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Defending tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders

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Defending tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders

For years, land and environmental defenders have been the first line of defence against climate breakdown. Yet despite clearer evidence than ever of the crucial role they play, far too many businesses, financiers and governments fail to safeguard their vital and peaceful work.

The climate crisis is arguably the greatest global and existential threat we face. As it escalates, it serves to exacerbate many of the other serious problems in our world today – from economic inequality to racial injustice and the spread of zoonotic diseases.

For years, land and environmental defenders have been the first line of defence against the causes and impacts of climate breakdown. Time after time, they have challenged those companies operating recklessly, rampaging unhampered through forests, skies, wetlands, oceans and biodiversity hotspots.

Yet despite clearer evidence than ever of the crucial role they play and the dangers they increasingly face, far too many businesses, financiers and governments fail to safeguard their vital and peaceful work.

Our annual report into the killings of land and environmental defenders in 2019 shows the highest number yet have been murdered in a single year. 212 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 – an average of more than four people a week.

Key findings

Shockingly, over half of all reported killings last year occurred in two countries: Colombia and the Philippines.

Both have seen a rise in attacks against land and environmental defenders since 2018, with killings in Colombia in 2019 peaking at 64 activists – the highest Global Witness has ever recorded in the country. Reports show that the murder of community and social leaders has risen dramatically in Colombia in recent years.

The United Nations Human Rights Office points to several reasons for this growing tide of violence, such as the challenges of implementing the 2016 Peace Agreement including land reform and programmes meant to encourage farmers to swap illegal crops for legal harvests. The resulting shifts in local power dynamics is driving increased violence.

The Philippines has become even deadlier for activists since 2018, having been consistently named as one of the worst places in Asia for attacks against defenders.

But things got even worse in 2019 with the number of murders rising to 43. The relentless vilification of defenders by the government and widespread impunity for their attackers may well be driving the increase.

Over two-thirds of killings took place in Latin America, which has consistently ranked the worst-affected region since Global Witness began to publish data in 2012. In 2019, the Amazon region alone saw 33 deaths. Almost 90% of the killings in Brazil were in the Amazon. In Honduras, killings rose from four in 2018 to 14 last year, making it the most dangerous country per capita in 2019.

Mining was the deadliest sector, with 50 defenders killed in 2019. Agribusiness continues to wreak destruction, with 34 defenders killed, and 85% of such attacks recorded in Asia. And logging was the sector with the highest increase in killings globally since 2018, with 85% more attacks recorded against defenders opposing the industry and 24 defenders killed in 2019.

Europe remains the least-affected region, with two people killed in 2019, both working to stop illegal logging in Romania. Indigenous peoples continue to be at a disproportionate risk of reprisals, with 40% of victims belonging to indigenous communities. Between 2015 and 2019 over a third of all fatal attacks have targeted indigenous people – even though indigenous communities make up only 5% of the world’s population.

Over 1 in 10 defenders killed were women. Often the backbone of their community, women tend to take on more of the responsibility of looking after children and elderly relatives, on top of trying to earn a living and work as activists. Women who act and speak out may also face gender-specific threats, including sexual violence. If other members of their household are defenders, they can become targeted too.

We must follow the leaders at the frontline of the climate crisis

On average, four defenders have been killed every week since December 2015 – the month the Paris Climate agreement was signed, amid hopes of a new era of climate progress. Countless more are silenced by violent attacks, arrests, death threats, sexual violence or lawsuits.

Agribusiness and oil, gas and mining have been the biggest industrial drivers of this conflict – and, as they cut down our forests and pump carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, they are also the sectors pushing us further into runaway climate change.

Land and environmental defenders play a vital role in protecting these climate-critical forests and ecosystems.

Recent research shows that indigenous and local communities around the world are managing forests that contain carbon equivalent to 33 times our current annual emissions – although even this staggering figure is likely to be an underestimate.

At the same time, research is clearly showing that indigenous-managed lands have lower deforestation rates and better conservation outcomes than protection zones that exclude indigenous peoples.

The dark side of these facts is that indigenous communities also suffer a highly disproportionate number of the attacks on defenders. Insecure land tenure, irresponsible business practices and government policies that prioritise extractive economies at the cost of human rights are putting these people, and their land, at risk.

Addressing these issues should be at the forefront of the world’s efforts to tackle climate change. But as things stand, we are in danger of missing an enormous opportunity.

The question for all of us is whether we want to build a better, greener future for our planet and its people. The answer lies in following the leadership, the campaigns and solutions that land and environmental defenders have been honing for generations.

