The first arrived months ago and stayed. Now there are hundreds of boats anchored in the waters of the Madeira River, a hundred kilometers from Manaus, dedicated to looking for gold, despite the fact that the extraction of minerals is prohibited in the region. They work undisturbed, even in nature reserves and demarcated territories of native peoples. The miners stir the bottom of the rivers, filter the water to look for gold and then return it contaminated to its channels, thus poisoning the fish, the basis of the diet of the riverside populations. The alluvial gold rush has led some settlers to invade Yanomami lands in Amazonas and Roraima. As Eric Nepomuceno writes in Page 12organized groups arrive even in airplanes and helicopters.
In Colombia, the penal code prohibits the extraction of minerals without official authorization. But as always happens, the law is obeyed but not complied with. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the areas of illicit gold extraction increased by 6.5% in the last year. Mining moves 2% of Colombian GDP. The illegal exploitations usually coincide with the formal ones in the same places. Antioquia and Chocó concentrate 40% and 38%, respectively, of the illicit extraction of gold on land. When the extractions are made in forest reserves, after their passage they leave holes up to 20 meters deep.
The call barequeo, the washing of river sediments in search of gold, accounts for 44% of Colombian production of the metal, according to the UNODC. 87% of farms are illegal. The Colombian Mining Association (ACM) itself admits that all legal production does not exceed 40%. InsightCrime calculates, for its part, that the net profits of the business are around 86%, with a wide margin of impunity due to the poor traceability of gold, whose trail is lost in the labyrinths of the black market as soon as it crosses Colombian borders. Mining in clandestine Andean and Amazonian veins also implies abusive working conditions, non-payment of taxes to local administrations, criminality and destruction and pollution. When liquid mercury is poured into water sources, it metallizes and produces methylmercury, which then accumulates in the tissues of the fish.
in Andean peaks
Lake Titicaca (shared by Peru and Bolivia) and its tributaries are increasingly polluted by discharges from sewage and heavy metals –boron, manganese, lead, and oils and fats– from surrounding cities –including Bolivian El Alto, with almost a million inhabitants–, which lack wastewater treatment plants.
In January 2016, in the port of Tampico (Mexico), the police seized in the Peruvian merchant Yacu Kallpa a shipment of 1,200 cubic meters of illegally extracted wood in Amazonian regions and that was going to be sold in the United States. On September 3, 2021, Global Plywood and Lumber Trading pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, which protects wildlife. A court in Washington DC sentenced the company to pay $200,000 in compensation to the Peruvian government. The owner of Inversiones La Oroza, owner of 80% of the seized wood, faces, in the worst case, a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
island nations
For the island nations of the Caribbean and Polynesia, climate change is literally an existential threat: rising sea levels, loss of beaches and coral reefs, increasingly destructive heat waves and hurricanes. The 2017 one did not leave a single built structure undamaged in Antigua and Barbuda.
Since 2000, major floods have increased by 134% on a global scale. In the Indian Ocean and Polynesia, their island countries and territories are seeing how saltwater increasingly contaminates their underground aquifers, making them increasingly dependent on rainfall and pushing their populations to migrate.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – which stretches 2,250 kilometers, covering an area similar to that of Italy – has been losing its colors as the warming of the water decreases the amount of oxygen, killing algae (zooxanthellae) that nourish their polyps and allow them to form their calcium carbonate exoskeletons, which turn white (bleaching) when they die. Although coral reefs only cover an area equivalent to half of France, they support 25% of all marine species.
China and coal
China has suspended the construction of coal plants in 10 regions of the country. In 2019, according to the Global Energy Monitor, however, it financed more than 2,000 coal plant projects in 35 countries. When completed, they will generate 102 gigawatts of electricity. China Huadian Corp. is the world’s second largest coal plant builder.
