Close to two thousand environmental human rights defenders have been killed in 57 countries since 2002, with about four losing their lives every week in 2019. Many of these defenders represent Indigenous Peoples and local communities protecting ecosystems from large-scale environmentally destructive projects. As the positive contributions of Indigenous and local communities to biodiversity conservation become better recognized, so should the losses and risks that they face. Despite major efforts at documenting abuses and protecting defenders, many blind spots and gaps remain. Here, we call for the conservation community to put the protection of defenders at the heart of its strategy to slow down and reverse the current onslaught on the environment. The conservation community can respond in a number of ways including reaching out to its constituencies, working together with the human rights community, and mobilizing its networks, field offices, and presence in remote areas to denounce abuses and counter isolation. In doing so the conservation community can advance the collective agenda bringing together conservation and environment-related human rights through the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.
Over the past two decades, the terms "environmental defenders", "land defenders" and "environmental human rights defenders" have gained currency among NGOs, media and UN agencies. This has coincided with the development of an international infrastructure encompassing prizes, resolutions and resources to support and acknowledge defenders and their causes. However, the uptake of the term "environmental defenders" and related notions has been uneven across geographical areas, languages and those considered defenders. Listening to the voices of this last group themselves, this chapter considers two questions. First, it explores the connotations of the term "environmental defenders" and examines to what extent it corresponds to the ways those labelled in this way see and identify themselves and their work. Second, it looks at the ways in which the term empowers or, by contrast, disempowers, and the various advantages and drawbacks related to its use. We conclude by considering a number of ways in which those supporting or reporting on defenders can mitigate the inadvertent negative effects of the term, to which so far no alternative has emerged that is less contentious or better captures the heterogeneous groups that it designates.
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