Dirty England

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More than 1,300 sites across England are breaching annual limits for harmful pollutant nitrogen dioxide, analysis by Friends of the Earth suggests. Friends of the Earth said 1,360 monitoring sites across the country exceeded the annual average air quality target of 40 micrograms per cubic metre of air for nitrogen dioxide in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available.



 In some spots, the annual average was more than double the level set to protect health from long-term exposure to pollution, the analysis shows. Nitrogen dioxide is a pollutant which mostly comes from traffic fumes and, along with other pollution such as particulate matter, is linked to health issues such as lung and respiratory diseases and early deaths.



 Simon Bowens, clean air campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said failing to fix air pollution costs lives and showed a failure to address the climate crisis.



 The 10 sites with the highest annual average nitrogen dioxide levels according to the Friends of the Earth analysis are:

– Chideock Hill, West Dorset 97.7
– Station Taxi Rank, Sheffield 91.7
– North Street Clock Tower, Brighton 90.8
– Neville Street Tunnel, Leeds 88
– Strand, City of Westminster 88
– Walbrook Wharf, City of London 87
– Hickleton opp Fir Tree Close, Doncaster 86
– Marylebone Road, City of Westminster 85
– Euston Road, London Borough of Camden 82.3
– Hickleton, John O’Gaunts, Doncaster 82

Bangladesh Floods and the Climate Emergency

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Around a third of Bangladesh is underwater due to recent catastrophic flooding and the climate crisis has played a role in the devastation, according to experts.
The widespread flooding, which has displaced millions of vulnerable people and caused more than 100 deaths, follows the deadly super-cyclone Amphan which hit the region in May. Amphan tore through coastal areas of Bangladesh, a low-lying, heavily-populated country of 162 million people, along with neighbouring regions of India. The cyclone killed more than 100 people and impacted at least 1 million, according to the United Nations, wiping out villages and essential infrastructure with the cost of damage estimated at $11.5 billion.
Torrential monsoon rains this month have compounded the suffering, sending water rushing from hilly areas and causing dangerously high water levels in two of Bangladesh’s major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna.


Developing countries like Bangladesh, which have historically contributed little to the pollution driving increased temperatures and rising sea levels, will suffer the greatest impacts. 10 per cent of the world’s most affluent people are responsible for between 25 and 43 per cent of environmental impact. In contrast, the world’s bottom 10 per cent income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.
Dr Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh, told The Independent that the “fingerprint” of climate change could be seen in the magnitude of the recent disasters. I think that this is definitely linked to climate change,” Dr Huq said. “This is a one in 20-year flood event that we are having now for the fifth time in the last 20 years. The events didn’t happen because of climate change but they are definitely more intense because we’ve interfered with the climate system.” Dr Huq pointed to the direct impacts that global heating had in intensifying Amphan into a super-cyclone in the Bay of Bengal. “Sea surface temperature aggravates the cyclone and makes it more intense,” he said. Dr Huq wrote that “it is now apparent that the year 2020 is clearly the year in which the impact of climate change can be identified in both Cyclone Amphan that hit Bangladesh and India a few months ago, as well as the current flooding which is affecting millions of people as well as crops and property”.
A monsoon climate change assessment by the American Meteorological Society in June found that “continued global warming and urbanisation over the past century has already caused a significant rise in the intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall events in all monsoon regions”.
World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General Petteri Taalas noted this week that “climate change is increasing the risk of extreme rainfall events, flooding and coastal inundation”.
The Bangladesh Directorate General of Health Services said this week that 129 people had died in the floods. Across India, Bangladesh and Nepal, some 550 people have died and millions more have been displaced from their homes, said the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). More than 100 Bangladeshis, mostly children, had drowned while other deaths were attributed to water-borne diseases. More than 3.3 million people had been impacted the flooding and a third of the total are children, according to UNICEF. Millions of Bangladeshis have little in the way of resources to fall back on, in a country where one in five people live below the poverty line and the average wage is less than $5 a day.
 Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the IFRC, told AP that South Asia could face a humanitarian crisis.
“People in Bangladesh, India and Nepal are sandwiched in a triple disaster of flooding, the coronavirus and an associated socioeconomic crisis of loss of livelihoods and jobs,” he said. “Flooding of farmlands and destruction of crops can push millions of people, already badly impacted by Covid-19, further into poverty.”
Bangladesh is widely-recognised as one of the most climate-vulnerable countries on the planet with impacts expected to intensify in the coming decades. The number of Bangladeshis displaced by the climate crisis could reach 13.3 million by 2050, according to a 2018 World Bank report. The recent disasters bring into sharp focus the ongoing calls from developing countries to their wealthier counterparts to address the inequities, the so-called “loss and damage” of the climate crisis. Dr Huq said that “loss and damage” remained a deeply political issue and a “taboo” subject in the developed world.
“We are now seeing inevitable loss and damage that is no longer natural but is manmade,” he said. “Under the framework, vulnerable developing countries have been demanding some financial mechanism or funding to be made available, to compensate the victims of climate change.”

