Lawyers Are Working to Put 'Ecocide' on Par with War Crimes. Could an International Law Hold Major Polluters to Account?


Mélissa Godin TIME
Fri, February 19, 2021

Extinction Rebellion Climate Crime Invesigators

Police watch as Extinction Rebellion "crime scene investigators" in white suits and masks put up climate crime scene tape to investigate areas of ecocide in a performance outside the Brazilian Embassy on Sept. 7, 2020 in London, United Kingdom Credit - Mike Kemp—In Pictures, via Getty Images

When a Nigerian judge ruled in 2005 that Shell’s practice of gas flaring in the Niger Delta was a violation of citizens’ constitutional rights to life and dignity, Nnummo Bassey, a local environmental activist, was thrilled.

Bassey’s organization, Friends of the Earth, had helped communities in the Niger Delta sue Shell for gas flaring, a highly polluting practice that caused mass disruption to communities in the region, polluting water and crops. Researchers had found that those disruptions were associated with increased rates of cancer, blood disorders, skin diseases, acid rain, and birth defects—leading to a life expectancy of 41 in the region, 13 years fewer than the national average.


“For the first time, a court of competence has boldly declared that Shell, Chevron and the other oil corporations have been engaged in illegal activities here for decades,” Bassey said on Nov. 14, 2005, the day the Federal High Court of Nigeria announced the ruling. “We expect this judgement to be respected and that for once the oil corporations will accept the truth and bring their sinful flaring activities to a halt.”

Yet the judgement was not respected. A United Nations report published six years later found that Shell had not followed its own procedures regarding the maintenance of oilfield infrastructure. Today, Shell is still gas flaring in the Niger Delta.

In the 15 years since the ruling, Bassey has come to believe that Shell’s executives might have been held accountable had the case gone to the International Criminal Court (ICC). “Shell could ignore [the case] because it wasn’t in the international media but if it had gone to the ICC, it would have gotten global attention and shareholders would have known what the company was doing,” he says. “If we had had an ecocide law, things would have turned out differently.”

The word “ecocide” is an umbrella term for all forms of environmental destruction from deforestation to greenhouse gas emissions. Since the 1970s, environmental advocates have championed the idea of creating an international ecocide law that would be adjudicated in the ICC and would penalize individuals responsible for environmental destruction. But the effort has gained significant traction over the past year, with leaders from Vanuatu, the Maldives, France, Belgium, the Netherlands—as well as influential global figures like Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg—expressing their support. Although there are questions about whether the ICC as an institution has the teeth to prosecute any crimes, Bassey and other activists believe the law will act as a powerful deterrent against future forms of environmental destruction. “We will not get different outcomes in cases of exploitation and marginalisation unless we reimagine the laws that govern us,” Bassey says.

In December 2020, lawyers from around the world gathered to begin drafting a legal definition of ecocide. If they succeed, it would potentially situate environmental destruction in the same legal category as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. But even within the movement, questions remain on how far the law should go — and who might fall under its jurisdiction.
The history of the ecocide movement

The term ecocide first rose to the public consciousness in 1972, when Olof Palme, the premier of Sweden, used the term at a United Nations environmental conference in Stockholm to describe the environmental damage caused by the Vietnam War. At the conference, an ecocide convention was proposed but never came to pass.

The idea resurfaced again in the 1990s when the ICC, the world’s first permanent international criminal court, was being created. As a court of last resort, the ICC was established not to override national courts but to complement them, creating a global tribunal that would adjudicate the gravest crimes of concern to the international community. When lawyers came together in 1998 to draft the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC, there was a law in the pipeline that would have criminalized environmental destruction.

But the law never came about. “My recollection is that there was just no political support for it,” says Philippe Sands, who was involved in drafting the preamble of the Rome Statute in 1998 (and who would go on to co-chair the expert panel formed in 2020 to draft a legal definition of ecocide). Environmental destruction, Sands says, was not on the public’s consciousness.

This began to change in 2017 when Polly Higgins, a British barrister, launched the Stop Ecocide campaign alongside environmental activist Jojo Mehta. Higgins, who sold her home in 2010 to raise funds to combat environmental destruction, wrote an influential book, Eradicating Ecocide, that informed the legal debate. When the campaign launched a few years later, it quickly gained unprecedented momentum: Greta Thunberg donated €100,000 of the money she received from that year’s Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity to the cause, and for the first time in history, several world leaders publicly backed the idea. Fast-forward three years and now, an expert panel of international criminal lawyers is drafting a definition of ecocide. “Six months ago, we never would have believed where we are at now,” says Mehta. Higgins, sadly, never lived to see her campaign bear fruit, dying in 2019 at the age of 50.

Environmental advocates believe an ecocide law at the ICC would be groundbreaking. While some countries have national laws on environmental harm, there is no international criminal law that explicitly imposes penalties on individuals responsible for environmental destruction. If adopted, experts say there are three main areas where an ecocide law would make a difference.

The first is the symbolic impact of having the ICC elevate environmental destruction to the same level as genocidal crimes. Mehta argues that the fear of being labelled an ecocide criminal could create incentives for leaders to behave more responsibly. “A CEO doesn’t want to be seen in the same bracket as a genocidal maniac,” she says.

The second area where this law could make a difference is by setting a legal precedent, creating a bandwagon effect where international law could prompt changes in national criminal laws, as countries look to signal their environmental commitment to others. ICC laws have influenced national policies before: several countries, including Germany and the Netherlands, have adopted national laws that criminalize ICC crimes.

The third way an ecocide law could be useful is by prosecuting environmental crimes that fall outside of national jurisdictions. This is especially helpful in poorer countries where legal barriers make it difficult to hold foreign companies accountable. An ecocide law, Bassey says, would create an arena in which marginalized communities in countries like Nigeria have a voice against powerful, polluting actors. “Most of this ecocide devastation is happening in communities where voices are not heard,” he says.


A picture taken on March 22, 2013 shows gas flare at Shell 

Cawtharine Channel, Nembe Creek in the Niger DeltaPius 

Utomi Ekpei—AFP via Getty Images

Advocates of an ecocide law also believe it would change the way the environment is valued. “There is something powerfully urgent about the idea that nature has rights,” says Mitch Anderson, founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, an organization that works with Indigenous communities in the Western Amazon to protect their lands. “The [ecocide] law would ensure that nature has a legal voice.”

There’s still a long way to go, though. While lawyers are expected to finish a draft of the law by the end of spring, it will take at least 3 to 5 years before the law might be ratified. Drafting the law is just the first of many steps: a member state needs to propose it to the ICC, at which point, 50% of ICC states have to approve it. States will then need to convene to debate the exact definition of the law before eventually, adopting and ratifying it.

But if passed, an ecocide law would be unique in the ICC’s history, not only because of what it would protect but who it could go after—the heads of countries and corporations that are big polluters. Historically, the ICC has been criticized for targeting only African dictators while turning a blind eye to Western leaders responsible for mass atrocities. But with an ecocide law, powerful white men—who are often disproportionately represented in extractive industries—could face criminal charges. “The ecocide movement is powerful not only in the legal precedent it could set for protecting rivers, forests, oceans and the air but also in the names and faces it identifies as being behind this destruction,” says Anderson. “[They] may not look like the picture we’re used to seeing.”

