Ecocide

[1] Ecocide threatens all human populations who are dependent on natural resources for maintaining ecosystems and ensuring their ability to support future generations.

[6][7] Common causes of ecocide include war, pollution, over-exploitation of natural resources such as the Amazon rainforest, and industrial disasters.

[10][3] Several countries have supported criminalising ecocide in international law, including Fiji, Niue, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga and Vanuatu.

[20] They were used to defoliate large parts of the countryside to prevent the Viet Cong from being able to hide weaponry and encampments under the foliage, and to deprive them of food.

[24][25] The aforementioned ecocides, bombings, and poaching and wildlife trafficking fuelled by the war from locals also furthered the declines of several other native Vietnamese species such as the Indochinese tiger, Asian elephant, Edward's pheasant, northern white-cheeked gibbon, and saola.

[27] The environmental destruction caused by this defoliation has been described by Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, lawyers, historians and other academics as an ecocide.

[35] According to Netherlands-based peace organization PAX, Russia's "deliberate targeting of industrial and energy infrastructure" has caused "severe" pollution, and the use of explosive weapons has left "millions of tonnes" of contaminated debris in cities and towns.

[42][43][44] Zelenskyy and Ukraine's prosecutor general Andriy Kostin have met with prominent European figures (Margot Wallstrom, Heidi Hautala, Mary Robinson and Greta Thunberg) to discuss the environmental damage and how to prosecute it.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identified 140 species of mammals as threatened and 15 as critically endangered, including the Bali myna,[59] Sumatran orangutan[60] and Javan rhinoceros.

[83][84] Israeli bombardment and the blockade have led to a total collapse of Gaza's civil infrastructure, including sewage treatment, waste disposal, water management, and fuel supplies.

There is no international law against ecocide that applies in peacetime, but the Rome Statute makes it a crime to Intentionally launch an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.

In February 2024, the European Parliament adopted a law making large-scale, intentionally caused, environmental damage “comparable to ecocide” a crime that can be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

[95] Efforts to criminalise ecocide have sought to include the crime among those prosecuted by the International Criminal Court established by the Rome Statute.

Several world leaders, environmentalists and celebrities have publicly supported ecocide being made an international crime including Pope Francis, Antonio Guterres, Greta Thunberg, Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa, Emmanuel Macron, Jane Goodall and Paul McCartney.

[113][114] At the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme described the damage caused by defoliant Agent Orange in the Vietnam War as ecocide and called for it to be made an international crime.

[115][116][117][118] United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in 2017 that it is "highly desirable" to include ecocide as a crime at the International Criminal Court.

[119][120][121] Pope Francis in his address to the International Association of Penal Law in 2019 stated that "By 'ecocide' we should understand the loss, damage and destruction of ecosystems of a given territory, so that its enjoyment by the inhabitants has been or may be severely affected.

[8][9][133] The word was first recorded at the Conference on War and National Responsibility in Washington DC, where American plant biologist and bioethicist Arthur Galston proposed a new international agreement to ban ecocide.

[134][135] In 1972 at the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme called the Vietnam War an ecocide.

[136] Others, including Indira Gandhi from India and Tang Ke, the leader of the Chinese delegation, also denounced the war in human and environmental terms, calling for ecocide to be an international crime.

[142] The report contained a passage that Some members of the Sub-Commission have, however, proposed that the definition of genocide should be broadened to include cultural genocide or "ethnocide", and also "ecocide": adverse alterations, often irreparable, to the environment – for example through nuclear explosions, chemical weapons, serious pollution and acid rain, or destruction of the rain forest – which threaten the existence of entire populations, whether deliberately or with criminal negligence.

He demonstrated that states, and arguably individuals and organizations, causing or permitting harm to the natural environment on a massive scale breach a duty of care owed to humanity in general.

He proposed that such breaches, where deliberate, reckless or negligent, be identified as ecocide where they entail serious, and extensive or lasting, ecological damage; international consequences; and waste.

Making ecocide an international crime was voted as one of the top twenty solutions to achieving sustainable development at the World Youth Congress in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012.

[159] The governments of some of the island states at risk from climate change (Fiji, Niue, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga and Vanuatu) launched the "Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific", calling for the phase out fossil fuels and the 'rapid and just transition' to renewable energy and strengthening environmental law including introducing the crime of ecocide.

[160][161] On 16 November 2023, European Union legislators reached an agreement on a new directive with jail sentences for the worst polluters and companies fined up to 5% of their global turnover.

The countries with domestic ecocide laws are France (2021), Georgia (1999), Armenia (2003), Ukraine (2001), Belarus (1999), Ecuador (2008; 2014), Chile (2023), Kazakhstan (1997), Kyrgyzstan (1997), Moldova (2002), Russia (1996), Tajikistan (1998), Uzbekistan (1994), Belgium (2023) and Vietnam (1990).

[164] In 2021, The French National Assembly approved the creation of an "ecocide" offence as part of a battery of measures aimed at protecting the environment and tackling climate change.

It also aligns Belgian legislation with the 2023 revised EU Environmental Crimes Directive, which requires member states to establish an offence comparable to ecocide.

For instance, the large-scale PFAS contamination discovered in Zwijndrecht in 2021 led to significant scrutiny of multinational companies and government-mandated corrective measures.