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Global ecocide law movement promises a sustainable tomorrow
The growing global momentum for an ecocide law reflects a heightened awareness of the imperative to protect the environment for future generations. As nations unite to combat ecocide, hope for a sustainable and secure future strengthens.
Netherlands proposes ecocide law
In the Netherlands, Member of Parliament Lammert van Raan of Partij voor de Dieren (Party for the Animals) has introduced a law proposal to criminalize ecocide. The proposal, which aims to hold individuals accountable for serious environmental damage caused by human actions or inaction, is currently undergoing a four-week public consultation period. If approved by Parliament, the bill will become law, reflecting the growing social opinion on the importance of protecting the environment. This move is seen as a significant step towards preventing ecocide globally, with various organizations, including Stop Ecocide NL and Stop Ecocide International, supporting the initiative.
OSCE calls for international ecocide law
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has made a groundbreaking endorsement, urging its participating States to incorporate ecocide as a concept in national and international law. This endorsement, part of the Final Declaration from the 30th Annual Session in Vancouver, highlights the rising concern over microplastic and nanoplastic pollution and calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions according to the Paris Agreement. Jojo Mehta of Stop Ecocide International welcomes this intervention, emphasizing that recognizing ecocide as a crime in both peacetime and conflict can effectively deter severe and long-term environmental harm.
Global Greens Congress backs ecocide law
At the Global Greens Congress in South Korea, representatives from Green Parties, Indigenous communities, civil society, and NGOs from around the world formally endorsed the establishment of an international crime of ecocide. The endorsement statement by the Global Greens emphasized the urgent need for legal recognition and a global framework to address ecocide. This move aims to shift attitudes, policy decisions, and cultural behavior toward protecting vital ecosystems and endangered species. The endorsement marks a collective effort to strengthen legal frameworks and accountability in environmental protection.
Kakhovka Dam destruction: A case of ecocide
In southern Ukraine, the breach of the Kakhovka Dam has caused devastating consequences for both humans and the environment. The ecological impacts of this disaster have been likened to “ecocide,” highlighting the gravity of the situation. Ukraine called on the international community to provide expertise and assistance to assess the full extent of the damage suffered. With the recognition that crimes of this scale require independent international investigations, Ukraine seeks cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). The incident underscores the urgency of recognizing ecocide as a standalone crime, applicable in both wartime and peacetime, to prevent severe and widespread environmental harm.
The global momentum behind the push for an ecocide law signifies the increasing awareness of the need to protect the environment and ensure the well-being of the planet for future generations. As nations and organizations come together to address ecocide, the hope for a sustainable and ecologically secure future grows stronger.
The number of people facing hunger in the world has risen by more than 122 million since 2019 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine and weather shocks, according to a new United Nations report.
It is estimated that 691 million to 783 million people lacked sufficient food in 2022, affecting 9.2% of the global population compared with 7.9% in 2019, the year before the pandemic began, according to the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2023 report, which is produced by five UN agencies.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) provide an annual update on the world’s progress towards ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition.
The 2023 report emphasized that the UN Sustainable Development Goal of creating a world free of hunger by 2030 risks failure if current trends continue. It is projected that almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished at the end of the decade.
“The latest SOFI report highlights the urgent need to reverse the trends that undermine the world’s ability to achieve the goal of zero hunger by 2030,” says Éliane Ubalijoro, Chief Executive Officer of the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF). “Trees, forests and agroforestry landscapes have a vital role to play in this process by helping address the interrelated challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change, food security, livelihoods and inequity.”
To help transform food systems, CIFOR-ICRAF is promoting the wide-scale adoption of agroecological approaches, including farmer-led strategies to increase tree cover and diversity across agricultural landscapes. And by providing evidence on how forests and trees contribute to people’s diets, it is raising awareness and influencing national policies to include forests and trees as part of national and local food systems.
