Climate Crisis and Ecocide

The Climate Crisis and Ecocide

Image courtesy of CristianIS is unmodified and licensed under Pixabay.

Today’s climate patterns heighten food insecurity, displacement, infectious diseases, water scarcity, poverty and inequality, and violence.

The climate crisis is a force multiplier of conflict.

The world is in our hands. The time to act is now. 

 

Intergroup political conflict increases with low water availability, extreme temperatures, and climate-induced changes in income. Drought, fires, displacement, and floods make people poorer and desperate. Conflict increases because they fight over access to scarce water, food, housing, and other resources.

Consider three conflicts where the climate crisis magnified violence:

Darfur, Sudan

Increasing desertification from droughts in Sudan’s Darfur region led to fighting between herders and farmers over scarce water. Since 2003, 400,000 people have perished in the 21st century’s first genocide. Millions remain displaced. Fighting broke out in April 2023 in the capital, Khartoum, and has spread throughout the country.

Rwanda

Rwanda experienced multiple years of severe droughts and floods. The majority of the population was living at below-starvation caloric intake levels. Climate-induced hunger fueled the genocide in 1994; 800,000 people were murdered in a hundred days.

 

Syria

Syria suffered severe droughts beginning in 2007 that led to devastating crop failures. 15 million starving rural people fled into cities searching for food.

In 2011, President Bashir al-Assad responded to peaceful demands for food with brutality that led to 306,000 people murdered, 13 million internally displaced, and 6.7 million people forced to flee Syria, the direct consequence of drought and hunger.

 

What is the consequence of doing nothing? Ecocide.

 

U.S. Air Force plane spraying Agent Orange on Vietnamese jungle, 1966. Image courtesy of manhhi is cropped and licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Ecocide means to destroy the environment, or to kill one’s home.

That’s what we’re doing, and we see this now every day – droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, melting icecaps and rising seas, dead coral reefs and extinct animal and botanical species. We are killing our home.

The term ‘ecocide’ was first used in 1970 by Professor Arthur Galston, a biologist at Yale University. He used it at a conference on war to describe the devastation that the US caused by spraying 20 million gallons of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the Vietnam War. The chemicals defoliated the jungle and caused cancers, neurological disease, and birth defects in at least 3 million people. Galston advocated for an international agreement to ban ecocide.

Ecocide

Ecocide: destruction of the natural environment by deliberate or negligent human action; to kill one’s home.

1976-96: 1.89 million barrels of oil spilled in the Niger Delta in 4,835 separate incidents, leaving a toxic wasteland with no means to grow crops.

1986: Radiation from the Chernobyl explosion caused agricultural destruction, cancer, and birth defects across Europe.

2023: Russia caused ecocide in Ukraine with the Kakhovka dam’s collapse. Flooding wiped out lives, villages, farmland, and polluted the water supply.

Ongoing: Deforestation in the Amazon threatens Indigenous cultures and destroys habitats, water cycles, land, and lives.

 

What constitutes ecocide?

and other practices of long-term environmental destruction.

Ecocide and the Law

Image courtesy of OSeveno is cropped and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The International Criminal Court defines 4 crimes in global human rights law:

  • genocide
  • crimes against humanity
  • war crimes
  • aggression

Legal scholars and environmental advocates propose crime 5: ecocide.

Today, the effort to criminalize ecocide at the international level is led by Stop Ecocide International (SEI). SEI collaborates with politicians, corporate leaders, NGOs, indigenous and faith groups, academic experts, grassroots campaigns and individuals to develop global cross-sector support for codifying ecocide at the ICC.

If ecocide becomes criminalized in the Rome Statute, this global mechanism directly accesses existing criminal justice systems of all 124 member states. Ratifying the crime at the international level means member states must make domestic laws which mirror this commitment.

Examples of Ecocide Crimes:

  1. Offenses that increase the climate crisis: deforestation
  2. Consequences of the climate crisis: species extinction, die-off of coral reefs, and rising seas
  3. Consequences that are criminal activities: genocide
  4. Regulatory offenses: carbon trading fraud

Many countries and international entities criminalize ecocide.

The US has taken no action on ecocide.

The Human Cost of Ecocide

Brazil: Deforestation destroys indigenous land, homes, livelihoods, and cultures.

United States: 2.5 million people were displaced in 2023 from floods, severe storms, fires, and drought.

Pakistan: Floods destroyed thousands of schools, affecting millions of children.

The Parable of the Boiling Frog

Image courtesy of Purple Slog is modified and licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Place a frog in boiling water and it immediately jumps out. Place a frog in cold water, bring it to a boil, and the frog boils to death.

We are the frog. The pot of boiling water is our planetary home.

We are slowly cooking to death.

What we do matters.

 

 

 

 

Read about climate migration and the law here.

Read about climate change legislative developments here.

Take action here.

Find resources including academic articles, fiction and non-fiction books, documentaries, and other resources about climate change here.

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