UK wildlife on the brink

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A quarter of native mammals now at risk of extinction in the UK. This is according to the first Red List of UK mammals – a comprehensive review of the status of species, including wildcats, red squirrels and hedgehogs.
“When we draw all the evidence together – about population size and how isolated and fragmented those populations are – we come up with this list of 11 of our 47 native species being threatened imminently,” explained Prof Mathews. “And there are more species that are categorised as ‘near threatened’. That means that we need to keep an eye on these species, because while we don’t yet have a red flag waving, they’re still abundant enough to be able to turn things around.”
The mammals in the most threatened categories are as follows:

Critically endangered: Wildcat, greater mouse-eared bat; Endangered: Beaver, red squirrel, water vole, grey long-eared bat; Vulnerable: Hedgehog, hazel dormouse, Orkney vole, Serotine bat, Barbastelle bat; Near threatened: Mountain hare, harvest mouse, lesser white-toothed shrew, Leisler’s bat, Nathusius’ pipistrelle

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53585627

The Old Were Sacrificed

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The COVID19 has been devastating for elderly people. 
The numbers are staggering, more than 80 percent of the fatalities due to coronavirus in the US and East Asia occurred among adults aged 65 and over. In Europe and Australia, the figures are even higher, 94 and 97 per cent of the deaths were persons aged 60 and over.