Oil and gas companies contacted by TIME did not want to comment on whether they support an ecocide law, but the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) said in a statement they “want to further improve the environmental performance and reduce the likelihood and consequences of incident.”

What counts as ecocide?

Bassey is confident that many of the world’s worst environmental offenses —such as Chevron’s pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1990s or the ongoing coal-seam fires in Witbank, South Africa—could have been prevented had an ecocide law been in place. “If we had an ecocide law, no one would allow this to go on,” he says. In theory, that might be true. But in practice, much depends on how the term is defined.

Sands, the co-chair of the panel drafting the law, is concerned that the bar for what counts as “ecocide” could be set too high. There’s historical precedence for such a scenario: When the idea of “genocide” was first proposed in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, he envisioned a law that would prosecute individuals that killed members of a national, ethnic, racial, religious or political group. But when member states—many of whom who were worried about their own histories of discrimination—came together to actually draft the law in 1948, they decided that lawyers needed to prove not only that an individual killed members of a group but that they did so with the specific intention to kill.

The result is that most genocide trials heard by the ICC have not ended with a guilty verdict because the burden of proof is too high. Sands is worried the same mistake might be made with the definition of ecocide. “It will never be possible to prove that someone intended to destroy the environment on a massive scale,” he says. “If we set the bar too high, we won’t catch anyone.”

On the other hand, if the bar is set too low—if the ecocide law encompasses too many types of alleged environmentally destructive acts, and implicates too many types of people and institutions—it may lose political support. Many people might get behind an ecocide law that charges mega-corporations for polluting on a grand scale; it is less likely they would support a law that penalizes anyone who destroys the environment in any way. The lawyers drafting the definition didn’t want to offer their opinion on what, specifically, a “low bar” would look like out of concern that doing so would put at risk their ability to advocate for a more robust law.

But even if a robust ecocide law is put in place, the movement faces another big challenge: the limited legal powers of the ICC. On its own, the ICC does not have the authority to enforce laws; it is completely reliant on its member states to arrest and surrender the accused. If a country does not comply—if it does not arrest the accused individual—there is no trial. In addition, over 70 countries are not members—including the United States. Some of the biggest fossil fuel corporations, such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, are American owned, meaning they would be unlikely to be drawn into a prosecution.

Lawyers working on the ecocide law are acutely aware of these limitations. “Let’s not be starry eyed about our legal international frameworks at the international level,” Sands says. “Let’s be realistic.” Holding perpetrators of environmental destruction to account, he says, must ultimately be done at the national level. Nevertheless, international criminal law can be a tool that catalyzes thinking and helps set a precedent. Although only four people have been convicted at the ICC since it began hearing cases in 2002, the creation of ICC law has influenced national policy through the norms and precedents it helped to generate. Advocates of ecocide believe the law could do something similar.

“We know one law won’t change everything,” says Mehta. “But without something like this in place, it’s hard to see how these [environmental] targets will be met.”

Should Harming Mother Earth Be a Crime? The Case for Ecocide

By Reynard Loki ***

April 26, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Stop Ecocide International logo



The destruction of nature might one day become a criminal offense adjudicated by the International Criminal Court.

On December 3, 2019, the Pacific island state of Vanuatu made an audacious proposal: Make ecocide—the destruction of nature—an international crime. “An amendment of the Rome Statute could criminalize acts that amount to Ecocide,” stated Ambassador of Vanuatu John Licht at the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) annual Assembly of States Parties in the Hague. He was speaking on behalf of his government at the assembly’s full plenary session. “We believe this radical idea merits serious discussion.”

Since then, the idea has become less radical: Amid the intensifying global climate emergency, interest has been mounting among nations and diverse stakeholders—spanning international bodies, grassroots organizations, and businesses—that ecocide be formally recognized as an international crime, joining the ranks of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression, which are the four core international crimes established by the Rome Statute of the ICC. These crimes are not subject to any statute of limitations.

Environmental activists are pushing to elevate the concept of ecocide—literally, the “killing of the ecosystem”—as the fifth international crime to be adjudicated by the ICC. If it becomes a reality, those who commit environmental destruction could be liable to arrest, prosecution, and punishment—by a fine, imprisonment, or both.

The European Union, in February 2024, took a step in the direction of criminalizing cases that lead to environmental destruction and “voted in a new directive” that makes these crimes comparable to ecocide, according to Grist. “The new law holds people liable for environmental destruction if they acted with knowledge of the damage their actions would cause.” The article adds that environmental crime is the “fourth most lucrative illegal activity in the world, worth an estimated $258 billion annually,” according to Interpol, and is only growing with each passing year.

Ecocide proponents want laws being pushed across various international organizations and government agencies to cover the most egregious crimes against nature, which could ultimately include massive abuses to the living environment, such as oil spills, illegal deforestation, deep-sea mining, mountaintop removal mining, Arctic oil exploration and extraction, tar sand extraction, and factory farming. British barrister and environmental lobbyist Polly Higgins defined ecocide as “extensive damage… to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.”

Ecosystem Services: Existential and Economic Value

Healthy, functioning ecosystems provide a wide range of services to humanity and all life on Earth that are essential for the sustainable management and conservation of natural resources. These services can be categorized into four broad categories.

Provisioning Services: Healthy ecosystems provide food and water for humans and nonhuman animals, timber for building, and fiber for clothing and other industries.

Regulating Services: These services control conditions and processes, such as climate regulation, water purification, and pollination. Wetlands, for instance, purify water by filtering out pollutants, while forests help regulate climate by absorbing carbon dioxide.

Supporting Services: These services are necessary to produce all other ecosystem services. Examples include nutrient cycling, soil formation, and primary production. Soil organisms contribute to nutrient cycling, and the soil supports plant growth.

Cultural Services: Humanity obtains numerous non-material benefits from healthy ecosystems, including spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences. Parks, beaches, and natural landscapes provide opportunities for recreation and relaxation, while cultural heritage sites offer historical and spiritual connections.

Ecosystem services are crucial for human well-being, economic prosperity, and societal development. To ensure that we continue to enjoy these services, we must protect ecosystems from the destructive harm of unsustainable exploitation. Ecocide laws can provide this protection.

War in Ukraine: Ecocide by Russia

Ukraine is seen as a “trailblazer” in pushing for recognizing ecocide crimes “within the realm of justice.” This thinking has especially gained momentum since Russia’s attack on the nation in February 2022, leading to the war on Ukraine being seen as a site of ecocide. On April 16, 2024, environmental, climate, and energy experts gathered at Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest in Middlebury, Vermont, for a panel discussion titled “Criminalizing Ecocide: Lessons From Ukraine in Addressing Global Environmental Challenges.” The event centered on the significant ramifications of Russia’s environmental transgressions in Ukraine within the broader scope of global environmental justice.

The panelists—including Marjukka Porvali from the European Commission (a specialist in environmental policy with a focus on Ukraine); Jojo Mehta, the co-founder of Stop Ecocide; Bart Gruyaert, project director at Neo-Eco Ukraine; and Anna Ackermann, a climate and energy policy analyst—discussed establishing legal precedents to prosecute the gravest offenses against nature, promoting a cultural shift toward taking environmental issues seriously, and navigating a fair transition—while responsibly utilizing critical resources for reconstruction.

