The COP30 climate conference starts in two weeks; will land and environmental defenders be on the agenda?
Photo: The Caravana for Climate and Life meets with COPINH while en route from Mexico to COP30 in Brazil.
The United Nations COP30 climate change conference will start two weeks from today on Monday November 10 in the city of Belém in northern Brazil. Will the protection needs of land and environmental defenders be on the agenda this year?
Land and environmental defenders continue to be killed
Berta Caceres, the co-founder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), was murdered on March 2, 2016, just months after COP21 concluded on December 11, 2015, in Paris.
More than 1,729 land and environmental defenders have been killed in the 9 years since Caceres was murdered.
That’s an average of 192 defenders killed per year.
Defenders excluded at COPs
In March 2019, the UN Human Rights Council affirmed: “Environmental human rights defenders must be ensured a safe and enabling environment to undertake their work free from hindrance and insecurity, in recognition of their important role in supporting States to fulfil their obligations under the Paris Agreement.”
And yet this short sentence was not included in the final text of COP25 later that year or in any of the subsequent COP declarations.
Shauna Gillooly and Simón Escoffier from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile have also noted: “Grassroots actors, Indigenous communities, labour unions, and environmental justice movements are not just consumers of climate information; they are frontline political actors, whose legitimacy in shaping climate policy should be recognised. Yet the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] and COP [these conferences of parties] do not provide them with the institutional leverage, financial resources, or direct access to decision-making processes that would allow them to act as true counterweights to government and corporate inertia.”
“Blatant attempts” to eliminate references to defenders
It appears that the dynamic is not just that defenders are neither meaningfully included nor mentioned in COP outcomes, but also that efforts to include defenders in the final text are removed by the “usual suspects”.
Commenting on COP29, Camilla Pollera of the Center for International Environmental Law stated: “The blatant attempts to eliminate reference to the protection of environmental human rights defenders and human rights is especially alarming.”
And Floridea Di Como of CambiaMO in Spain added: “To take out from the text reference to Land and Environmental Human Rights defenders is to make a deep injustice from the recognition, procedural and distributive points of view.”
The “usual suspects”
This echoes the comments made by Michel Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders (Aarhus Convention), on a PBI-Canada organized webinar.
Forst told those at our webinar: “There are people who are willing to push for good results and at the same time we know that we also have people who are not our allies who are pushing also for counter-results and trying to delete paragraphs and good wording that some of us, some of them, would like to introduce.”
He added: “We have the same usual suspects who block the discussions.”
Forst did not name those “usual suspects”, but they are likely to include the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia.
“We can’t legitimize COP meetings”
Beyond this focused concern about COP conferences failing environmental defenders, there is also a broader critique of these annual gatherings.
Ahead of COP29, Greta Thunberg stated: “We can’t legitimize COP meetings in their current form. …Every time those in power get a chance to act, they choose not to and instead listen to industries that destroy the planet and violate human rights, rather than doing what’s right. …The only thing that will come out of it is loopholes, more negotiations, and symbolic decisions that look good on paper but are really just greenwashing.”
Calls for action
Within this challenging context that brings little expectation of progress, PBI-Canada supports the call that all State Parties at COP30 should “recognize the link between the climate crisis and growing violence and repression against land and environmental defenders and take meaningful steps to protect defenders and civic space (online and in person) to promote ambition and climate action.”
We further support the call “urging all Parties to commit to the enhanced protection of environmental human rights defenders, including reporting, investigating and seeking accountability and redress for reprisals against environmental human rights defenders, and public information about the actions taken to do so as well as public recognition of the importance of their work.”
Measuring violations
Global Witness has recommended: “To be effective, legislation and public policies to protect defenders need to be based on a deep understanding of the realities they face. The systematic documentation of attacks, and their motivations, would enable states to improve existing laws and mechanisms to protect defenders.”
We agree that Indicator 16.10.1 of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be incorporated into the COP process a meaningful way. That Indicator seeks to measure the “number of verified cases of killing, kidnapping, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention and torture of journalists, associated media personnel, trade unionists and human rights advocates in the previous 12 months.”
The International Land Coalition says: “Countries are expected to report on the number of verified cases of killing, kidnapping, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention and torture of human rights defenders (HRD).”
However, they further highlight, in the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) of 162 countries, only 3 countries reported that at least one HRD had been killed or attacked, 7 countries reported zero cases, and 152 countries did not report at all.
While Canada was one of the countries that did submit a report in 2024, it did not reference Indicator 16.10.1, specifically on the ongoing concerns about the abuse of process and arbitrary detention of Wet’suwet’en land defenders.
Canada and COP30
On September 8, 2025, the Canadian Press reported: “Prime Minister Mark Carney and his environment minister aren’t saying whether Canada is still committed to meeting its climate goals under the Paris agreement by 2030, as the government faces criticism over his emissions reduction plans.”
On October 25, 2025, CBC News reported: “The Prime Minister’s Office has yet to confirm if Carney will attend COP30.”
Meanwhile, Gitanyow land defenders are preparing to blockade the construction of the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) fracked gas pipeline on their territories as a final investment decision on that megaproject is expected within weeks.
Coming up
PBI-Canada is following the Mesoamerican Caravan for the Climate and Life that was formed with the assertion that: “Activism in defense of land, territory, water, and nature is dangerous, and many of our comrades face stigmatization, harassment, repression, criminalization, and even murder.”
The Caravan is expected to arrive in Belém by November 10.
And this coming Tuesday November 18, we plan to hold a webinar that comments on COP30 and the protection needs of land and environmental defenders. You can pre-register for this webinar by clicking here.
COP30 is scheduled to conclude on November 21.
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