However, when contagions spread, older persons were denied access to beds and ventilators, despite being the most vulnerable group.
Human rights experts were alarmed by the decisions made around the use of scarce medical resources in hospitals and intensive care units, discriminating solely based on age. Despite being helpless and most at risk, older persons were not prioritized; they were de facto sacrificed, denied treatment and emergency support. 
About half of the coronavirus casualties in high income countries were in care homes, though this is an underestimation because originally official death tolls did not include those who had died outside hospitals without a COVID19 test done. 
In Sweden, protocols discouraged care workers from sending older persons to hospitals, letting them die in the care homes. 
Most countries reported insufficient protective equipment and testing in care homes for both residents and care workers. Thousands were infected of coronavirus in nursing homes, and while some staff heroically worked in dangerous conditions, others did not. Staff absenteeism added to the problems. 
In a nursing home in France, 24 old folk passed away in only 5 days; they died alone in their rooms of hypovolemic shock, without food or water, because 40 percent of the staff was absent. 
In Canada, a criminal investigation was launched after 31 residents were found dead, unfed and unchanged at a Seniors’ Residence; after other disturbing cases, the Canadian military had to be deployed to assist and the government is considering to take over all private long-term care institutions. 
In Spain, when the military were deployed to disinfect nursing homes, they were shocked to find people “completely abandoned or even dead in their beds.” Spain has launched criminal investigations into dozens of care homes after grieving relatives of thousands of elderly coronavirus victims claimed ‘our parents were left to die’.
In Italy’s Lombardy region, a resolution offering 150 euros (US$175) to care homes for accepting COVID19 patients to ease the burden on hospital beds, accelerated the spread of the virus among health workers and residents. Coffins piled up in nursing homes. Families are filing lawsuits for mishandling the epidemic.
In the US, more than 38,000 older persons have died in residences because of COVID19 and many families have filed lawsuits against nursing homes for wrongful death and gross negligence. In the US, nursing homes and long-term care operators have been lobbying state and federal legislators across the US to pass laws giving them broad immunity, denying responsibility for conditions inside care homes during COVID19. Nineteen states have recently enacted laws or gubernatorial executive orders granting nursing homes protection from civil liability in connection with COVID19. Nobody is being held responsible for the suffering of thousands of older persons that died alone in care homes.
In the UK, families of care home residents who died from COVID19 are suing the Health and Social Care Secretary; the claims accuse the government of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights, National Health Service Act 2006 and the Equalities Act.
Long-term care is a lucrative and powerful industry. Europe’s care sector is concentrated in the hands of a few large private groups. Also in the US, 70 percent of the 15,000 nursing homes are run by for-profit companies; many have been bought and sold in recent years by private-equity firms.
Health system capacity is strained because austerity cuts in earlier years. It was the shortage of beds, staff and equipment that made doctors discriminate against older persons and prioritize those younger, with more chances of survival to COVID19. Governments and international financial institutions must stop mean budget cuts that have condemned many to die, and instead invest in universal public health and social protection systems, spend more on health and long-term care services for older persons.
Despite a rapidly ageing population, half the world’s elderly lacks access to long-term care. At the moment, governments spend very little on long term care; instead, they have allowed private care services to develop, with minimal regulation. As a result, most older persons have to pay up to 100 percent of long term care out of their own pocket and most cannot afford quality services – a highly unequal system. Societies have failed their senior citizens during the COVID19 pandemic
“Older people have the same rights to life and heath as everyone else. Difficult decisions around life-saving medical care must respect the human rights and dignity of all,” stated the UN Secretary-General.



 http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/07/neglected-sacrificed-older-persons-covid19-pandemic/

Lead Poison in the Blood

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One in three children around the world have concentrations of lead in their blood at levels likely to cause significant long-term health damage, new research has found.
About 800 million children and young people under the age of 19 are likely to have blood levels of lead at or above 5 micrograms per decilitre (5μg/dl), according to the report. There is no safe level for lead exposure, according to the World Health Organization, because even at very low concentrations it operates as a dangerous toxin, but levels above 5μg/dl are regarded by the US Centers for Disease Control as a cause for action. Lead is a potent neurotoxin and high exposure can kill, while lower levels cause symptoms ranging from pain, vomiting and seizures to developmental delay, mental difficulties and mood disorders. The lower levels can also cause children to be born prematurely. Exposure at the levels studied is likely to cause reductions in cognitive ability, higher levels of violence and long term health impacts such as cardiovascular disease, according to the researchers. 
Children are particularly vulnerable to lead exposure because it damages the developing brain and nervous system, building up over time, and the impacts do not show immediately. Lead mimics calcium in the bones, building up in people’s bodies and causing damage to other vital organs, including the kidneys, heart and lungs. Lead at 5μg/dl of blood is likely to wipe about 3-5 points from a child’s IQ score, and at the levels found in the Unicef report could double the level of violence in society. It is also likely to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, as about 900,000 deaths a year are already linked to lead poisoning.  30 academic studies had linked elevated lead levels to people’s propensity for violent behaviour, providing enough corroboration for scientists to make a strong association between continuing lead contamination and its likely impacts on violence.
“This is an absolutely shocking figure,” said Nicholas Rees, policy specialist at Unicef and author of the report. “We have known for so long about the toxic nature of lead, but we have not known how widespread it is, and how many children are affected.”
Richard Fuller of Pure Earth, an NGO that collaborated with Unicef on the report, said people were less aware of the damage caused by lead, after campaigns to remove the toxin from many common uses in developed countries decades ago.
“We did a terrific job of taking lead out of gasoline, but the use of lead has plateaued after falling in the 1970s and 80s,” he said. Fuller said that while the levels of lead might seem small, across populations the damage was significant. “It means double the number of people who are intellectually impaired,” he said. “It is definitely not a trivial issue.”
 In the US, children living in poorer households and dilapidated accommodation have been found to be at higher risk. In the UK, about 200,000 children are likely to be affected, according to Unicef.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/30/one-in-three-children-dangerous-levels-lead-in-blood

