defenders

There are, however, some glimmers of hope.

A small number of national human rights institutes and government agencies — in cooperation with national statistical offices, and the U.N.’s Human Rights Office (OHCHR) — are working to bolster national-level data collection, further encouraged by the Global Action Plan set forth by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutes. The U.N. is supporting this work in many countries, but progress remains limited.

In the meantime, civil society continues to organize their data collection and explore ways to further support the construction of better national datasets. The ALLIED Data Working Group represents a number of these organizations, such as CEMDA in Mexico, ANGOC’ in Indonesia, UDEFEGUA in Guatemala and CINEP in Colombia, though many others could be mentioned.

Such monitoring initiatives have been central to efforts to protect activists in many countries, but this is ultimately an obligation that must be assumed by the state to fulfil their SDG requirements. Unless they commit to monitoring violence against human rights defenders, states will continue to fail to understand the root causes of such violence and will not be able to build the evidence-based policies needed to prevent further violence.

Among its findings, the Crucial Gap report recommends five specific actions, relevant to state and intergovernmental bodies, and to data collectors broadly:

States must develop and sustain mechanisms that collect and report data on attacks on environmental and human rights defenders.
States should develop and support national human rights institutes to be independent, authoritative monitoring bodies of attacks.
States and reporting agencies must recognize and protect the important role played by civil society data collectors, providing for their meaningful participation in monitoring processes and acknowledging their contributions, as well as the risk they incur for the work they do.
Reporting bodies — including National Human Rights Institutes, custodian agencies, treaty bodies, and other data collectors — must make the work of particularly vulnerable groups, including land, environmental and indigenous human rights defenders, more visible.
The international community must work towards a global, harmonized database of attacks and killings to capture the verified cases violence against land and environmental activists (and human rights defenders, more broadly), building on the work of ALLIED and others.

In order to better protect land and environmental defenders and to build policies that foster an enabling environment, the state — not civil society alone — must be monitoring, reporting on and ultimately responding to their situation. In many cases, we see government discrediting civil society monitoring work while they fail to protect defenders themselves.

Until national governments commit resources to build monitoring capacity and develop mechanisms to document violence against defenders, the message sent to civil society and the global community will be the same: that stopping violence against activists is not a priority and, as a result, it’s not monitored.

Without a state-led commitment to stop this violence, such attacks will continue.

In the nearly 10 years since Chut Wutty died, thousands of defenders across the world have lost their lives in defense of the land, environment and indigenous territories. It is time for governments to step up, assume their responsibilities, and in the next 10 years, do a better job of defending their defenders.

Endnote:

*Four additional countries – Colombia, Kenya, Mexico and the Philippines – reported data directly to OHCHR, the custodian of indicator 16.10.1.

Creating a new relationship with nature through a ‘stewardship economy’

December 5, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

*Small forestry in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Juan Carlos Huayllapuma/CIFOR*

New approach reshapes markets by putting stewards of nature at the center.

By Ravi Prabhu, Steven Lawry, John Colmey, Forests News (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold, American conservationist and forester

On the islands that lie between Alaska and Russia, ancient tradition mandates that the native Aleut people will not pick a blueberry without ceremony or prayer. In 18th century colonial India, 363 Bishnoi men and women died at the hands of foresters while clinging to their trees to save them from being turned into timber, inspiring the term ‘tree hugger.’

While perhaps not the first that comes to mind, one word to describe these acts is, by definition, ‘stewardship’: the conducting, supervising, or managing of something, especially the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.

Echoing Leopold and others who have come before, we at CIFOR-ICRAF, our partners, and the growing global community invested in re-examining the relationship between people and nature are ascribing a contemporary meaning to the concept of ‘stewardship.’ In this understanding, stewardship is the respect we exercise in using nature to produce the goods and services necessary to meet the needs of the world’s 8 billion people as well as those of the environment. It’s clear we must get away from our abusive and purely extractive relationship with nature, and stewardship embodies a responsible and caring relationship with the natural world to ensure collective, planetary well-being and health.

Who are the stewards?

Charles Hugh Stevenson , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — *Drying Salmon at Unalaska, Alaska. Credit: Charles Hugh Stevenson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

As illustrated in the examples at the beginning of this article, the notion of stewardship of nature is as old as human culture. Today, we think of environmental stewardship as inclusive, equitable, place-based, and focused on resilient, prosperous, and sustainable development.

We can think of stewardship of land in particular as a deliberate and informed combination of solicitude, foresight and skill – a marriage of practice and ethics – that has tangible impacts in landscapes. Present-day movements around regenerative agriculture, natural farming and agroecology, buoyed by attention to gender, ethnic and age equality, are examples of the modern embodiment of stewardship practices at forest, farm and community levels.

