Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

On 23 April 2026 Anamaría Martinez and Elizabeth Moses for WRI explain how environmental defenders help prevent deforestation and protect ecosystems critical to climate stability. Yet many face severe and sometimes lethal threats while remaining underrecognized in climate policies that often depend on their work but fail to protect them.

Image by VaLife/Shutterstock

Benitha Bompendju grew up in Tshuapa province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, surrounded by the dense rainforests of the Congo Basin. The world’s second-largest tropical forest, it plays a critical role in regulating the global climate, conserving biodiversity and sustaining local communities like Benitha’s. Yet when she was growing up, industrial logging was constant.

Concessionaires licensed by the government to harvest timber promised to bring benefits like schools and health centers. But these projects often did not materialize, and local authorities rarely got involved. Instead, companies stripped trees from the land and left local communities — who have long stewarded and relied on the rainforest — with little in return.

“As children, we watched the concessionaires leave with the wood and our parents received nothing,” Benitha recalls. “That was injustice.” This experience shaped Benitha’s future work. In 2016, she began monitoring forest-use contracts and documenting violations, working with partner organizations and government agencies to hold violators accountable. Since then, these joint efforts have helped curb illegal logging, enforce environmental regulations and deliver promised investments to communities.

Yet this critical work can be dangerous — lethally so. Benitha and other environmental defenders like her are often caught in the crosshairs of commercial interests and corruption. Many face threats, intimidation, physical assault, kidnapping and deadly violence. Global Witness documented 146 defenders killed or missing in 2024. The total number killed or missing from 2012 to 2024 is over 2,200 — and because many cases go unreported, the true toll is likely higher.

Research consistently shows that forests managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities have lower deforestation rates and greater carbon sequestration than those managed under other regimes, making their contribution a measurable climate outcome. But without necessary protections — from access to climate justice to the systems and law enforcement needed to prevent threats and tragic loss of life — environmental defenders can’t safeguard vital ecosystems. And such protections can’t materialize or become institutionalized if environmental defenders aren’t accurately recognized and reflected in climate and nature policies.

The UN defines environmental human rights defenders as “individuals and groups who, in their personal or professional capacity and in a peaceful manner, strive to protect and promote human rights relating to the environment, including water, air, land, flora and fauna.” This includes those who defend the collective right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as well as traditional lands and livelihoods, through actions ranging from community organizing and legal advocacy to protesting, public campaigning and journalism. Many come from Indigenous and tribal groups with deep ancestral ties to the land.

Our research focuses specifically on frontline environmental defenders — those who live in, and defend, resource-rich areas experiencing what the UN Environment Programme describes as “abuse of environmental rights which affects a growing number of people in many parts of the world.”

To understand how defenders are represented in the gray (unpublished) and peer-reviewed literature on climate change under the UNFCCC, we examined 170 peer-reviewed documents from 2015 to 2025, including journal articles, books and reports, to map how defenders’ actions and contributions are reflected. The literature we surveyed both reflects trends in policymaking and serves as a source decision-makers might draw on to develop global and national climate and nature policies. Download

We found that groups such as Indigenous Peoples, women, local communities and youth are increasingly acknowledged as “agents of change” with decision-making capacity, rather than portrayed as victims or passive recipients of project benefits.

However, only 5% of the literature explicitly identifies members of these groups as “defenders” working to protect ecosystems and resources. This represents a crucial gap. Climate literature (and wider climate governance frameworks) tends to recognize who these people are — such as Indigenous Peoples, women-led organizations and youth activists — but without recognizing what they do, such as monitor deforestation and challenge extractive industries, or the risks they face as a result.

This difference may seem subtle, but is crucial. Recognizing someone’s identity alone doesn’t necessarily translate into protection or funding for the stewardship and advocacy these groups engage in. Not all identity groups (for example, Indigenous Peoples) are environmental defenders, and not all defenders belong to these groups, even if there is often an overlap. Recognizing defenders’ on the ground contributions, on the other hand, is important because it highlights their role in delivering concrete climate actions — and the need for institutional support and protection, not just their inclusion as stakeholders.

Protection can include early-warning and rapid-response systems that trigger protective action when defenders report threats or surveillance. It also means access to legal aid and judicial remedies, such as fast-track investigations, special counsel and public defenders trained in environmental and land-rights cases.

Meanwhile, governments are missing out on more effective and equitable climate solutions. Defenders bring unique perspectives, knowledge and lived experience — from agroforestry practices rooted in local traditions to stronger data collection and monitoring for more accurate NDC reporting — and help ensure policies are carried out more effectively. Yet threats to defenders weaken both national and global climate action by deterring those who risk their lives to safeguard ecosystems and enforce laws and policies.