Cuba Continues Reforms

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Cuba is loosening restrictions on small businesses as it seeks to stimulate a state-dominated economy effected by events in its ally Venezuela, the United States sanctions and the pandemic. 



 President Miguel Diaz-Canel, however, speaking earlier this month, said the country faced an ongoing international crisis and would implement a series of reforms to increase exports, cut imports and stimulate domestic demand. The economy is forecast to decline this year in tandem with the region, or a bit less than 10 percent. The government admits it has little foreign exchange to buy food, fuel and other supplies from abroad, where the peso is worthless. Cuba faced a liquidity crisis even before the coronavirus pandemic shuttered tourism and hit other revenue earners.



 The measures include more autonomy for state companies, farmers and local government, dollarisation of some internal trade and, Diaz-Canel said, “the improvement of the non-state sector, with immediate priority in the expansion of self-employment and removal of obstacles.”



 The non-state sector, excluding agriculture, is composed mainly of small private businesses and cooperatives; their employees, artisans, taxi drivers and tradesmen. All are under the rubric of self-employed, numbering 600,000 before the pandemic left an estimated 40 percent tied to the tourism industry and public transportation without work.



 One obstacle already removed regards the right to import and export, albeit through state companies.



 “We want to put all forms of management on an equal footing,” Foreign Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca said.



 COVID-19 pandemic has worsened shortages of food, medicine and other goods and led to long lines at retail outlets.



 https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/isle-revival-communist-run-cuba-loosens-grip-small-businesses-200729190411727.html