The Ukrainian government “has [also] argued for using…[international criminalization of ecocide] as a tool to hold individuals accountable for environmental destruction in wartime.” Their call increased in the summer of 2023 when Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, which not only killed people but also caused the spread of chemical pollution in the area.

Protecting the Future of Life on Earth

In 2017, Higgins and Mehta founded the Stop Ecocide campaign. Overseen by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, a charitable organization based in the Netherlands, the campaign is the only global effort to exclusively focus on the establishment of ecocide as an international crime to prevent further devastation to the Earth’s ecosystems. “Protecting the future of life on Earth means stopping the mass damage and destruction of ecosystems taking place globally,” states the Stop Ecocide Facebook page. “And right now, in most of the world, no one is held responsible.”

Vanuatu’s bold proposition was the first time a state representative made an official call for the criminalization of ecocide on the international stage since 1972 when then-Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme made the argument during his keynote address at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

“The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention,” said Palme in his address. “It is shocking that only preliminary discussions of this matter have been possible so far in the United Nations and at the conferences of the International Committee of the Red Cross, where it has been taken up by my country and others. We fear that the active use of these methods is coupled by a passive resistance to discuss them.”

The Failure of the Paris Climate Agreement

That passive resistance to discussing the immense destruction of nature at the hands of humanity has largely continued. Though nearly 200 nations signed the Paris Agreement in 2015—designed to avoid irreversible climate change by limiting global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius—the countries’ commitments are not nearly enough. As they stand, the promises put the Earth on course to heat up between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius above the historic baseline by 2100.

Although the Paris Agreement mandates the monitoring and reporting of carbon emissions, it lacks the authority to compel any nation to decrease its emissions. Considering this shortcoming, the landmark agreement has been a failure. This failure inspired more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries to sign a “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” declaration in January 2020. Another 2,100 scientists have signed it as of April 9, 2021.“An immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis,” the scientists warned.

Society did not heed the warning: Two years later, in 2022, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels reached a record high.

“A 100 countries say they are aiming for net-zero or carbon neutrality by 2050, yet just 14 have enacted such targets into law,” Carter Dillard, policy director of the nonprofit Fair Start Movement and author of Justice as a Fair Start in Life: Understanding the Right to Have Children, wrote in the Hill in April 2022.

“[T]he Paris Agreement, which itself allowed for widespread ecological destruction, is failing,” said Dillard, whose organization supports the emergence of smaller families not only to tackle environmental degradation but also to establish “fair starts” for the children born today who have to face the prospect of growing up on a rapidly deteriorating planet. “Meanwhile, in real-time, global warming is already killing and sickening people and damaging fetal and infant health worldwide,” Dillard wrote. “Maybe it’s time for a rethink and a deeper approach.”

A Broken Legal Framework

One deeper approach would be to protect the natural environment through the legal system since, as the Paris Agreement has shown, non-binding commitments that are not subject to possible punishment and remain unfulfilled are ultimately meaningless.

Higgins pointed out the illogical state of our current legal system, which shields perpetrators of crimes against nature: “We have laws that are protecting dangerous industrial activities, such as fracking, despite the fact that there is an abundance of evidence that it is hugely harmful in terms of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and the catastrophic trauma it can cause communities that are impacted by it.”

“The rules of our world are laws, and they can be changed,” she said in 2015. “Laws can restrict, or they can enable. What matters is what they serve. Many of the laws in our world serve property—they are based on ownership. But imagine a law that has a higher moral authority… a law that puts people and planet first. Imagine a law that starts from first do no harm, that stops this dangerous game and takes us to a place of safety.”

Ecocide Movement Growing

While the ecocide movement was dealt a blow when Higgins died in 2019 after a battle with cancer, it picked up speed, aided not only by Vanuatu’s proposal but also by high-profile supporters like French President Emmanuel Macron, who said, “The mother of all battles is international: to ensure that this term is enshrined in international law so that leaders… are accountable before the International Criminal Court.”

Environmental protection is becoming more of a concern among the general public, many of whom take a dim view of elected leaders’ inaction. According to a 2024 CBS News poll, 70 percent of Americans favor government action to address climate change. Half of Americans believe that it is a crisis that must be addressed immediately. Almost a quarter of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions come from the industrialized destruction of natural landscapes to support agriculture, forestry, and other uses to support human society. By criminalizing widespread environmental destruction with no remediation, ecocide laws can be a vital tool in dealing with the climate crisis.

A 2024 Conservation in the West poll revealed a deep-seated worry about the environment’s future among two-thirds of voters across eight Western U.S. states. Their concerns ranged from low river water levels and loss of wildlife habitat to air and water pollution. Interestingly, the survey found that 80 percent or more of these voters support the idea of energy companies bearing the costs of cleaning up extraction sites and restoring the land after drilling activities. This view is not far from the belief that environmental destruction should be treated as a criminal offense.

Meanwhile, three-quarters want the U.S. to generate all of its electricity from renewable sources within 15 years, according to a poll conducted by the Guardian and Vice in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. In December 2020, as world leaders marked the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged every country to declare a “climate emergency.”

The general public is warming to the idea of criminalizing the destruction of nature, with more than 99 percent of the French “citizens’ climate assembly”—a group of 150 people randomly selected to help guide the nation’s climate policy—voting to make ecocide a crime in June 2020.

“If something’s a crime, we place it below a moral red line. At the moment, you can still go to the government and get a permit to frack or mine or drill for oil, whereas you can’t just get a permit to kill people because it’s criminal,” said Mehta. “Once you set that parameter in place, you shift the cultural mindset as well as the legal reality.”

“The air we breathe is not the property of any one nation—we share it,” Palme said in his 1972 address. “The big oceans are not divided by national frontiers—they are our common property. … In the field of human environment there is no individual future, neither for humans nor for nations. Our future is common. We must share it together. We must shape it together.”

Greta Thunberg called for a shift in our legal system regarding the environment. “We will not save the world by playing by the rules,” said Thunberg, who has become the face of the international youth climate movement. “We need to change the rules.”

Ecocide Laws Moving Through European Parliaments

In February 2024, the Belgian parliament passed a revised penal code endorsing the punishment of ecocide at national and international levels. This landmark decision makes Belgium the first European nation to acknowledge ecocide within the realm of international law.

“Belgium is now at the forefront of a truly global conversation around criminalizing the most severe harms to nature and must continue to advocate for the recognition of ecocide at the International Criminal Court, alongside genocide,” said Patricia Willocq, director of Stop Ecocide Belgium. “In order to fully protect nature, it is necessary that those that would willfully destroy vast swaths of the natural world, in turn causing untold human harm, should be criminalized.”

Scotland may follow suit. On November 8, 2023, Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament Monica Lennon introduced a proposed ecocide bill in the Scottish Parliament that could lead to substantial penalties for those found guilty of the large-scale destruction of the environment, potentially resulting in up to 20 years of imprisonment. If passed, it would establish Scotland as the first country in the United Kingdom to implement strict consequences for environmental damage.