What Would It Take to Support Environmental Defenders?

Frameworks like the Paris Agreement and the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP) under the UNFCCC already aim to integrate rights-based climate action into national and global goals. But they lack clear definitions and guidance on how defenders should be recognized and supported. To truly support environmental defenders, they must be incorporated into climate policy, reporting and finance.

Here are three ways this can happen: 

1) Defining ‘Defenders’

The first step is defining what defenders are — not by identities, but by the concrete actions they take for climate protection and community resilience. Many don’t self-identify as “defenders.” They are individuals and communities that contribute to climate action and environmental protection. This would capture these de facto roles.

Adopting a practice-based definition in national and multilateral policymaking, alongside indicators that track defenders’ contributions to climate action, would allow policymakers to systematically recognize the people protecting ecosystems on the ground. Indicators could include community monitoring results, forest protection metrics or the number of co-designed adaptation plans.

This formalization would have three practical implications: First, recognizing defenders as a group would allow implementation of protection measures by identifying and addressing the risks they take. Second, it could enable governments to allocate budget to support defender-led initiatives. Third, it could strengthen their participation in decision-making at national and international levels by giving them space to share their knowledge on climate action and local ecosystems.

2) Protecting Defenders

Without safety guarantees, defenders cannot participate or contribute effectively. Protection requires two key elements: physical safety and legal resources.

Physical safety includes strengthening safeguards to reduce social and environmental risks and exploitation, for example, when concessionaires undertake projects in resource-rich areas. One way this can be supported is by creating early warning systems that allow defenders to report threats to the authorities and receive support, ensuring formal grievance mechanisms exist to ensure defender safety (with international backing, if needed). Another is by integrating defender protection requirements into climate funding, including zero-tolerance policies for violent reprisals.

Legal protection includes access to resources and courts. However, many defenders lack access due to prohibitive costs, limited connections and a poor understanding of the system. Where corruption is entrenched and governance weak, domestic legal systems can be used against defenders, leading to their criminalization as a way to silence them and stop their work. International accountability mechanisms — including UN human rights bodies, transnational legal networks and climate finance conditions tied to defender safety — can create external pressure where national systems fail. But they can only function if defenders are formally recognized. Without this, accountability is nearly impossible to demand.

Some progress has been made in different parts of the world. The Aarhus Convention, adopted in 1998, requires parties to “ensure that individuals exercising their rights to environmental information, participation and justice are not penalized, persecuted or harassed.” And Article 9 of the Escazú Agreement, adopted in 2018, calls for “a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organizations that promote and defend human rights in environmental matters.” 

At the national level, climate justice laws and policies in Colombia, Mexico, Indonesia and the Philippines enshrine protection mechanisms that cover defenders and their work, while aiming to provide access to legal support. 

However, significant implementation gaps remain.

Colombia’s law has stalled due to limited accessibility, the absence of a clear definition of who constitutes a human rights defender and a reshuffling of funds during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Mexico, a backlog caused in part by insufficient staffing prevents cases from being addressed in a timely manner, and protection measures are not always adequately implemented.

Indonesia recognizes defenders explicitly, but in practice, continued criminalization and intimidation prevent them from accessing the legal protection the mechanism provides. In the Philippines, financial and cultural barriers to filing cases, limited legal knowledge among defenders and slow processing times hinder the widespread implementation of legal framework protecting them.

Yet when defenders can access justice, legal action can drive accountability and tangible outcomes. In 2018, 25 Colombian youth aged seven to 26 years old filed a lawsuit against the government, alleging that climate change and failure to reduce deforestation threatened their fundamental rights. While a lower court initially ruled against them, Colombia’s Supreme Court overturned the decision and ordered the government to devise and implement action plans to address deforestation in the Amazon.

Defenders need legal support and safe, inclusive access to the processes behind these laws and regulations. Rights-based climate cases and stronger rule of law systems provide essential recourse when other accountability channels fail.

3) Integrating Defenders into Climate Plans

Protecting Defenders Is Essential for Climate Action

Protecting environmental defenders is a question of safeguarding human rights and life, ensuring climate justice and strengthening climate action.

People like Benitha, who put their lives on the line to defend the forests and other ecosystems that sustain them and the world, should not face these high-stake risks alone. Governments, multilateral institutions and finance bodies share the responsibility of formally recognizing and protecting environmental defenders within climate, nature and other policies.

Doing so is a matter of equity — and a climate imperative. When defenders are safe and supported, forests stay standing, emissions stay out of the atmosphere and frontline communities can continue building resilience for their own futures and the world’s. 

https://www.wri.org/insights/defenders-in-climate-policy