Black Motherhood

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n 2018, Serena Williams gave birth to her first child via caesarean section. The day after the birth, the world-number-one tennis player became breathless and told doctors she believed she had developed a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot on her lungs), which she has a history of. She later described how she had to plead with her medical team for a CT scan, which showed she was correct. The blood clots could have been fatal if not treated.
Nine months later, Beyoncé opened up about her experience of pre-eclampsia when she was pregnant with her twins, Rumi and Sir. Her babies were delivered via emergency c-section, and had to stay in intensive care for weeks. Despite being two of the wealthiest women in the world, their stories resonate with black mothers everywhere.
In November 2019, a report into maternal morbidity in the UK from researchers at Oxford University, found black women are five times more likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth or in the postpartum period, compared to their white counterparts. Asian women were also twice as likely to die compared to white women. This data was up from previous years, which still staggeringly showed black women were three times more likely to die than white women.
Medical professionals have long assumed the death rate can be explained by pre-existing conditions amongst black women such as high blood pressure, or the higher prevalence of complications such as pre-eclampsia. Rather, research from the US points to a more complex picture. The likeliness of an adverse outcome for someone like a black, healthy, middle-class professional increases, rather than decreases. 
In the United States there are similar racial disparities in its maternal deaths with black and indigenous Americans being two to three times as likely to die of pregnancy related causes. 
Black motherhood has been presented in an unfavourable light, both in popular culture and academic circles. Studies have shown the media uses “concern for children as a rhetorical tool to define poor and minority women as bad mothers,” and statistics show black children are overrepresented in the care system, making up 16 per cent of all looked-after children and young people. This is despite society being built on the care services of black women; 20 per cent of black African women work in the health and social care sector often in lower paid jobs that require longer shift patterns.
US academic, Dorthy Roberts in her book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty describes how stereotypes of black motherhood persist, from “welfare queens”, who are presented as “immoral, neglectful, and domineering” to “hypersexual” women that are accused of “overbreeding”. In the UK, the media has routinely linked households with single black mothers to increasing youth violence, with little regard for the other structural factors at play.
In March, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (RCOG) hosted an event entitled ‘We need to talk about race’ for International Women’s Day, following an article of the same name written by obstetrician Dr Christine Ekechi. The RCOG event was well attended, yet there was a noticeable absence of white healthcare professionals. Dr Ekechi shared her own powerful experiences of navigating the health system as a black woman whilst sharing those of other women who had felt “dismissed” by healthcare professionals or reduced to “complainers”.
Janet Fyle, a senior midwife and professional policy advisory, is adamant that underlying prejudice among midwives is a crucial factor in the deaths of black mothers: 
“Black women are categorised according to a white perspective; they are not believed, this notion of them having a higher threshold for pain and these biases mean that we miss serious conditions or the opportunity to escalate serious changes in the woman’s condition in a timely way.” Fyle says this goes back as far as when people are studying medicine. “They practice as students on white women and with no opportunity to understand differences,” she says. “People are getting things wrong because they are not culturally competent, for example, doctors, nurses and midwives have the standard patient profile in their heads as being a woman who is blonde, blue eyes and size 12. It’s everything about the concept of medicine.”
The problem isn’t exclusive to women’s experience of childbirth either: the RCOG has highlighted racial disparities within gynaecology services, including the late diagnosis of gynecological cancers and lower uptake of cervical screening amongst black women.
On 15 July the RCOG launched a race equality taskforce to better understand how to tackle racial disparities amongst patients as well as understand the effects on racism on staff working within the sector. The taskforce plans to collaborate with groups across healthcare, government and individuals to ensure new ways are developed to tackle racism and racial disparity.
Dr Ekechi says: “It sends a clear and brave message to our members and the women that we serve, of our strong commitment to equality in outcomes for all obstetricians and gynaecologists in the UK and for the health of each and every woman.” Ekechi says she is “confident” it will “ultimately save lives”.
Rachael Buabeng, founder of Mummy’s Day Out, a community for black women to network and share experiences, had a pregnancy plagued by hyperemesis gravidarum (nausea and vomiting which can lead to reduced fetal growth) and a difficult childbirth. She describes how her husband had to advocate for her when she was not offered alternative pain relief after declining an epidural; she went on to deliver her baby without the midwife in the room, explained:
 “What maternity services need is very, very straightforward. Treat every woman as an individual. Believe women when they say that they will feel pain, believe women when they say that something is not right. Believe women when they say that they are concerned about something and don’t brush it off.”

A Broken Pledge

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The super-rich who pledged to give away most of their money to good causes are instead sitting on rising wealth fueled by the “warehousing” of cash in dedicated family foundations or funds, a new study from the Institute for Policy Studies has found.



 More than three-quarters of a group of US billionaires who signed up to the Giving Pledge to donate most of their money saw a significant rise in wealth over the last decade.



 “The Giving Pledgers set out in 2010 to give away half their wealth and instead their assets have doubled,” said Chuck Collins, co-author of the Gilded Giving report.



  51 out of the 62 American billionaires reviewed in the research saw “significant increases” in their net worth. 



 This is partly because many are making money so fast that it has “outstripped” their capacity to give it away, the IPS said.



 But it also highlighted concerns that many are choosing to put their charitable funds into private foundations and donor-advised funds that often save on tax and may end up “warehousing” money instead of getting it to just causes.



 “They should give it directly to working non-profit charities and not to their own perpetual family foundations or donor-advised funds,” Collins said.



 The top 1 percent may hold 24 percent of global wealth by 2050, according to a recent United Nations report, as global wealth inequality steadily grows.