Lennon initiated a consultation that was set to conclude in February 2024. The government responded by confirming that Circular Economy Minister Lorna Slater would discuss the proposed measures with Lennon. Following the conclusion of the consultation phase on February 9, 2024, the bill now needs the backing of at least 18 parliamentary members to advance to the next stage.

“Thousands of overwhelmingly supportive submissions have been received from members of the public and institutions in the space of just four months and Greens Biodiversity Minister Lorna Slater has now written indicating her government’s support,” reported John Ferguson, political editor of the Sunday Mail, on March 24, 2024.

“This is a promising development and I welcome the Scottish Government’s support,” said Lennon. “Ecocide law is emerging around the world in a bid to prevent and punish the most serious crimes against nature. My proposed bill to stop ecocide in Scotland is gaining widespread support, and this encouraging update from the Scottish Government is a boost to the campaign.”

The Case for Ecocide Laws

If implemented, ecocide laws would protect ecosystems and preserve biodiversity, an essential element for maintaining healthy ecosystems that support all life forms, including humans. These laws would safeguard natural habitats, reduce environmental damage, and significantly mitigate climate change by preserving carbon sinks like forests and curbing greenhouse gas emissions from industrial activities.

Critically, enshrining ecocide as a crime would hold individuals and corporations accountable for environmental harm, promoting a sense of justice and responsibility in interacting with the natural world. Enforcing laws against ecocide also encourages sustainable practices and resource management, fostering a more harmonious relationship between human activities and the environment over the long term.

Together, these reasons reflect broader efforts that stretch across disciplines and activist frontlines—from environmentalism and nature rights to social justice and the law—toward sustainable development, conservation, and responsible stewardship of the planet for current and future generations. Part of that stewardship is eradicating “institutional speciesism,” cultivating ecocentrism, and seeing our place in the natural world in the context of the entire planetary ecosystem—as one species among a multitude of interdependent species.

Philippe Sands, a lawyer who is a member of a panel launched in November 2020 to draft a definition of ecocide and who has appeared before the ICC and the European Court of Justice, told the Economist in 2021, “My sense is that there is a broad recognition that the old anthropocentric assumptions may well have to be cast to one side if justice is truly to be done, and the environment given a fair degree of protection.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

*** REYNARD IS THE NAME GIVEN A FRENCH FOX CHARACTER WHO IS A TRICKSTER

LOKI NORSE GOD OF CHAOS ALSO A TRICKSTER

What is ecocide and could it become an international crime like genocide?

Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa — island nations particularly vulnerable to climate change — asked the International Criminal Court to make the destruction of ecosystems a crime.

By Rachel Pannett
September 10, 2024

Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have formally asked the International Criminal Court to consider ecocide — acts that destroy the world’s ecosystems — an international crime, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

If successful, their bid could allow for the prosecutions of company leaders, or even nations, that knowingly contribute to environmental degradation. Still, some of the world’s biggest polluters — China, Russia, India and the United States — are not ICC member states and could challenge any of the court’s rulings on jurisdictional grounds.

Proponents say labeling ecocide a crime under international law would create guard rails for the world’s policymakers. “The primary goal is ultimately protective: it’s deterrence,” Jojo Mehta, co-founder of the advocacy group Stop Ecocide International, said in a news release. “Criminal law creates powerful moral as well as legal boundaries, making it clear that extreme levels of harm are not just unlawful but totally unacceptable.”

Here’s what to know about the push to crack down on environmental destruction.

What is ecocide?

Arthur Galston, an American biologist, coined the term in the 1970s. The Yale University professor campaigned to stop the use of the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam, where it was used to defoliate battlefields. “I thought it was a misuse of science,” he once said of the toxic herbicide, which was developed by other scientists based on his early research into plant growth regulators and has been linked to cancer and birth defects.

In the past few years, international environmental lawyers have been pushing to make ecocide a globally punishable offense. According to the proposal put to the ICC on Monday, ecocide is defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

Acts that could count as ecocide, according to legal experts, include oil spills, the deforestation of the Amazon and fossil fuel companies knowingly emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, which scientists have said will probably lead to major and irreversible damage to ecosystems.

“Recognition of ecocide as an international crime would be a major advance in international accountability for severe environmental harm,” Donald R. Rothwell, an expert in international law at the Australian National University, said via email. Still, he noted it “will be a long diplomatic process.”

Where is ecocide illegal?

Ecocide became a crime in Belgium earlier this year. Under the country’s criminal code, it is defined as “deliberately committing an unlawful act causing serious, widespread and long-term damage to the environment, in the knowledge that such acts cause such kind of damage.” The punishment is up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $1.8 million.

The European Union recently criminalized environmental damage “comparable to ecocide.” Similar bills have been introduced in France, the Netherlands and Spain, and are under consideration in Scotland, Brazil and Mexico.

Ecocide is also included in the criminal code in places such as Russia, which has been accused of committing ecocide during the war against Ukraine — underscoring the potential difficulties in enforcing such laws.

Rothwell said there are long-standing international war crimes that relate to environmental damage during armed conflicts.

Writing in the Conversation, Filippos Proedrou, an expert on global political economy at the University of South Wales, and Maria Pournara, a criminology expert at Swansea University, said that the way ecocide is defined in the European Union and elsewhere could undermine the grounds for successful prosecution.

They added that usage of the word “wanton” with regard to acts that damage the environment “sets the bar for prosecution too high,” because defendants could escape prosecution by demonstrating that such acts were outweighed by substantive economic benefits.

Why are Pacific islands battling ecocide?

Low-lying Pacific islands nations are especially vulnerable to rising seas and more intense storms, fueled by climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the proposal to include ecocide as a crime at the ICC in 2019.

“Environmental and climate loss and damage in Vanuatu is devastating our island economy, submerging our territory, and threatening livelihoods,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, said in a news release.

“Legal recognition of severe and widespread environmental harm holds significant potential to ensure justice and, crucially, to deter further destruction,” he added.

Legal experts define a new international crime: 'Ecocide'



Legal experts define a new international crime: 'Ecocide'

Katie Surma, Inside Climate News and Yuliya Talmazan
Tue, June 22, 2021, 

This article was published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is part of "The Fifth Crime," a series on ecocide.

A panel of 12 lawyers from around the world has proposed a legal definition for a new crime that the lawyers want to see outlawed internationally: ecocide, or widespread destruction of the environment.

The definition’s unveiling on Tuesday is the first major step in a global campaign aimed at preventing environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest — and, more broadly, climate change.

The Netherlands-based Stop Ecocide Foundation, along with a coalition of environmentalists, lawyers and human rights advocates, has been pushing since 2017 to make ecocide a crime prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. The court currently prosecutes just four offenses: genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and war crimes.

If the campaign to criminalize ecocide succeeds, the international court would be able to hold accountable those most responsible for major ecological harms, including business and government leaders.

The definition released on Tuesday, the result of months of work by the team of a dozen lawyers, describes ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

If this definition is adopted as the fifth crime before the international court, it would signal that mass environmental destruction is one of the most morally reprehensible crimes in the world, advocates said.

“None of the existing international criminal laws protect the environment as an end in itself, and that's what the crime of ecocide does,” Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London and co-chair of the panel that drafted the definition, said at an online news conference Tuesday.