Land stewards, then, are not simply owners or producers of commodities (food, timber, fiber, etc.), as water stewards are not just those making use of water resources. Yes, stewards are engaged in their landscapes, but in ways that uphold a ‘duty of care’ – an ethos of responsibility for all the ecosystem services the land currently provides, as well as the integrity of its history and, importantly, its future. This, of course, takes hold best when stewards, as individuals or communities, hold rights to their land and waters, giving them the legal assurance to invest in the longevity of their natural resources.

Supporting these directly engaged stewards are larger players, such as governments, businesses, educational and research institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the slew of others that recognize the societal benefit of environmental stewardship, which fuels their relationship with landscapes and their caretakers with the same mindset and approach of stewardship – in whatever form that may be, from policy support and project implementation, to knowledge and site-specific research, to innovative finance. Establishment of national parks, climate negotiations and public awareness campaigns are all forms of stewardship when executed well, but ideally their missions ultimately tie back to advancing the efforts of the people spending their days working to sustainably benefit from and protect our natural resources.

Stewardship also involves fluid, productive dialogues between all these actors to improve the policies, consumption patterns and behavior change needed to realize sustainable benefits from nature for livelihoods.

Market influence

Botanic Garden Meise wild coffee nursery in Yangambi - DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR — *Botanic Garden Meise wild coffee nursery in Yangambi – DRC. Photo by Axel Fassio/CIFOR*

The market economy and balance sheets require land to be considered as a fixed asset, which in turn implies that market mechanisms can drive sustainable outcomes. But it is this strictly utilitarian view of land and nature that drives their commodification – and the crushing environmental crises that result.

A primary part of the problem is that markets have no realistic way of pricing agricultural commodities so that they bear the full cost of what it takes to ensure land and nature are resilient and able to heal themselves. (Embedded in this is the aforementioned challenge that, in many countries, and especially in forest-reliant communities, insecure or unclear property and tenure rights act as deterrents to investments in stewardship.)

It is no wonder that forests are being replaced by monoculture oil palm, cacao or plantation timber. Even where they exist, the niche markets for high-priced ‘fully costed’ products are far too thin to offer people decent livelihoods and the means to sustain their original landscapes. Farmers in these scenarios are reduced to agricultural factory workers, for lack of a better term.

Over time, the results of these powerful and unsustainable market pressures on direct land users – perhaps would-be stewards under different conditions – result in rapidly degrading land and the ensuing cascade of effects: massive increases in greenhouse gases, disappearing biodiversity, polluted and vanishing water resources, and ever intensifying forms of agriculture that are increasingly dependent on ecologically and economically expensive inputs. This is accelerated by the erosion of social externalities, such as democratic institutions, livelihoods, rights and nutrition.

Turning point

*The women of Perigi Village travelled along 500 m of rubber gardens while carrying puruns to get to their place. Photo by Rifky/CIFOR*

We clearly need a change in direction. We believe the answer lies in a shift to a stewardship economy, which would operate both within and outside markets as we know them, supporting, recruiting and connecting stewards, nature and the broader economy through an equitable and affordable system of incentives and rewards that would assure the future of life as we know it. It would aim to fairly reward farmers, forest users and other ‘landscape architects’ for the produce they deliver to markets. It would also see them profit from the services and values they conserve and restore – clean air, removal of greenhouse gases, clean water, biodiversity, and places of spirituality, worship and history.

As for pricing, commodities in a stewardship economy would bear their fair – but not necessarily full – share of the true costs of their production and trade. This means a kilo of rice, wheat or maize would not be priced out of the grasp of poor people. The difference between these fair and full prices would be paid outside market mechanisms, such as through ‘conditional cash transfers’ that are a recognized mechanism for performance-based payments, in this case used for the delivery of services beyond the produced commodities.

In this way, stewards are not forced to commodify their landscapes, as they are rewarded for allowing their lands to continue in health. The two core pillars of the stewardship economy, then, might well be the total income from fair commodity prices and stewardship dividends – delivered through conditional cash transfers, for instance – for service delivery.

A major task, then, is co-designing the mechanisms and building the institutional architecture that help determine both the fair and full costs, translate the fair costs into market prices, and ensure the equitable difference – what could be called the ‘stewardship dividend’ – is efficiently put into the pockets of stewards.

At the same time, the individual rights of stewards and their communities to land and natural resources would need to be taken into account. Innovative finance and investment arrangements, including peer-to-peer finance systems, would have to be mobilized to achieve this.

We believe almost all the tools and elements of a stewardship economy exist already, in one form or the other; what has been missing has been an effort to put the parts together into a greater whole. Our intention is to explore this assembling in the context of the stewardship of farms, forests and terrestrial landscapes.

Modern forms of agriculture, forest and land management have divorced people from nature. People have been turned into laborers and nature into commodities. ‘Stewardship economics’ is the turning point we propose for a more resilient, equitable and optimistic future. Nature is more than products; it also provides immeasurable services. People are not just producers; they are also caretakers. It is high time we recognize and reward this, and we will all benefit as a result.