‘’The SOFI 2023 report shows that in a world where regular crises become the new norm, increasing the resilience of agrifood systems is a priority,” says David Laborde, Director of the FAO Agrifood Economics Division (ESA). “Forestry has a key role to play in this system. The range of actions and opportunities is vast: from helping the regulation of water flows and mitigating the severity of heatwaves, to providing income diversification options and more robust integrated production systems.’’
While global hunger stabilized in 2022 alone, it continued to increase in some vulnerable countries, in particular in Africa. Seizing the opportunity provided by forests, either by rebuilding them in the Sahel region, or preserving their services in Central and Eastern Africa is part of reversing the hunger trend in these countries, Laborde says.
As it addresses five global challenges, CIFOR-ICRAF is committed to transforming food systems that are based on sustainable land management, equitable outcomes for Indigenous Peoples and local communities, as well as supply chains that rely on sound environmental practices and social inclusion.
Trees can make a major contribution to boosting the productivity of farming systems and the lives of rural communities, who provide most of the world’s food. CIFOR-ICRAF facilitates this process by helping farmers choose the right tree for the right place for the right purpose on their farms and then to manage them effectively.
“Agroecology enables farmers to grow food while preserving soil health and improving the resilience of food systems,” says Fergus Sinclair, Chief Scientist at CIFOR-ICRAF. “The world produces enough food to feed nearly twice the current population, yet millions of people are still hungry. A greater emphasis on agroecology, including reducing food loss and waste, would help policymakers tackle this worsening global food crisis.”
The 2023 SOFI report highlighted that agroecology has a role to play in ending hunger by the end of the decade while offering other benefits. At plot, farm and landscape scales, it can help increase farmers’ incomes, improve food security and nutrition, use water more efficiently and enhance nutrient recycling, as well as conserve biodiversity and provide other ecosystem services.
Agrifood systems will also need to be viewed beyond the traditional rural-urban divide, according to the UN agencies. Due to population growth, small and intermediate cities and rural towns are increasingly bridging the space between rural areas and large metropolises, creating both challenges and opportunities to ensure everyone has access to affordable healthy diets.
Forest carbon markets have a vital role to play in helping fund greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
When companies or individuals purchase credits to offset their carbon footprint, the money is often used to finance projects that are intended to also deliver environmental and social benefits on the ground in developing countries. This means that impacts on local environmental and social conditions from these projects need to be evaluated.
However, even evaluating the impact of forest carbon offset projects on emission reductions is a challenging task and involves a complex set of rules and requirements, which were subject to media scrutiny earlier this year. This is why reliable, verifiable accounting procedures and a consolidated methodology are needed to measure, report and verify changes in GHG emissions so that effective forest-based mitigation policies can be developed.
On 8 June 2023, a group of experts took part in a side event at the Bonn Climate Change Conference (SBSTA 58) to discuss ways of developing methods that satisfy the demand for high-integrity forest carbon credits, specifically from the REDD+ projects and programmes that have been operating on voluntary carbon markets.
The event was jointly organized by the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), the European Forestry Institute, and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
At CIFOR-ICRAF, forest carbon markets and projects are considered to have high integrity when they meet certain criteria, which are embedded in its research on the impact evaluation of REDD+ projects:
High-integrity forest carbon markets require realistic baseline data to assess the impact of REDD+ initiatives and establish additionality, meaning that emission reductions or removals wouldn’t have taken place without revenue from the sale of carbon credits. Furthermore, carbon credits should be discounted if they only postpone rather than permanently avoid emissions, and if emission reductions in one place lead to emission increases elsewhere – a concept known as carbon leakage.
“There is essentially a contract involved where some parties promise to reduce forest carbon emissions, and other parties promise to provide recognition, rewards, or compensation for that, so we need an accounting system to implement the contract,” said Erin Sills, a professor of forest economics at North Carolina State University and a CIFOR-ICRAF senior associate. “But we equally need an impact evaluation system set up to evaluate how much those contracts are actually helping the climate.”