The International Criminal Court has not commented on the panel’s efforts.

There is still a long road ahead before the ecocide definition could be adopted by the court. One of the court’s 123 member countries would need to submit the definition to the United Nations secretary-general, triggering a formal multistep process that could lead to an amendment of the Rome Statute, which sets the court’s rules.

But legal scholars say the panel’s work could still have effects at the International Criminal Court and beyond, regardless of whether ecocide is officially made an international crime.

“It is an essential exercise because environmental damage is growing phenomenally,” said David J. Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who led the U.S. delegation that negotiated the International Criminal Court’s founding treaty. “Ecocide, by its mere existence, will heighten the issue of the environment.”
The campaign

The International Criminal Court’s four existing crimes focus on harm to humans, not the planet — so the lawyers who began working late last year to craft an ecocide definition had to largely start from scratch.

They wanted it to be strict enough to be meaningful, but they also wanted it to be appealing enough to win support from most of the world’s nations, which are historically reluctant to cede sovereignty to international institutions.

“A perfect definition does you no good if states ignore it or worse, become hostile to the enterprise and set the effort back,” said Nancy Combs, an expert in international criminal law and professor at William and Mary Law School. “If the panel’s calculations are wrong, the whole thing could go bust.”

Related: A growing number of world leaders advocate making ecocide a crime before the International Criminal Court, to serve as a “moral line” for the planet.

The definition aims to be less of a sledgehammer and more of a guardrail for governments and businesses that are most responsible for ecological harm.

“We hope that that approach comes up with something which is potentially effective,” Sands said, but not “so widespread in its effects that states run away and throw their arms up in horror.”

The definition also had to be general enough to address all manner of environmental harms and keep pace with evolving science but specific enough to put would-be wrongdoers on notice of what counts as criminal behavior.

The six-month endeavor required an unprecedented collaborative effort between international criminal lawyers and environmental lawyers, two professions that until now have rarely intersected.
The definition

The 165-word definition resembles the court’s other four crimes in some ways, including by implementing high thresholds, like “widespread” and “severe” damage.

But the new potential crime differs in one major respect: harm to human beings is not a prerequisite for ecocide. That shift would be a major development for international criminal law, which mainly focuses on human injuries, Richard Rogers, a British lawyer and one of the panelists, said.

The definition is also notable for what it doesn’t include. The panel chose not to incorporate a list of examples of ecocide for fear that something would inevitably be left out, possibly signaling that the excluded act may not qualify, lawyers said.

That choice also had a political dimension. The panel did not want countries to feel they were being targeted by examples. “We felt that it was best to keep that door shut,” Sands said.

Sands believes the definition would cover actions that contribute to climate change, though the specifics aren’t yet clear. It may come down to whether the actions are also unlawful, under other national or international laws, he said.
What’s next

Now that the panel has delivered its definition, Stop Ecocide’s diplomatic work will kick into high gear to marshal political backing.

The support, or lack thereof, will act as a bellwether for how serious governments are about combating climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

Lawmakers from close U.S. allies like France, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Canada, Luxemburg and the European Union have voiced their support for making ecocide a crime. Major greenhouse gas emitters like the United States, China, India and Russia are not members of the court but could weigh in on diplomatic negotiations.

If one of the court’s member countries formally proposes an ecocide crime, triggering the start of the amendment process, then at the court’s next annual meeting in December, the countries would hold a vote on whether to take up the proposal. Then, the countries would debate the crime’s definition, a process that could take years, or even decades.

In the meantime, Jojo Mehta, the co-founder of Stop Ecocide Foundation, expects just the prospect of the crime to shift the behavior of some businesses, governments, insurers and financers.

And lawmakers from around the world have already expressed interest in enacting their own national ecocide laws, using the panel’s definition as a starting point.

“Even if some states only revise their domestic law, that would be a success,” Christina Voigt, a Norway-based international law professor and one of the panelists, said.

Above all, the new definition is stimulating debate about whether mass environmental damage should be illegal.

“We fully expect that attention from around the world will expand significantly as a result of this definition emerging,” Mehta said, “and that public interest and demand for this very concrete legal solution will steadily increase.”

What it means if 'ecocide' becomes an international crime

BY JOJO MEHTA, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 07/10/21 

© Getty Images

Ecocide means to destroy the environment, but when considered etymologically, from the Greek and Latin, it signifies to kill one’s home.

When we were first able to view, and photograph, the Earth from space, our planetary perspective changed. Suddenly “home” had a whole new meaning. Nowhere, as far as our technology has been able to discern, is there evidence of any planet like Earth — anywhere else that can sustain life as we know it.

In its recent 11,700-year period of climatic stability, that is what our planetary home has done, facilitating the spread and technological advance of human civilization. While benefiting many in terms of material comfort, life expectancy and societal support structures, this advance has increasingly taken place within a framework of thought that perceives nature as “other” — a resource to be exploited, or a foe to be conquered. The Oxford English Dictionary even defines nature as “opposed to humans.”

With this perspective, ever since the industrial revolution, we have been — at first unwittingly, now recklessly and even knowingly — disrupting the biological, chemical and atmospheric systems on whose stable interaction we intimately and profoundly depend. Greenhouse gas emissions are just one part of this story. Bit by bit, with each felled forest, polluted river system, species extinction, oil spill, toxic waste leak, nuclear or mining disaster, we are committing ecocide. Relentlessly, and with startling rapidity, we are killing our home — while exacerbating social injustice, racial inequality and resource conflict along the way.

And because our legal system doesn’t treat environmental destruction with the seriousness we are now beginning to understand it warrants, we are doing this with impunity.

The word “ecocide” was first used on the international stage by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme at the UN environment conference in Stockholm (1972), when he stated that “destruction brought about... by large scale use of bulldozers and pesticides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention.”

Nearly 50 years later, the world is at last beginning to pay that attention. Last month an expert panel of top international criminal and environmental lawyers, convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, proposed a legal definition of the term, suitable for adoption into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a fifth crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Responding to the explicit call of climate-vulnerable island nations Vanuatu and the Maldives, directly impacted by rising sea levels and heavy tropical storms, such a move would criminalize, “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”

The warmth of response to this legal definition has been remarkable. Sparking articles in over 100 global publications in the first week, from the Financial Times to Der Spiegel and from Bloomberg to Le Monde, it has also prompted political action. From Bangladesh to the Caribbean to the UK (where an amendment to the government’s Environment Bill includes the newly released definition in full), diplomats and politicians are joining a conversation which already includes EU states such as France and Belgium and has the support of public figures as influential and diverse as Pope Francis and Greta Thunberg.

Since the International Criminal Court’s mandate is the prosecution of individuals, the addition of ecocide to the list of crimes considered “of most serious concern to the international community as a whole” would make key corporate and political actors personally liable to criminal prosecution in any ratifying state, should their decisions threaten severe and either widespread or long-term environmental damage — thus creating an enforceable deterrent to help prevent finance from flowing to projects that could destroy ecosystems. Nothing concentrates the mind like having one’s personal freedom on the line.