Vaccine Nationalism Warning

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Global health agencies are planning a scheme to bulk-buy and equitably distribute vaccines around the world. They are watching with dismay as some wealthier countries have decided to go it alone, striking deals with drug-makers to secure millions of doses of promising candidates for their citizens.
The deals – including those agreed by the United States, Britain and the European Union with the likes of Pfizer, BioNtech, AstraZeneca and Moderna  – are undermining the global drive, experts say.
“Everybody doing bilateral deals is not a way to optimize the situation,” said Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI alliance which co-leads the scheme called COVAX designed to secure rapid and fair global access to COVID-19 vaccines.
Pfizer said this week it was in concurrent talks with the EU and several of its member states on supplying them with its potential vaccine. Britain announced a deal on Wednesday to secure advanced supplies of potential COVID-19 vaccines from GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi.
This, according to health charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), will further fuel “the global scramble to hoard vaccines by rich countries” and feed “a dangerous trend of vaccine nationalism”.
The concern is that vaccine supply and allocation in this pandemic will echo the last – caused by the H1N1 flu virus in 2009/2010 – when rich nations bought up the available supply of vaccines, initially leaving poor countries with none.
“There is a risk that some countries are doing exactly what we feared – which is every man for himself,” said Gayle Smith, former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and CEO of the One Campaign, a non-profit aimed at ending poverty and preventable disease.
The United States, China and Russia are not among countries expressing interest in COVAX, according to GAVI. And an EU source said last week that the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive arm and leads EU talks with drug-makers, has advised EU countries not to buy COVID-19 vaccines via COVAX.
“I am worried,” said Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What is happening with the handful of nations that are locking up supply of vaccine competes with the multilateral supply deals. At the end of the day, vaccine manufacturing is a finite resource. You can expand it, but only so much.”
Experts estimate the world can reasonably hope to have around 2 billion doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines by the end of next year. Berkley of GAVI said, however, that if self-interested countries or regions snapped those up to cover their entire populations – instead of sharing them across nations and protecting the most at-risk people first – the pandemic could not be controlled.
“If you were to try to vaccinate the entire U.S., (and) the entire EU, for example, with two doses of vaccine – then you’d get to about 1.7 billion doses. And if that is the number of doses that’s available, there’s not a lot left for others.” If a handful, or even 30 or 40 countries have vaccines, but more than 150 others don’t, “then the epidemic will rage there” Berkley said.
“This virus … moves around like lightning. So you’ll end up in a situation where you will not be able to go back to normal. You won’t be able to have commerce, tourism, travel, trade, unless you can get the whole pandemic to be slowed down.” He and Smith and other health experts said ending the pandemic meant ending it globally.

The fate of land defenders

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A new report reveals a spike in the murder of global land defenders, especially in Latin America. The failure to combat climate change is forcing the most vulnerable to the frontlines, and to pay with their lives. According to NGO, Global Witness, 212 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 alone, a 30% rise from the 164 killed in 2018. Around 40% were indigenous people and traditional land owners.



  Mary Menton, a research fellow in environmental justice at University of Sussex who co-authored the report, told DW that she “would not be surprised” if the real figure were double due to the failure to report and even investigate killings. 



  Menton says only 10% of perpetrators are prosecuted. 



 The overall rise in murders is part of a broader trend. Astudy published in Nature in 2019 showed that in the 15 years between 2002 and 2017, more than 1,558 environment defenders were killed, doubling from two to four per week over that time. 



 Increasing conflict over scarce land resources in a time of rising global consumer demand is forcing indigenous and traditional community leaders to protect their territories, says Rachel Cox,  a campaigner at Global Witness. 

“Indigenous people are disproportionately vulnerable to attack,” she says of minorities resisting mining, logging and the agribusiness projects encroaching on the frontiers they call home. But the killings are only the tip of the iceberg. “Many more defenders were attacked, jailed or faced smear campaigns because of their work,” said Cox

.

1. The Philippines

The deadliest country for environmental activists in 2018, at least 46 environmental defenders were murdered last year in the Philippines, a 53% increase and a return to the high murder rate during the first years of the Duterte regime. Twenty six murders were related to agribusiness, the highest in the world. Leon Dulce, the national coordinator of Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, says “we are bracing for more spates of violence” due to government efforts to expand mining and logging “under the guise of a COVID-19 economic recovery.” President Duterte is also using draconian anti-terror laws to suppress activists by labeling them as criminals.  



