COP 29: “Attacking environmental defenders is aggravating the climate crisis”

Combustion of oil, gas and coal to produce energy, for industry or for transport, massive deforestation and intensive agriculture: the causes of climate change are now known to everyone, and the IPCC regularly makes one of them. synthesis as remarkable as it is implacable. But there is one factor that is systematically forgotten in this research work, and that is the relentlessness of States and private actors against all those who defend the climate and the environment on the ground.

As COP29 approaches, it is high time to show the importance of these defenders in the legitimate fight against climate change, and to protect them, to better defend the climate and our rights.

Environmentalists arrested or even killed

Everywhere, those who fight against these destructive projects are in fact repressed, arrested, threatened, imprisoned, even killed. In Ecuador, a bomb exploded in February 2024 in front of the home of a 14-year-old activist opposed to the practice of gas flaring, which is slowly asphyxiating local populations.

Six months later, in Uganda, nearly 47 students opposing the heated pipeline project to connect central Uganda to the Tanzanian coast (EACOP project) were arrested. Since July 2024, two Indonesian fishermen have faced trial because they defend the mangroves and their village threatened with engulfment. They risk 5 years in prison.

These isolated examples may seem insignificant, but, taken as a whole, they reveal a worrying reality: those who demand the application on the ground of the main principles and decisions for the climate face increasing marginalization and criminalization.

2,100 deaths in a decade

Unfortunately, this relentlessness very often takes a more tragic turn. Between 2012 and 2023, according to the NGO Global Witness, more than 2,100 climate activists around the world paid with their lives for their fight for their land and the resources of their people, and our right to a healthy environment.

Bans and repression of demonstrations, closures of associations, arbitrary detentions, stigmatization and defamation in the media, verbal and physical violence: all of these attacks have the sole objective of silencing those who try to slow down the most polluting and dangerous projects. for the climate, and in finefor all humanity. Repressive measures and behaviors which have as a direct consequence the perpetuation of harmful practices by States and companies, which lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, without any accountability to citizens. They are then moved, hand on heart, during major climate conferences.

From France to Canada

However, we should not believe that these practices are reserved for regimes hostile to international law or climate obligations. In Canada, a country that aims to be exemplary on the issue, Chief Dsta’hyl of the Wet’suwet’en Indigenous Nation was sentenced to 60 days of house arrest for peacefully defending his ancestral lands against the construction of a liquefied natural gas pipeline. For us, he became the first prisoner of conscience in contemporary Canadian history. His partners in the fight risk imprisonment.

In the United Kingdom, five environmental activists were heavily sentenced to 4 and 5 years in prison for participating in blocking a highway north of London to ask the government to abandon new oil and gas projects. In France, the “squirrel” movement, which opposes the A69, whose consequences on biodiversity and the artificialization of soils are criticized by several scientists, is faced with such repression that Michel Forst, special rapporteur for United Nations on environmental defenders, called for “an investigation and sanctions”.

Lobbyists at the COP

Paradoxically, while environmental defenders are facing ever more violent attacks, major international meetings are now dominated by industrial lobbies. Last year, during COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, more than 2,400 fossil fuel lobbyists, far more than the delegations of the 10 most vulnerable countries combined, were present in the aisles, to minimize the impact of the texts on activities in their sector.

From the « sortie » of fossil fuels initially planned at the start of the Dubai negotiations, the final text only called for a “ just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems “. A formulation as smoky as a burning forest, with several loopholes that allow fossil fuel producers and states to continue their usual activities.

Powerless civil society

Civil society, left out of the debates, can only helplessly witness the planned failure of any attempt at strong and restrictive regulation, while the trajectory currently followed in relation to pre-industrial levels is now +3 .1°C, according to the latest estimates from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

As long as civil society, indigenous peoples, and environmental defenders are denied a seat at the decision-making table, as long as governments delegitimize their fight and make them look like criminals, we will not respond to the crisis climate that we see every day (recurring torrential floods, massive hurricanes, mega-fires, etc.) and which will only get worse tomorrow. It is our common capacity to face it, with the necessary urgency and ambition, that will be put at risk.