Moreover, ecocide law may prove to be not just a stick but also a carrot. Setting a criminal parameter will not only steer activity away from hazards — acting as a kind of health and safety law for the planet – but is likely to stimulate innovation and development in a healthy direction in a wide range of economic sectors. Many of the solutions we need to transition to sustainability are already available — renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, circular economy — but aren’t being supported or developed at scale while finance continues to flow towards the same old destructive approaches, leaving those who would do the right thing at a disadvantage.

Criminalizing ecosystem destruction at the highest level could also shore up and strengthen the whole edifice of environmental law, supporting all those working to improve regulation and best practice, from frontline activists to academics, scientists, NGOs and policymakers.

While it would be naive to believe that establishing this crime would be a silver bullet for all of our environmental woes, or even prevent all ecocides, it is difficult to see how our planet’s life-support systems can be adequately protected — or indeed Paris targets and UN Sustainable Development Goals realistically approached — without a “hard stop” intervention of this kind. This year’s NDC synthesis report from the UNFCCC certainly suggests that we’re not doing well without it. Goodwill agreements and raised ambitions are clearly not up to the task.

But perhaps the most powerful effect of defining and criminalizing ecocide as an international crime may be that of beginning to shift cultural and moral assumptions. Our understanding of our place in, and responsibility towards, the natural world is in dire need of a reality check. Calling out and condemning ecocide for what it is may be exactly what is required if we are to begin to transform our relationship with the Earth from one of harm to one of harmony. That may be the best way to ensure our children, and our children’s children, will still be able to call this beautiful planet “home.”

Jojo Mehta is co-founder and executive director of Stop Ecocide International and chair of the charitable Stop Ecocide Foundation. She co-founded the public campaign in 2017 (alongside legal pioneer the late Polly Higgins) to support making severe harm to nature an international crime and has overseen the growth of the global movement while coordinating legal developments, diplomatic traction and public narrative.

  

Rising Desertification Shows We Can’t Keep Farming With Fossil Fuels

By Jack Marley

December 15, 2024

Source: The Conversation

Three-quarters of Earth’s land has become drier since 1990.

Droughts come and go – more often and more extreme with the incessant rise of greenhouse gas emissions over the last three decades – but burning fossil fuels is transforming our blue planet. A new report from scientists convened by the United Nations found that an area as large as India has become arid, and it’s probably permanent.

A transition from humid to dry land is underway that has shrunk the area available to grow food, costing Africa 12% of its GDP and depleting our natural buffer to rising temperatures. We have covered several consequences of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction in this newsletter. Today we turn to the loss of life-giving moisture – what is driving it, and what we are ultimately losing.

Why is the land drying out so fast? It’s partly because there is more heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels. This excess heat has exacerbated evaporation and is drawing more moisture out of soil.

‘Oil, not soil’

Climate change has also made the weather more volatile. When drought does cede to rain, more of it arrives in bruising downpours that slough the topsoil.

A stable climate would deliver a year’s rain more evenly and gently, nourishing the soil so that it can nurture microbes that hold onto water and release nutrients.

This is the kind of soil that industrial civilisation inherited. It’s disappearing.

“Soil is being lost up to 100 times faster than it is formed, and desertification is growing year on year,” says Anna Krzywoszynska, a sustainable food expert at the University of Sheffield.

“The truth is, the modern farming system is based around oil, not soil.”

Fossil fuels have unleashed agriculture from the constraints of local ecology. Once, the nutrients that were taken from the soil in the form of food had to be replaced using organic waste, Krzywoszynska says. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, made with fossil energy at great cost to the climate, changed all that.

Next came diesel-powered machinery that brought more wilderness into cultivation. Farm vehicles as heavy as the biggest dinosaurs now churn and compact the soil, making it difficult for earthworms and assorted soil organisms to maintain it.

Tractors and chemicals served humanity for a long time, Krzywoszynska says. But soil is now so degraded that no amount of fossil help can compensate.

“Across the world, soils have been pushed beyond their capacity to recover, and humanity’s ability to feed itself is now in danger.”

Green pumps and white mirrors

The primary way that we have been making up for lost food yield is turning more forests into farms. This is accelerating our journey towards a drier, less liveable world because forests, if allowed to thrive, create their own rain.

“Water sucked up by tree roots is pumped back into the atmosphere where it forms clouds which eventually release the water as rain to be reabsorbed by trees,” say Callum Smith, Dominick Spracklen and Jess Baker, a team of biologists at the University of Leeds who study the Amazon rainforest.

“In the Amazon and Congo river basins, somewhere between a quarter and a half of all rainfall comes from moisture pumped from the forest itself.”

Some experts have argued that the UN report understates Earth’s growing aridity by overlooking the water that is held in snow caps, ice sheets and glaciers. Climate change is melting this frozen reservoir, which also serves as a seasonal source of water.

“And as water in its bright-white solid form is much more effective at reflecting heat from the sun, its rapid loss is also accelerating global heating,” says Mark Brandon, a professor of polar oceanography at The Open University.

How do we adapt our relationship with the land to remoisturise the world? Krzywoszynska argues that there is no easy solution, but the future of food-growing “is localised and diverse”.

“To ensure that we eat well and live well in the future, we’ll need to reverse the trend towards greater homogenisation which drove food systems so far.”

The good news, according to Krzywoszynska, is that farmers are experimenting with methods that restore the soil even as they produce a diverse range of nutritious food. These innovators need rights and secure access to the land, the opportunity to share their experiences and financial and political support.

“Regenerating land is a win-win, for humans and their ecosystems, if we dare to look beyond the immediate short-term horizon,” she says.

Refusing Ecocide: From Fossil Capitalism to a Liveable World

By William K. Carroll

December 16, 2024

Source: Socialist Project

On February 8, 2024, Earth reached a new milestone. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that mean temperature in the previous 12 months had been more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. As the Progressive International (2024) commented, “Just nine short years ago, the world’s governments agreed in Paris that they would limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees. ‘1.5 to stay alive’ was the mantra. They failed in record time.”

In fact, the World Meteorological Organization’s State of Global Climate 2023, issued in March 2024, reports a plethora of records broken, even smashed, for greenhouse gas levels, ocean heat and acidification, surface temperatures, sea level rise, glacier retreat, and Antarctic Sea ice cover (World Meteorological Organization, 2024). These ‘records’ are broken at our peril, and indeed, the human dimensions of climate change are also undeniable. As the report observes, in 2023 “heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and intense tropical cyclones wreaked havoc on every continent and caused huge socioeconomic losses” (World Meteorological Organization, 2024:iii).

The consequences were particularly devastating for vulnerable populations, as “extreme climate conditions exacerbated humanitarian crises, with millions experiencing acute food insecurity and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes” (World Meteorological Organization, 2024). It is hardly surprising that nearly 80 percent of the world’s leading climate scientists, when polled in the spring of 2024, foresaw a global temperature increase of at least 2.5 degrees Celsius by end of century. The vast majority of the most knowledgeable people on our planet “expect climate havoc to unfold in the coming decades” (Carrington 2024).