Recommendations

We must listen to the demands of land and environmental defenders and amplify them.

Inspired by their bravery and leadership, we must push those in power – businesses, financiers and governments – to tackle the root causes of the problem, support and safeguard defenders and create regulations that ensure projects and operations are carried out with proper due diligence, transparency and free prior and informed consent.

And you can help too.

Large-scale agriculture, mining and logging are still driving the majority of attacks against environmental defenders across the world.

But it does not have to be this way – we’re exposing these companies with irresponsible practices, and those that finance them and urging them to take action to ensure their operations do not harm our environment and those who stand up to protect it.

Join our campain, advocate for land and environmental defenders, and amplify their causes and their voices as we work to bring in better rules to regulate destructive, climate-wrecking activity at the hands of companies like these.

Download the full report Defending Tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders (High resolution, 28.4MB, PDF)

Download the full report Defending Tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders (Low resolution, 6.6MB, PDF)

Original Source: Global Witness

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Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) rejects the request to dismiss the EACOP appeal case.

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1 day ago

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November 18, 2024

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By Witness Radio team.

The Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) has rejected a request by the Tanzanian government to dismiss an appeal filed by four East African civil society organizations (CSOs) seeking compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards.

Tanzania’s Deputy Solicitor General, Mr. Mark Mulwambo, requested the judges dismiss the Appeal, arguing that the record of proceedings from the hearings held at the First Instance Division was missing. The record of proceedings includes the CSOs and respondents’ submissions. He added that, without it, the judges at the Appellate Division could not determine whether the First Instance Court erred in the ruling that they made.

However, the court could not grant his request. Instead, it ordered the four CSOs that filed the Appeal to file supplementary information so that the judges could hear the case.

The Appeal will be heard by a panel of judges from the Appellate Division of the EACJ, including Justice Nestor Kayobera, the division’s president; Justice Anita Mugeni, the Vice President; Justice Kathurima M’Inot; Justice Cheboriona Barishaki; and Justice Omar Othman Makungu. These judges, with their expertise in regional and international law, will review the Appeal and make a final decision.

The Appeal was filed by four CSOs, including the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) from Uganda, the Centre for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT) from Uganda, the Natural Justice (NJ) from Kenya, and the Centre for Strategic Litigation (CSL) from Tanzania, in December 2023. This was in response to the dismissal of their case, which sought compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards, by judges at the First Instance Division of the EACJ in November 2023.

During the dismissal, the court ruled that the applicants filed the petition out of time, stating that the petitioners should have filed the petition as early as 2017 instead of 2020. The court also ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case, meaning it did not have the legal authority to decide on this matter. These decisions were based on legal precedents and the specific circumstances of the case.

The CSOs were ordered to file the record of proceedings by Justice Nestor Kayobera by November 29, 2024.

The court session was attended by EACOP-affected communities from both Uganda and Tanzania. Among them was Mr. Gozanga Kyakulubya, an affected person from Kyotera District in Southern Uganda, who traveled to Arusha to participate in the hearing. His personal story underscores the profound impact of the EACOP on the lives of these communities.

He shared his grievance, stating, “I came to the court because I have a lot of pain. My land was taken for the EACOP, and before I was paid, it was fenced off. The government of Uganda also sued me because I rejected the low compensation offered by EACOP. We need at least one court to be fair to EACOP host communities, and we hope the East African Court of Justice will be that court.”

The EACOP has been designed, constructed, financed, and operated through a dedicated Pipeline Company with the same name. The shareholders in EACOP are affiliates of the three upstream joint venture partners: the Uganda National Oil Company (8%), TotalEnergies E&P Uganda (62%), and CNOOC Uganda Ltd (15%), together with the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (15%).

The 1,443km pipeline will eventually transport Uganda’s crude oil from Kabaale—Hoima to the Chongoleani peninsula near Tanga Port in Tanzania.

Climate activists and civil society organizations, however, continue to oppose the project, claiming that it will harm several fragile and protected habitats irreversibly and violate key agreements and treaties.

The potential environmental damage is a cause for concern among these groups.

Related posts:

Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) to hear an Appeal filed by CSOs which seeks to reinstate a petition against the construction of the EACOP project tomorrow. EACJ’s Appellate Court will hear an appeal on the dismissed Case against EACOP development. The Appellate East African Court of Justice sets timelines for hearing an appeal against the construction of the EACOP. East African Court of Justice is to decide whether it has jurisdiction to try the EACOP case filed by Four East African NGOs today. The East Africa regional court dismisses a case challenging the construction of the EACOP project.
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Big oil firms knew of dire effects of fossil fuels as early as 1950s, memos show

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1 day ago

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November 18, 2024

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Newly unearthed documents contain warning from head of Air Pollution Foundation, founded in 1953 by oil interests.

