Indigenous Land Rights and Defender Killings
The most effective forest guardians are being killed for doing it.
Severity score
39.9
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Indigenous communities manage a large share of the world remaining intact ecosystems, usually without secure legal title. Land and environmental defenders are murdered at a rate of several per week, overwhelmingly in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
16Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
64People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
26Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
58Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
52Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.