During the session, Sills delivered a presentation that compared and contrasted methods for accounting systems and impact evaluations of REDD+ initiatives, illustrated by CIFOR-ICRAF’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+, which collected data from 150 villages in six countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The market should use impact evaluation studies to promote confidence in carbon offsetting as a viable mechanism for conservation as crediting standards evolve to be better and more forward looking, according to Sills.
Kevin Brown of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) presented the Forest Landscape Integrity Index, which integrates data on observed and inferred forest pressures and lost forest connectivity. Based on a collaboration between a range of universities, institutes and non-governmental organizations, the index has found that only 40 percent of the world’s forests have high integrity.
“REDD isn’t a utopia – it’s an emergency response,” Brown said in his presentation. “Questions of scale and speed are equal to integrity. New voluntary carbon market approaches dramatically advance the prospect for integrity at scale.”
Brown also outlined the importance of achieving impact at scale through a new consolidated REDD methodology, thereby removing cost and time barriers to project startup while increasing investor confidence in revenue projections.
Verra is a Washington-based organization that aims to provide quality assurance in voluntary carbon markets through its Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) programme. It is now developing a new REDD methodology to ensure the integrity of greenhouse gas accounting for individual projects within a jurisdiction, using the most up-to-date science, data, and technologies.
Basanta Gautam, who manages REDD+ technical innovation at Verra, described how measuring the impact of emission reductions is challenging and that refining the methods requires patience, reflecting new insights and learning from the ongoing process.
The methods are steadily refined over time, thereby strengthening confidence in forest carbon accounting, he said.
The new methodology would help engage jurisdictions and governments by establishing relevant jurisdictional baseline activity data and aligning project accounting at the jurisdictional level, according to Gautam.
Jurisdictional approaches are the focus of REDD+ implementation in the Paris Agreement and can form the basis of compliance-based carbon markets instead of just voluntary ones. They are expected to be scaled up and learn from local projects, whose experiences have been compiled in CIFOR-ICRAF’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+.
Equitable outcomes are also a key component of high-integrity forest carbon markets and involve the Indigenous Peoples who manage more than a quarter of the world’s land surface.
“For carbon to be high-integrity, it must recognize that Indigenous Peoples deserve the right to ownership of the land, including the carbon, and the right to be informed in a language that they understand,” said Asami Segundo, who belongs to the Kalanguya-Ikalahan Indigenous cultural community in the Philippines and provides technical assistance to the International Land Coalition.
If Indigenous Peoples cannot access carbon finance due to their effective forest management, what other options do they have? she said.
Segundo said there was a need to create funding mechanisms for areas where there are high forest conservation and low deforestation/degradation rates.
She described how two Indigenous territories in the Philippines last year tried to enter the carbon market but were paradoxically disqualified from REDD+ because they had too low deforestation and degradation rates due to their effective stewardship of the land. Today’s crediting standards don’t provide an approach to demonstrate the additionality of their existing stewardship.
“Carbon credits should be ethical. In a sense, high-integrity carbon is ethical carbon. There is no climate justice without human rights,” she said.
Sven Wunder, principal scientist at the European Forestry Institute and a CIFOR-ICRAF senior associate, presented the results of a meta-study on the effectiveness of REDD+ and found that the forest impacts were statistically significant but modest in size, just like for other conservation tools.
REDD+ could have more impact if activities spatially targeted high-threat, forest carbon-dense areas, he said. These may include any high forest area under imminent threat, such as in the “Arc of deforestation” of the Amazon (e.g. Mato Grosso, Acre, Para, Rondonia) or at other forest-agricultural frontiers (e.g. parts of Kalimantan, Papua), according to Wunder.
“REDD performs at least as well – or as poorly – as other conservation tools, but there is little analysis of its cost-effectiveness,” he said. “Our research points to various design and implementation recommendations to make REDD+ actions more effective, which would also be needed in its currently ongoing scale-up to the jurisdictional level.”
This research is part of CIFOR-ICRAF’s Global Comparative Study on REDD+. The funding partners that have supported this research include the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad, Grant No. QZA-21/0124), International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU, Grant No. 20_III_108), and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRPFTA) with financial support from the CGIAR Fund Donors.