Major oil companies, including Shell and precursors to energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were alerted about the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents show.

The warning, from the head of an industry-created group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, was revealed by Climate Investigations Center and published Tuesday by the climate website DeSmog. It represents what may be the earliest instance of big oil being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its products.

“Every time there’s a push for climate action, [we see] fossil fuel companies downplay and deny the harms of burning fossil fuels,” said Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center who uncovered the historic memos. “Now we have evidence they were doing this way back in the 50s during these really early attempts to crack down on sources of pollution.”

The Air Pollution Foundation was founded in 1953 by oil interests in response to public outcry over smog that was blanketing Los Angeles county.

Researchers had identified hydrocarbon pollution from fossil fuel sources such as cars and refineries as a primary culprit and Los Angeles officials had begun to proposal pollution controls.

The Air Pollution Foundation, which was primarily funded by the lobbying organization Western States Petroleum Association, publicly claimed to want to help solve the smog crisis, but was set up in large part to counter efforts at regulation, the new memos indicate.

It’s a commonly used tactic today, said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in climate disinformation at the University of Miami.

Fire emanating from a factory chimney
A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery burns against the sky in Louisiana. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“The Air Pollution Foundation appears to be one of the earliest and most brazen efforts by the oil industry to prop up a … front group to exaggerate scientific uncertainty to defend business as usual,” Supran said. “It helped lay the strategic and organizational groundwork for big oil’s decades of climate denial and delay.”

Then called the Western Oil and Gas Association, the lobbying group provided $1.3m to the group in the 1950s – the equivalent of $14m today – to the Air Pollution Foundation. That funding came from member companies including Shell and firms later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips, as well as southern California utility SoCalGas.

The Air Pollution Foundation recruited the respected chemical engineer Lauren B Hitchcock to serve as its president. And in 1954, the organization – which until then was arguing that households incinerating waste in backyards was to blame – asked Caltech to submit a proposal to determine the main source of smog.

In November 1954, Caltech submitted its proposal, which included crucial warnings about the coal, oil, and gas and said that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization”, a memo previously uncovered by John shows. The newly uncovered documents show the Air Pollution Foundation shared the warning with the Western Oil and Gas Association’s members in March 1955.

In the mid-1950s, climate researchers were beginning to understand the planet-heating impact of fossil fuels, and to discuss their emergent research in the media. But the newly uncovered Air Pollution Foundation memo represents the earliest known cautionary message to the oil industry about the greenhouse effect.

The Air Pollution Foundation’s board of trustees, including representatives from SoCalGas and Union Oil, which was later acquired by Chevron, approved funding for the Caltech project. In the following months, foundation president Hitchcock advocated for pollution controls on oil refineries and then testified in favor of state-funded pollution research in the California Senate.

Hitchcock was reprimanded by industry leaders for these efforts. In an April 1955 meeting, the Western Oil and Gas Association told him he was drawing too much “attention” to refinery pollution and conducting “too broad a program” of research. The Air Pollution Foundation was meant to be “protective” of the industry and should publish “findings which would be accepted as unbiased”, meeting minutes uncovered by John show.

After this meeting, the foundation made no further reference to the potential climate impact of fossil fuels, publications reviewed by DeSmog suggest.

“The fossil fuel industry is often seen as having followed in the footsteps of the tobacco industry’s playbook for denying science and blocking regulation,” said Supran. “But these documents suggest that big oil has been running public affairs campaigns to downplay the dangers of its products just as long as big tobacco, starting with air pollution in the early-to-mid-1950s.”

In the following months, many of the foundation’s research projects were scaled back or designed to be conducted in direct partnerships with lobbying groups. Hitchcock resigned as president in 1956.

Last year, the largest county in Oregon sued the Western States Petroleum Association for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of it.

DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center previously found that the Air Pollution Foundation underwrote the earliest studies on CO2 conducted in 1955 and 1956 by renowned climate scientist Charles David Keeling, paving the way for his groundbreaking “Keeling Curve,” which charts how fossil fuels cause an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Other earlier investigations have found that major fossil companies spent decades conducting their own research into the consequences of burning coal, oil and gas. One 2023 study found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s, only to then spend decades sowing doubt about climate science.

The newly unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego, the State University of New York Buffalo archives and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s.