Stewardship Economy

An equitable system of exchange that rewards those managing nature sustainably for the goods and services derived from those landscapes – which often feed into markets to meet the needs of the global population – while recognizing and promoting the rights of all people to food, water, nutrition, health, voice and a decent livelihood. Coupled with pillars of the landscape approach and democracy, it builds upon classic notions of ‘stewardship’ in a modern context: a deliberate and informed combination of solicitude, foresight and skill – a marriage of practice and ethics – that brings visible and tangible impacts in landscapes and ecosystems. It is underpinned by economic principles and financial mechanisms that will ensure fair and equal benefits and market inclusion of land managers, while meeting consumers’ pricing needs. Shifting fully to a stewardship economy, which exists today in facets and fragments, can swiftly unblock pathways to a more sustainable future for a planet in crisis.This research forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, which is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors.

Products tied to legal and illegal deforestation may be banned in the European Union

November 21, 2021 / activist360 / Leave a comment

By Maxwell Radwin, Mongabay (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Proposed legislation in the European Union would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to legal or illegal deforestation.
The law would focus on the industries with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture.
Conservation groups have expressed satisfaction with the first-of-its kind legislation but are concerned about the lack of protections for Indigenous peoples, as well as carbon-rich ecosystems like savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

The European Union is considering an ambitious new proposal that would regulate imports of products linked to global forest loss.

The law would require suppliers to prove their products haven’t contributed to deforestation, whether legal or illegal. If passed, it would force producers to raise their environmental standards or risk losing out on a market of 27 countries and 450 million people.

“Europe is finally taking steps against the deforestation that it drives, and it is doing it not by placing the burden on consumers, but on the big companies that produce these products,” Nico Muzi, Europe director of environmental advocacy group Mighty Earth, told Mongabay. “If we want change, we need to regulate the industries that cause deforestation.”

The proposal, introduced by the European Commission earlier this week, gives special focus to products with some of the most egregious environmental track records, including soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa and coffee, as well as leather, chocolate and furniture. Should the proposal pass, importers will have to meet stricter traceability measures, such as sharing geographic coordinates of where their products originated.

It also establishes a benchmarking system to determine which countries are the most at risk of deforestation, and pledges 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to help them develop more sustainable forest management programs.

The EU predicts the proposal will cut at least 31.9 million metric tons of annual carbon emissions and save around 3.2 billion euros ($3.6 billion).

“We must protect biodiversity and fight climate change not only in the EU, but globally, and our consumption should not contribute to global deforestation, which is a major cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the European commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries.

Between 1990 and 2020, an estimated 420 million trees were lost to deforestation worldwide, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Agriculture is responsible for nearly 90% of that, with cattle ranching being the biggest contributor.

Globally, Europe is the second-largest importer of products associated with deforestation, according to a 2021 WWF report. In recent years, trade to the region has led to around 16% of global forest loss.

*A herd of cattle on a ranch in Colombia. Image by Rhett Butler, Mongabay.com*

The deforestation proposal is part of a package of recently announced environmental initiatives that include more rigorous regulations for waste and waste trafficking, as well as improved soil protections to increase carbon storage in agricultural areas, fight desertification and restore degraded land, the European Commission said in a statement.

“If we expect more ambitious climate and environmental policies from partners, we should stop exporting pollution and supporting deforestation ourselves,” Sinkevičius said, adding, “With these proposals, we are taking our responsibility and walking the talk by lowering our global impact on pollution and biodiversity loss.”

Other countries, coming out of the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, have announced similar plans to clean up supply chains. Last week, the U.K. passed a law banning products linked to illegal deforestation. In October, U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill that holds importers accountable for forest loss.

However, unlike the European proposal, neither of those measures targets legal drivers of deforestation.

Loopholes and missed opportunities

While the EU’s proposal takes ambitious steps to protect forests, it falls short when it comes to other types of carbon-rich ecosystems, some environmental groups pointed out. For example, the proposal’s current language would exclude protection of many savannas, wetlands and peatlands.

In addition to storing massive amounts of carbon, these ecosystems prevent soil erosion and flooding, and help provide clean drinking water.

“There’s simply no need to destroy native ecosystems to make room for commercial crops,” Mighty Earth’s Muzi said. “There are more than 1 billion acres [400 million hectares] of previously degraded land where all future agricultural needs can easily be met without threatening the world’s last ecosystems.”

Mongabay has reported extensively on the rapid disappearance of wetlands and peatlands due to palm oil, timber and other agricultural commodities, as well as governments’ continued omission of these landscapes from legislation.

The EU’s proposal also fails to include special protections for Indigenous communities, which often serve as stewards of the environment. Instead, it relies on the local laws of the exporting countries despite the fact they’re often weak or ignored.

Muzi said he expects officials to close this loophole by including international human rights standards in the proposal’s language. And because proposals by the European Commission are often heavily revised, he expects many of the other loopholes to be addressed, too.

“Usually, Europe sets the standard for environmental regulations,” he said. “It is often at the forefront. We expect other regions will follow.”