Hothouse Earth

In 2018, a team of earth scientists introduced the term “Hothouse Earth,” in a widely cited article. They noted a rapid advance toward planetary thresholds at which “intrinsic bio-geophysical feedbacks in the Earth System … could become the dominant processes controlling the system’s trajectory” (Steffen et al. 2018:8254). These thresholds are called ‘tipping points’, beyond which climate change accelerates and becomes irreversible, in a cascade of positive feedback. The feedback processes include permafrost thawing, which releases methane (a greenhouse gas 84 times more impactful than CO2) and loss of polar ice sheets, which is not only elevating sea levels but weakening the albedo effect.¹ As the planet warms, increased atmospheric methane and shrinking polar ice caps, triggered by global heating, amplify global heating.

There are other feedback loops. Climate chaos already underway (drought, wildfires) contributes to the die-back of tropical and boreal forests – turning ecosystems that have fixed carbon for millennia into grasslands and carbon bombs. Meanwhile, increasing volumes of atmospheric carbon precipitate as acid rain, reducing the oceans’ capacity to absorb carbon, and further heating the hothouse.² Steffen et al noted that “Hothouse Earth is likely to be uncontrollable and dangerous to many … and it poses severe risks for health, economies, political stability … and ultimately, the habitability of the planet for human” (2018:8257). The challenge for humanity is to create “a ‘Stabilized Earth’ pathway that steers the Earth System away from its current trajectory toward the threshold beyond which is Hothouse Earth” (2018:8254).

Ecocide

The situation has been described as climate crisis, climate breakdown, climate emergency but, most ominously, as ecocide. In the scholarly literature, ‘ecocide’ emerged as a term in 1970 (Weisberg 1970) but was rarely invoked in the titles of academic articles and books until recent years.³ In his eponymously titled book, David Whyte defined ecocide as “the deliberate destruction of our natural environment” (2020:2), and pointed his finger directly at the profit-driven corporations that “are wrecking our world” (2020).

Stop Ecocide International, a movement organization campaigning to make ecocide an international crime, defines the term as “the mass damage and destruction of the natural living world,” literally “killing one’s home” (Stop Ecocide n.d.). Ecocide does not mean the end of nature, which is indifferent to any particular species, including ours. Nor is the prospect of ecocide a death sentence for all of humanity. Just as genocide – a term painfully familiar to us from contemporary Palestine – does not mean the annihilation of an entire ethnic group, ecocide implies the destruction of the conditions for a decent life for vast numbers of people. The growing numbers of climate refugees from regions that are already becoming uninhabitable – whether from sea level rise or desertification – confirm that ecocide is already upon us, in its earliest stage.

Ecocide is very much about the Earth’s prospects of supporting a large population of humans, but other species are already in sharp decline. Drawing on the most recent figures from the Living Planet Index,⁴ Patrick Greenfield (2022) notes that between 1970 and 2018 “wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69%”; “the abundance of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles is falling fast, as populations of sea lions, sharks, frogs and salmon collapse.” Indeed, the climate crisis is entirely entangled with the Sixth Extinction, the cumulative decline of living systems – and of biodiversity – as forests are cleared to make room for cattle grazing, reducing biodiversity, impairing the Earth’s ‘lungs’ from fixing atmospheric carbon and increasing carbon emissions. Elizabeth Kolbert writes, in her Pulitzer Prize winning The Sixth Extinction:

“Having freed ourselves from the constraints of evolution, humans nevertheless remain dependent on the earth’s biological and geochemical systems. By disrupting these systems – cutting down tropical forests, altering the composition of the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans – we’re putting our own survival in danger.” (2014:267)

Although the Sixth Extinction looms in the background, this book is laser-focussed on the single most urgent ecological and existential challenge of our time: the climate crisis, its human causes, and the possibilities for refusing this cardinal element of ecocide.

The climate crisis is a natural phenomenon, driven by human activities (which, as I will explain in Chapter 1, are also natural phenomena). This has led many earth scientists to argue that the planet has crossed into a new epoch, the Anthropocene – that of the ‘geology of mankind’ – (Crutzen 2002), “beginning around 1950, representing the emergence of human-industrialized society as the primary factor in Earth System change” (Foster 2024:249). Critical social scientists, however, have noted that this term can be misleading. It fails to identify the specific human agents, operating within social structures, who are the primary drivers of the crisis. Andreas Malm (2016:391) suggests, “this is the geology not of mankind, but of capital accumulation.”

Drive for Capital Accumulation

Certainly, the corporations that dominate the fossil fuel sector, and their predecessor firms, are the major culprits. In 2014, Richard Heede published an article documenting that between 1751 (before the invention of the steam engine) and 2010 the 90 biggest emitters – the ‘carbon majors’ – were responsible for 63% of cumulative worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases, with half of all emissions having been released since 1986. In the seven years following the 2015 Paris climate accord, the carbon majors increased their emissions; indeed 80% of global emissions from 2016 through 2022 “can be traced to just 57 corporate and state producing entities,” demonstrating “the outsized influence of a small group of producers that are increasing production” (InfluenceMap 2024:4, 26). Their investment decisions have directly caused the climate crisis, and continue to exacerbate it. The CEOs of these fossil-fuel producers could fit into a couple of school buses.

But the carbon majors are enabled by other actors and institutions. At the Corporate Mapping Project, a community-university research and public engagement project I co-directed from 2015 to 2023 (Carroll and Daub 2015; Carroll 2021), we mapped the various connections between the fossil-fuel sector and the economic, political, and cultural organizations that enable and legitimate its activities, focussing on the case of Canada, a major fossil-fuel producer. In Chapter 4, I reflect on some of our findings, which reveal a “regime of obstruction” that enables and protects the revenue streams and fixed-capital investments of fossil-fuel corporations and blocks meaningful climate action. The key actors in this regime include the banks and institutional investors that finance the industry, the captured regulators that green-light new investments, the government ministries in regular dialogue with industry lobbyists, and a range of organizations that legitimate the industry, from think tanks, industry groups, and business councils to corporate and astro-turf media and business schools.

This book focusses on these centres of economic, political, and cultural power. I analyze how their actions have driven the climate crisis, and why the ruling economic and political bloc, based in the advanced capitalist west, or global North, is incapable of steering humanity to a safe destination. Ecocide, however, is not inevitable. In recent decades, many initiatives have appeared in resistance and opposition to ecocidal practices. These include:

• grassroots movements and street actions to raise consciousness and pressure governing elites, such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future;
• more organized popular opposition grounded in the left, such as like Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, the Global Ecosocialist Network, and the Climate Justice Alliance;
• online platforms that offer critical policy analysis focussed on the fossil-fuel industry and its allies, enablers, and legitimators, such as Oil Change International, InfluenceMap and the Climate Social Science Network; and
• alternative media focussed on the ecological crisis, such as Desmog, Green Left, and Climate&Capitalism.

However, in the dominant institutions, including the annual Convention of the Parties (COP) that governs the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, corporate interests predominate, fettering the transformations that are obviously necessary. At COP 28, held in Dubai in December 2023, a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists (2,456 in all) outnumbered all national delegations but those of the host and host-designate. Dwarfing all official Indigenous representatives 7-to-1, those lobbyists found ready allies among the many fossil-fuel employees embedded in the national delegations of France, Italy, and other Northern countries (Corporate Europe Observatory 2023). Not surprisingly, COP 28, like all previous COPs,

“failed to agree on the need to phase out fossil fuels and to set a deadline for doing so. Instead, the final document suggests that states may – with no obligations – ‘draw down’ fossil fuel production. The demands from over 120 countries to completely eliminate new fossil fuel production were ignored.” (Progressive International, 2023)

The chasm between the urgency of serious climate action, understood by many, and the stasis of climate policy at global and national levels is palpable. Why this stasis, and what is to be done?

