The scramble for critical minerals — deemed vital to powering artificial intelligence and defense and energy needs — is fueling a renewed wave of resource extraction and conflict across the world, from Colombia to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
States, companies, and armed state actors jostle, often violently, to secure supply chains and market share in this lucrative enterprise. But the rights, wellbeing, and prosperity of those under whose lands the minerals lie, often indigenous people, are at best an afterthought. These communities, seen as obstacles, are forcibly removed, their lands plundered, their environment polluted, and their livelihoods stolen. Environmental human rights defenders, often volunteers and community leaders, are organizing for the right to a healthy environment and a say in decisions that shape their lives. Protecting them is a political choice and key to ensuring that this agenda, which advances participatory democracy, reduces inequality and upholds basic human rights, succeeds.
At their core, environmental human rights defenders want communities to have a seat at the table, along with companies and States, to ensure that projects bring true shared prosperity. Yet, year on year, they are killed or disappear at alarming rates. In 2024, Global Witness recorded 146 land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared around the world defending their land, communities, or the environment.
There is ample information on the attacks that such rights defenders face, from criminalization, to stigmatization, to death threats. What is less discussed is the impact these levels of insecurity and reprisals have on the causes they champion: environmental justice and the right to free and informed consent on projects that could impact lives. The chilling effect on activism is real.
Human rights defense won’t be successful when left to a handful of professional NGOs. It requires ordinary people to organize for change. But when the risk of reprisal is high, fewer choose to take it. This is evident in Colombia. Even though fewer defenders were killed or disappeared there in 2024 than the previous year, those who remain have told my colleagues and I that the drop may have occurred because fewer are active out of fear for their lives and the lives of their families. In the Kivu provinces in DR Congo, the M23 armed group has targeted rights defenders with extreme violence – “attempted killings, repeated kidnappings, torture, sexual violence and death threats,” according to U.N. experts — forcing many to flee or halt their work altogether.
Where the State is either unable or unwilling to ensure that communities benefit from their natural resources, environmental human rights defenders are the first and last lines of defense. No amount of well-intentioned green industrial policies will have serious impact on reducing inequity or mitigating climate change while governments have no incentive to implement them. Without these defenders to monitor and advocate for principled policies, officials simply cut deals with great powers, multinationals, or armed groups to split the proceeds of extraction, and then use those proceeds to entrench their own political advantage.
Supporting Collective Protection
In this dire reality, what is the way forward? For too long, the protection of human rights defender has been seen as apolitical: organizations and networks connect lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and other service providers to embattled defenders, or relocate them in an emergency. This is still necessary, but the approach needs to go further still. Environmental human rights defenders must be empowered to design and implement their own, context-appropriate, form of collective protection. The key lies in preventative measures that are woven into cultural, spiritual, and collective-governance practices.
A representative of an Afro-Colombian organization shared with our team that collective protection “is not a question of walking around accompanied by others and doesn’t involve militarization; it’s not a question of armed men. Collective protection means we must seek out tools and strategies rooted in our way of doing things.” It involves building relationships of trust with community organizers and organizations. Defenders across the Global South emphasize that, often, at the grassroots level, “you can’t protect who you don’t know,” meaning that true protection occurs, for example, when a detained defender’s community comes out to the police station in large numbers, demanding their release. It is about strengthening community bonds and shifting the power imbalance between rights defenders and those seeking to silence them. It is, thus, necessarily political: defenders who feel more secure have greater agency and confidence to negotiate with powerful stakeholders about the future of their communities.
The Funding Crisis
The current funding landscape makes matters more urgent. In May 2025, 58 regional and international civil society groups working on the protection of human rights defenders reported as part of an internal survey organized by a leading international human rights organization that they had lost an estimated $33 million in funding for this work in the past year. Three quarters had experienced funding cuts the previous year due to steep drops in government foreign assistance, especially the U.S. funding cuts that began in January 2025, as well as a decline in philanthropic support.
In response, 40 of the leading government and philanthropic organizations supporting work on peace, democracy, climate, and human rights, including my own, the Open Society Foundations, are convening in Dublin June 9-11 to listen to human rights defenders and assess whether and by how much it’s necessary to increase their spending in protecting them, and how to calibrate this. The recently concluded first-ever European Forum on environmental human rights defenders in Strasbourg highlighted how threats and risks to environmental defenders are a truly global phenomena, and that strengthening protection mechanisms for defenders is the need of the hour.
This is a step in the right direction. Donors should redouble their support, going beyond funding global organizations to invest boldly in locally rooted protection networks in their priority countries, in solidarity with defenders and their struggles. Supportive governments, for their part, should engage in trial monitoring of detained defenders, forcefully raise specific cases of criminalization through diplomatic channels, and place their embassies at the disposal of defenders to convene and strategize.
Even amid scarce resources and competing crises, private donors and governments alike should consider the role that defender protection, particularly of grassroots environmental human rights defenders, plays in advancing their organizational missions: from mitigating climate change to halting democratic backsliding. The impact goes far beyond saving lives, essential as that is. When defenders are safer, they are better positioned to advocate and organize for the societies that the vast majority of citizens hope to see.
