The supply chain of violence

Abstract

Every year, more people are killed defending the environment than are soldiers from the United Kingdom and Australia on overseas deployments in war zones combined. During the last 15 years, the number of both deaths of environmental defenders, and the countries where they occur, have increased. Recorded deaths have increased from two per week to four per week over this period. These deaths are primarily related to conflict over natural resources, across a range of sectors. Of 683 total deaths, >230 were related to mining and agribusiness between 2014 and 2017. We find that rule of law and corruption indices are closely linked to patterns of killings. Using spatial data, we investigate the drivers of these conflicts and violence and seek to identify who may be most at risk and why. We argue that businesses, investors and national governments at both ends of the chain of violence need to be more accountable.

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Articles
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0349-4
1School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia. 2School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford,
Oxford, UK. 3Not1More, Harborne, UK. 4Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK. *e-mail: n.butt@uq.edu.au
Between 2002 and 2017, 1,558 people in 50 countries were killed
for defending their environments and lands1 (Supplementary
Table 1). This is more than double the number of United
Kingdom and Australian armed service people killed on active duty
in war zones over the same period (n = 697; refs. 2,3) and almost half
as many as the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan
since 2001 (n = 4,044; ref. 4). ‘Environmental defenders’ here refers
to people engaged in protecting land, forests, water and other
natural resources. This includes community activists, members of
social movements, lawyers, journalists, non-governmental organi-
zation staff, indigenous peoples, members of traditional, peasant
and agrarian communities, and those who resist forced eviction
or other violent interventions. These people take peaceful action,
either voluntarily or professionally, to protect the environment
or land rights1. They may be directly involved in working on the
land, represent those who do, or be advocates for conservation of
habitats or species.
The forms of violence (direct, structural and cultural), and the
types of harm caused (for example, physical and psychological),
are examined in detail elsewhere5–7. We distinguish between large-
scale violence linked to armed conflicts (civil, guerrilla or interna-
tional) rooted in struggles over natural resources, and that aimed
at individuals or particular communities or groups of individuals
due to their acts of resistance and/or protection of their land or
environmental rights. Environmental defenders currently face a
wave of violence that includes threats of physical harm, intimida-
tion and criminalization8,9 (Fig. 1). We focus on the deaths of envi-
ronmental defenders, documented since 2002 by Global Witness
(UK), the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (Pastoral Land Commission,
Brazil), The Guardian (UK) and others. Deaths represent the ‘tip
of the iceberg’ of the violence that environmental defenders face.
For every defender murdered, thousands more face direct violence,
threats and psychological intimidation, and more invisible cultural
and structural violence (or ‘slow violence’)10. We examine the par-
ticular conditions, sectors and interactions leading to the deaths of
defenders. Using global datasets, we analyse the drivers of violence
contributing to these deaths. Other studies have looked at the links
between authoritarianism and deaths of environmental defenders11
and the relationship between economic growth and these deaths12.
We further this analysis by evaluating the relationship between
spatial factors (natural resource distribution such as hectares of
agricultural cultivation and area of mining concessions) and deaths
of environmental defenders.
Natural resource conflicts
Conflicts over natural resources are linked to different resources
and/or sectors (for example, fossil fuels, minerals, timber, agricul-
ture, aquaculture and water), as well as access to land and/or bod-
ies of water from which natural resources can be extracted13. These
conflicts can be seen as a continuation of colonial land and resource
appropriation that established systems of dispossession and con-
trol. Such appropriation includes: displacement, forced labour and
denial of native and Indigenous rights; private control and exploita-
tion of land and natural resources with state backing (for example,
the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium); benefits
of natural resource exploitation in one nation accruing to another
nation; a global shift from communal to private land rights14.
Developed countries’ resource consumption is outsourced to less
wealthy nations and regions15.
Conflicts often arise around the extraction of resources by com-
panies or others without legitimate user-rights to the resource (for
example, illegal logging in community forests); or when user-rights
are granted by corrupt governments (for example, access to water
already used by communities); or through political processes that
fail to respect free prior informed consent (for example, oil drilling
in concessions in indigenous territories in Peru16,17). In other cases
of conflict, traditional natural resource users are excluded from the
land, often in the name of conservation in national parks or marine
protected areas that restrict fishing activities (for example, evic-
tions of indigenous Sengwer from their traditional forest lands in
Kenya18,19). Some conflicts surround benefit-sharing from extrac-
tive industries (for example, the Panguna mine owned by Rio Tinto
subsidiary BCL in Papua New Guinea20); in others, it is the indirect
effects of the extraction that lead to conflicts (for example, water
pollution caused by mining or oil drilling and air pollution from
factories). In some more extreme cases, extractive industries can
lead to displacement of communities: either through contamina-
tion of rivers and lands that makes an area uninhabitable (for exam-
ple, Chevron and Texaco in Ecuador and Peru21,22); or by flooding
of entire communities for the creation of hydroelectric dams (for
example, the Belo Monte dam, Pará, Brazil, and the Lower Sesan 2
dam, Strung Treng, Cambodia23,24). In addition to local or national
The supply chain of violence
Nathalie Butt 1,2*, Frances Lambrick3, Mary Menton4 and Anna Renwick1
Every year, more people are killed defending the environment than are soldiers from the United Kingdom and Australia on
overseas deployments in war zones combined. During the last 15 years, the number of both deaths of environmental defend-
ers, and the countries where they occur, have increased. Recorded deaths have increased from two per week to four per week
over this period. These deaths are primarily related to conflict over natural resources, across a range of sectors. Of 683 total
deaths, >230 were related to mining and agribusiness between 2014 and 2017. We find that rule of law and corruption indices
are closely linked to patterns of killings. Using spatial data, we investigate the drivers of these conflicts and violence and seek
to identify who may be most at risk and why. We argue that businesses, investors and national governments at both ends of the
chain of violence need to be more accountable.
Corrected: Publisher Correction
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