In 2019 and 2020, Pakistan generated 19% of its electricity from four coal-fired plants, including the 1,320-megawatt Sahiwal, powered by Chinese technology. Two of its cities – Lahore and Karachi – are among the 10 with the dirtiest air in the world. The Global Alliance on Health and Pollution estimates that 130,000 Pakistanis die each year from asthma, lung cancer, bronchial infections and other respiratory and coronary diseases.
african tragedies
In Africa, the most pressing problem caused by climate change is that of water. Its last three mountain glaciers, including Kilimanjaro (Tanzania), could disappear in 20 years, causing irreversible damage to its ecosystems, as warned by Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization.
During the pandemic, two hundred countries have generated more than eight million tons of plastic waste. OceanAsia estimates that 1.5 billion masks could end up in the oceans and seas. Just one of them can release more than 16 million microplastics on a beach, the so-called nurdle, which attract toxins to their surface. As Ian Urbina writes in Outlaw Ocean (2019), given the attention that accidental spills attract, the truth is that much more fuel is thrown into the sea on purpose and with the permission of the States.
In Kenya, the expansion and dredging of the port of Lamu, the cradle of the Islamic Swahili culture, has destroyed mangroves, coral reefs and fish nursery areas that have sustained local populations for centuries. Lake Chad, which is shared by Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, has already almost dried up. Some 30 million people depended on it as a source of drinking water. Since 1970, the Chadian population has grown from 3.6 million to 16.4 million inhabitants.
In the first half of 2020, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center counted 14 million newly displaced persons in 127 countries and territories. The violence was responsible for 4.8 million. Natural disasters, 9.8 million. Eastern Africa concentrated 12%.
Typify to be able to sanction
All these ecological catastrophes and crimes are reviving the debate on the need to classify the crime of ecocide and include it as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court (ICC).
It won’t be easy, however. At the conference that spawned the Paris Agreement in 2015, big emitters refused to talk about offsets, instead offering voluntary aid to developing countries. Between 1900 and 2020, the main emitters were Europe (without Germany, 27% of the total), the USA (25%), Asia (without China, 13.7%), China (13.7%), Germany (5.7 %), Russia (3.2%), India (3.2%), Africa (2.4%) and South America (2.4%). Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, developed countries, whose population does not exceed 17% of the total, have emitted 70% of the gases accumulated in the atmosphere.
At the climate summit in Glasgow (COP26), Antigua and Barbuda, Tuvalu and Palau agreed to seek legal avenues to sue large emitters. One such avenue they are considering is asking the ICC to issue an opinion on whether states can be held legally responsible for the impact of their emissions on third countries. Vanuatu has asked the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea created by the 1982 UN convention to draft a non-binding ruling that could serve as a precedent in future international negotiations.
In 2010, the Scottish environmental lawyer Polly Higgins proposed to the UN International Law Commission to include “ecocide” as a fifth crime against humanity in the Rome Statute, in the event that the damage is so serious that it can be considered that the victim is the entire international community. This possibility was already suggested in 1998, but it was rejected as “premature”. Vietnam was the first country to include it in its legal system due to the effects that “agent orange” had on its population, a herbicide and defolinant used as a chemical weapon by the US army during the war. Operation Ranch Hand (1962-1971).
«International Law is a sum of treaties to which some States are party and others are not, which creates a normative ‘dumping’»
The Parliaments of France, Belgium, Chile, Spain and Mexico, among others, are debating proposals so that natural and legal persons (corporations) can be held liable for transboundary environmental damage. The problem is that convictions and enforceable sanctions remain exceptional, as evidenced by the difficulties that Ecuador has had in getting Chevron to compensate it for oil spills in its Amazon regions.
International Law is a sum of treaties to which some States are party and others are not, which creates a dumping regulatory: companies prefer to locate their activities with higher environmental risks in countries where regulations are less demanding or where it is easier to corrupt the officials who grant licenses.
Neither the US nor China nor Russia are part of the ICC. The UN Security Council, of which they are permanent members, can also veto investigations by the ICC prosecution. Some believe, therefore, that it would be more effective to create an international environmental court through a statute similar to that of Rome. Illegal logging and mining are, after all, the third most lucrative crime in existence, after drug trafficking and smuggling.
The entry What is ecocide? was first published in Foreign Policy.
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