Here’s the global playbook being used to crack down on climate protest

A new study published this month in the journal Environmental Politics finds that efforts to suppress climate and environmental protests are growing around the world through a combination of new legislation, new uses of existing legal processes, police actions, vilification of activists, and both violence and murder. The authors argue that acts of repression are likely to expand and intensify as authoritarian regimes roll back their climate policies, with a particular focus on President Donald Trump’s actions in office, criminalizing protests, increasing police power, and public attacks on climate and environmental commitments.

The authors assert that the effects of this “repertoire or repression” are threefold. First, the risk of legal sanctions, prison sentences, and violence diverts resources from movements and deters environmental action. Second, criminalization delegitimizes climate movements in the public eye by presenting them as counterproductive, criminal, or dangerous. And third, criminalization and enforcement of new laws distract from climate change by focusing conversations on “extremists” and “ecoterrorists” opposed to the public interest.

“Behind all this, we can see very clearly that over the past few years there has been a relentless vilification of climate and environmental activists across the world,” said Oscar Berglund, co-author of the report. “The media and politicians are very involved and this kind of defamation fuels all these forms of repression. »

Drawing on data from 14 countries, research from the University of Bristol found that countries engage in repression by creating new laws designed to regulate protests, such as in the US and UK, which create criminal penalties for protests targeting “critical infrastructure” like pipelines. However, non-state actors, such as corporations or private security companies, engage in deadly acts of violence against environmental and land defenders, particularly those who are indigenous. The authors write that these efforts at “criminalization and repression are not aberrations of climate governance but a fundamental governance strategy.” The study also highlights that climate and environment protests have steadily increased every year since 2018.

Slandering protesters in public and in the media has been key to the state’s tactics of repression. In the Philippines, “red-tagging” labels activists, especially those who are indigenous, as communists or terrorists, in order to distract public attention from protests on climate issues. In the US state of Georgia, activists protesting the construction of “Cop City”, a police training site outside Atlanta that required deforestation, have been charged with domestic terrorism and face up to 35 years in prison and one activist, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, was killed after being shot at least 57 times, in what some experts have called the first case in the US where an environmental activist was shot and killed by the security forces.

Outside the United States, where more violent forms of deterrence are used, the report’s authors say militaries, police forces and landowners often commit killings or kidnappings of activists because states create “a permissive environment and culture of impunity for private actors.” According to data from Global Witness, an international organization that investigates human and environmental rights violations, more than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed between 2012 and 2023. About 43% were indigenous and the majority of killings took place in Latin America.

“Since colonization, Indigenous people have defended and put their bodies in the path of environmental destruction because it has changed the places where they live,” Berglund said. “This has continued in recent years, and we often see indigenous people leading struggles against mining or fossil fuel extraction. » “This has continued in recent years, and we often see that the environment in which indigenous peoples lead [are] fight against whether it is mining or the extraction of fossil fuels.

Since Donald Trump took office this year, the United States has once again left the Paris Agreement, while companies have abandoned their own climate commitments, in part because of the current administration’s backlash on environmental, social and governance, or ESG, issues. The study says that “many political and industrial actors have backtracked on their climate goals, not because they deny climate change or its contribution, but because it has become politically viable to accept its inevitability.”

In October, President Trump ordered federal law enforcement to review reports filed by the Government Accountability Institute and the Capital Research Center, two conservative think tanks that link organizations associated with anti-fascist, or “Antifa,” networks. Among these alleged groups are the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity.

“It amounts to delegitimizing these actors and making them invisible,” Berglund said. “It enables violence against them.”