 The southern island of Mindanao remains a hotspot with 19 environment-related killings in 2019 due to ongoing opposition to palm oil and agribusiness fruit plantations. In the photo top, a family from the island’s Bukidnon region, are from the KADIMADC community whose ancestral lands have been grabbed and illegally sub-leased.

Attacks are prevalent on the territory of these indigenous or Lumad people, Dulce explained, because it forms “the last forest corridors of the island.” Indigenous communities “continue to stand in the way of mining, dam, and agribusiness tenements,” he said. 

The Philippines’ high vulnerability to climate change, especially typhoons, has further necessitated this resistance, according to the report. 



 2. Brazil

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to expand large-scale mining and agribusiness in the Amazon has forced indigenous peoples further into the frontlines of the climate crisis, especially as deforestation on indigenous land increased by 74% from 2018 to 2019. Of the 24 murders of land defenders in Brazil, 90% occurred in the Amazon. The uptick in violence in the resource rich region that is also the planet’s largest carbon sink, comes as the Bolsonaro government introduced a controversial bill in 2019 that calls for the legalization of commercial mining on indigenous land. In June last year, it was reported that dozens of miners dressed in military uniform invaded the Wajapi community in the Brazilian Amazon, stabbing and killing one of its leaders.



 3. Mexico

Eighteen land and environmental defenders were killed in 2019 in Mexico, a rise of four. They included Otilia Martínez Cruz, 60, and her 20-year-old son, Gregorio Chaparro Cruz, who were found dead outside their home in the town of El Chapote in north-west Mexico on May 1, 2019. The indigenous Tarahumara defenders were allegedly killed by assassins in retaliation for their efforts to stop the illegal deforestation of their ancestral land in the Sierra Madre. Two months earlier, Samir Flores Soberanes was shot dead outside his home on February 20, 2019. An Indigenous Nahuatl farmer and environmental activist from Amilcingo, Morelos, Samir publicly spoke out against the Morelos Integral Project (MIP) to develop coal and gas energy infrastructure the day before he was killed.



 4. Romania

Europe has rarely witnessed deaths by environment defenders, but two rangers fighting illegal logging were killed in 2019. Romania has over half of Europe’s remaining old-growth and primeval forests that have been dubbed the “lungs of Europe.” But according to Greenpeace, some 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of this pristine forest is degraded every hour in Romania, much of it by the “wood mafia” that the two forest rangers opposed. The Global Witness report notes that there were hundreds of threats and attacks against the rangers before they were killed. Despite the thousands who marched in Bucharest and across Romania in late 2019 to oppose illegal logging and to demand an investigation into the attacks, no one has been charged.  



 5. Honduras

Killings rose from four in 2018 to 14 last year in Honduras, making it the most dangerous country per capita for land and environmental defenders in 2019. Lethal attacks against activists were especially prevalent against women, continuing the upward trend since Honduran activist and indigenous leader Berta Caceres was brutally murdered in 2016, months after winning the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, for opposing dam construction in her region. “Women have an important leadership in the fight against extractive companies and criminal groups that want to take away their land,” said Marusia Lopez of the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders, which documented 1,233 attacks against these women defenders between 2017-18.   Afro-indigenous Garifuna people living on the east coast were especially targeted in 2019, with 16 killed for defending their lands, mostly from palm oil and tourism development. Criminal groups have long attacked Garifuna communities with impunity.



 6. Columbia

More than two-thirds of killings took place in Latin America, with Colombia topping the list with 64 murders due to the failure to implement the 2016 peace agreement with FARC and protect farmers transitioning from coca to cocoa and coffee to reduce cocaine production. 



 https://www.dw.com/en/5-deadly-countries-for-environmental-defenders/a-54298499

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