The Western States Petroleum Association and the American Petroleum Institute, the top US fossil fuels lobby group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Origin Source: The Guardian

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EACJ’s Appellate Court will hear an appeal on the dismissed Case against EACOP development.

Published

4 days ago

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November 15, 2024

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By Witness Radio team.

The appeal against the dismissal of a lower court case, filed by four East African civil societies seeking compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards, is scheduled to be heard today, November 15, 2024, by the Appellate Court of the East Africa Court of Justice. The Appellate Court is the higher court that reviews decisions made by lower courts, and in this Case, it will review the decision of the EACJ’s First Instance Division that dismissed the Case.

The appeal case was filed against the Attorney Generals of Uganda and Tanzania and the East African Community Secretary General (EAC).

The appeal is based on case Reference No. 39 of 2020, which was filed in November 2020 by the Center for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT), Natural Justice (NJ), Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO), and Center for Strategic Litigation (CSL) from Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. The Case asked the EACJ lower court to issue temporary and permanent injunctions to halt the development of the EACOP.

The organizations claimed that the EACOP violates key East African and international treaties and laws, including the East African Community (EAC) Treaty, Protocol for Sustainable Development of the Lake Victoria basin, Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Others include the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the African Convention on Conservation of Natural Resources.

The EACOP has been designed, constructed, financed, and operated through a dedicated Pipeline Company with the same name. The shareholders in EACOP are affiliates of the three upstream joint venture partners: the Uganda National Oil Company (8%), TotalEnergies E&P Uganda (62%), and CNOOC Uganda Ltd (15%), together with the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (15%).

The 1,443km pipeline will eventually transport Uganda’s crude oil from Kabaale—Hoima to the Chongoleani peninsula near Tanga Port in Tanzania.

Climate activists and civil society organizations, however, have opposed the project, claiming that it will harm several fragile and protected habitats irreversibly and violate key agreements and treaties. Furthermore, the project has been linked to several human rights violations, such as land grabs and the imprisonment of project critics.

On November 29, 2023, the EACJ dismissed the Case. The court ruled that the applicants filed the petition out of time, stating that the petitioners should have filed the petition as early as 2017 instead of 2020. The court also ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the Case, meaning it did not have the legal authority to make a decision on this particular matter. These rulings were based on the court’s interpretation of the EAC Treaty and procedural law.

Undeterred by the dismissal of the Case, on December 13, 2023, the four CSOs demonstrated their unwavering commitment to justice by filing an appeal at the East African Court of Justice’s (EACJ) Appellate Division.

Their appeal is meticulously based on the grounds that the court case was timely, given that the applicants (CSOs) became aware of the signing of the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) on October 26, 2020, and filed the Case on November 6, 2020, just ten days after gaining knowledge of the IGA.

They argue that the First Instance Division erred in interpreting Article 30 of the EAC Treaty and misapplied procedural law. The CSOs, with their legal expertise, assert that article 30 of the EAC Treaty sets a two-month limitation period for filing cases at the EACJ, starting from the enactment, publication, directive, decision, or action being contested, or, in its absence, from the day it came to the knowledge of the complainant.

The appellants also contend that the court should have recognized that their statement of reference was based on 12 grounds, with only two being challenged by the respondents. They argue that the court should have preserved and heard the remaining ten grounds, even if the preliminary objections on the two were upheld. Furthermore, they assert that the court misinterpreted the evidence, as the affidavits relied upon in resolving the preliminary objections constituted valid evidence, which they argue is a violation of the law on preliminary objections, among other issues.”

In their appeal, which will be heard today, the CSOs ask the Appellate Court to overturn the First Instance Division’s decision to dismiss their EACOP case, return the Case to the First Instance Division for a merits hearing, and return the Case to the First Instance Division for a trial of the remaining aspects for which the governments of Tanzania and Uganda did not raise any preliminary objections.

They also want the First Instance Division’s decision to overturn the awarding of costs decision to the Tanzanian and Ugandan governments and the EAC Secretary General.

Related posts:

Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) to hear an Appeal filed by CSOs which seeks to reinstate a petition against the construction of the EACOP project tomorrow. The Appellate East African Court of Justice sets timelines for hearing an appeal against the construction of the EACOP. The East Africa regional court dismisses a case challenging the construction of the EACOP project. EACJ TO GIVE A RULING ON THE PRELIMINARY OBJECTIONS RAISED IN THE EACOP CASE East African Court of Justice is to decide whether it has jurisdiction to try the EACOP case filed by Four East African NGOs today.
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