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Threats to land and environmental defenders in nature’s last strongholds

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Abstract

Land and environmental defenders are a major bulwark against environmental destruction and biodiversity loss resulting from unsustainable nature resource extraction. Resultant conflicts can lead to violence against and deaths of these defenders. Along with mounting environmental pressures, homicides of these defenders are increasing globally. Yet, this issue has only recently started to receive scientific attention. While existing studies indicate the importance of socio-economic processes in driving such murders, spatially explicit global analyses considering environmental components are largely missing. Here, we take a broad spatial approach to assess relative contributions of environmental factors to the killing of environmental defenders. We find higher rates of such homicides are typically found in areas where limited or underutilized resources (e.g., freshwater, land and forests) are more available. Our results point towards a prevalent global land scarcity that results in industries targeting the last remaining strongholds for biodiversity and the environmental defenders within.

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Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article (and its supplementary information files) without geographical coordinates for confidentiality issues. Detailed data in our study was requested from Global Witness.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Global Witness for sharing their data on global killings of Earth defenders, and Siti Zarina Zainul Rahim, editors and reviewers for their help in improving the manuscript. Z.Y. and L.R.C. acknowledge support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its Commonwealth Research Fellowship grant NRF-CSC-ICFC2017-05.

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore, 117543, Republic of Singapore

    Yiwen Zeng, Fangqi Twang & L. Roman Carrasco

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  1. Yiwen Zeng
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Correspondence to Yiwen Zeng.

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Zeng, Y., Twang, F. & Carrasco, L.R. Threats to land and environmental defenders in nature’s last strongholds. Ambio 51, 269–279 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-021-01557-3

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