What Is To Be Done?

This book addresses these questions, in two parts. The first develops a critical perspective on fossil capitalism and climate breakdown, drawing primarily on the historical materialist framework first introduced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This framework directs our attention toward a ‘trifecta of power’ at the centre of capitalism as a way of life, illuminated via three core concepts. Capitalist accumulation, the economic aspect, is driven by the private profit motive toward endless growth and increasing inequities. Imperialism, the geo-political-economic aspect, entails the domination of the global South by advanced capitalist states as they strip the land of resources and super-exploit cheap labour. Finally, hegemony, the cultural and political aspect, organizes popular consent to the capitalist way of life, particularly in the global North.

In Chapter 1, I unpack that trifecta, and apply it in recounting the century-and-a-half epoch from the Industrial Revolution to the close of World War Two, during which fossil capitalism was fully established. Chapter 2 takes up the post-war era – the ‘golden years’ of economic prosperity, consumer capitalism and class compromise, from the mid-1940s into the 1970s, during which the Great Acceleration took shape, exponentially increasing carbon emissions and trending toward ecological overshoot.⁵ The final chapter in Part 1 brings us up to date. Powered by fossil fuels, capital has subjected the world to its predatory logic, eventuating in today’s deep civilizational crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s, the economic crisis of the 1970s was resolved through neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization and austerity, as capital became more globalized and financialized. Although the global financial meltdown of 2008 discredited neoliberalism, no alternative has gained favour in the centres political-economic power. As climate breakdown becomes increasingly visible, and as a diverse array of movements for climate justice and sanity intensify hegemonic struggle, the neoliberal zombie stumbles toward the precipice.

The book’s second part appraises solutions to the climate crisis that have been proposed from various quarters. In these chapters I examine how proposed remedies square with our core analytical concepts of accumulation, imperialism and hegemony. This engagement with alternatives begins in Chapter 4 with a critique of the ‘false solutions’ comprising Climate Capitalism: attempts to regulate fossil capital via market mechanisms or to create techno-fixes, as in changing the energy source without addressing the socio-ecological relations at the heart of the crisis. The rejection of these approaches, which remain within the logic of accumulation, imperialism and bourgeois hegemony, leads to the final two chapters. Chapter 5 explores three alternatives that move us in the right direction, yet fail to provide the comprehensive approach that the civilizational and climate crisis actually demands. These projects – the Green New Deal, Degrowth, and Buen Vivir – each contain currents that could converge upon a refusal of ecocide.

The challenge lies in pulling these social forces into a coherent hegemonic project with a mass base. Chapter 6 takes up this challenge. I argue for a democratic eco-socialism that breaks decisively from both fossil capitalism and Climate Capitalism. A capacious eco-socialist project directly confronts the trifecta of power that is at the heart of ecological degradation and social injustice. It is our best bet, against lengthening odds, in refusing ecocide. •

This is an excerpt from William K. Carroll Refusing Ecocide: From Fossil Capitalism to a Liveable World, (London: Routledge, 2025).

References

• Canada. 2011. Canada’s State of the Oceans Report, 2012. Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
• Carrington, Damian. 2024. “World’s Top Climate Scientists Expect Global Heating to Blast Past 1.5C Target.” The Guardian. Retrieved May 13, 2024.
• Carroll, William K. 2021. “Introduction.” in Regime of Obstruction, edited by W. K. Carroll. Edmonton: AU Press, pp. 3–31.
• Carroll, William K., and Shannon Daub. 2015. “We’re Putting Fossil Fuel Industry Influence under the Microscope.” Corporate Mapping Project. Retrieved May 1, 2024.
• Corporate Europe Observatory. 2023. “Record Number of Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Granted Access to COP28 Climate Talks.” Corporate Europe Observatory. Retrieved May 2, 2024.
• Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415(6867):23–23. doi:10.1038/415023a
• Earth Overshoot Day. 2024. “How Many Earths? How Many Countries?” Earth Overshoot Day. Retrieved April 30, 2024.
• Foster, John Bellamy. 2024. The Dialectics of Ecology: Socialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Greenfield, Patrick. 2022. “The Biodiversity Crisis in Numbers – a Visual Guide.” The Guardian. Retrieved April 26, 2024.
• Heede, Richard. 2014. “Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers, 1854–2010.” Climatic Change 122(1–2):229–41. doi: 10.1007/s10584-013-0986-y
• InfluenceMap. 2024. “The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report.” Retrieved May 28, 2024.
• Kashiwase, Haruhiko, Kay I. Ohshima, Sohey Nihashi, and Hajo Eicken. 2017. “Evidence for Ice-Ocean Albedo Feedback in the Arctic Ocean Shifting to a Seasonal Ice Zone.” Scientific Reports 7(1):8170. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-08467-z
• Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
• Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso.
• Progressive International. 2023. “PI Briefing No. 50 COP Out.” Progressive International. Retrieved May 2, 2024.
• Progressive International. 2024. “PI Briefing | No. 6 | 1.5 to Stay Alive?” Progressive International. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
• Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. 2018. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(33):8252–59. doi:10.1073/pnas.1810141115
• Stop Ecocide. n.d. “What Is Ecocide?” Stop Ecocide. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
• Weisberg, Barry. 1970. Ecocide in Indochina: The Ecology of War. San Francisco: Canfield Press.
• Whyte, David. 2020. Ecocide: Kill the Corporation before It Kills Us. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• World Meteorological Organization. 2024. “State of the Global Climate 2023.” Retrieved May 2, 2024.

Endnotes

1. As Kashiwase et al. (2017:8170) explain, “Ice-albedo feedback is a key aspect of global climate change. In the polar region, a decrease of snow and ice area results in a decrease of surface albedo, and the intensified solar heating further decreases the snow and ice area.”
2. Each year, about one third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in fossil fuel emissions dissolves in ocean surface waters, forming carbonic acid and increasing ocean acidity. Over the next century or so, acidification will be intensified near the surface where much of the marine life that humans depend upon live’ (Canada 2011:10).
3. From 1970 to 1990 ‘ecocide’ appeared in titles of 49 articles and books in the Google Scholar database. The term was used in titles of 187 publications between 1991 and 2010. From 2011 to 25 April 2024, 770 academic publications included ‘ecocide’ in their titles (393 since 2021; search conducted on 25 April 2024).
4. livingplanetindex.org, accessed 26 April 2024.
5. The Global Footprint Network estimates that “humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. That’s equivalent to using the resources of 1.7 Earths.” For everyone on the planet to live like the average American or Canadian would require 5.1 Earths (Earth Overshoot Day 2024).

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William K. Carroll

Bill Carroll established the Interdisciplinary Program in Social Justice Studies at the University of Victoria in 2008 and served as its director from 2008 to 2012. His writings can be found at onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/wcarroll.