Declaring ecocide as crime against humanity

First, the context. It’s not working. The planet is headed for Armageddon in this century itself if we continue with our present unsustainable lifestyles. The Paris Accord redline of 1.5° C temperature increase has been breached, CO2 levels have gone up by 125 per cent above pre-industrial levels and at 425 ppm are approaching the survival limit of 450 ppm. The last three years were the hottest in recorded history; Himalayan glaciers are expected to disappear by the end of the century, causing unimaginable water shortages for a quarter of the world’s population; thousands of species are going extinct every year. The planet cannot live with this depredation for very much longer.

One of the main reasons for this impending calamity is the humongous scale of deforestation. Global Forest Watch has reported that 10 million hectares of forest are felled every year globally; that is, 100,000 sq km or twice the area of Himachal Pradesh. Between 2001 and 2023, we have lost 408 million hectares of forests to development, farming and logging, losing also a CO2 sequestration capacity of 204 giga tonnes. And this cuts across countries, as governments look for short-term economic gains and multinationals plunder natural resources with impunity.

The regular Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings are exercises in futility. Just consider a few of the most recent rapacious examples of environmental bloodletting — 30 per cent of the forests in the Amazon basin have already been lost to mining and logging. And yet, Ecuador has finalised plans to auction 3 million ha of the Amazon forests for mining. The bombing of the Kakhovka dam in eastern Ukraine in 2023 by Russia released 18 cubic km of impounded water and devastated hundreds of square kilometres of the natural environment and habitats.

Indonesia is in the process of implementing the largest deforestation project in the world: 30,689 sq km of the third largest rain forest is being cleared to grow sugarcane (for ethanol and food crops). This will completely shatter the biodiversity of the region. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of virgin forests have been deforested in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea for palm oil plantations. WWF has estimated that wildlife populations (including marine life) have declined by 70 per cent in the last five decades.

India, as befits a country at the bottom of the Environmental Performance Index, is one of the worst plunderers of forests. Notwithstanding the regular fudging of reports and statistics, the government’s own admission in Parliament indicates that 1,73,000 hectares of forests were diverted for non-forestry activities in just the last 10 years. According to Global Forest Watch, the country has lost 2.33 million ha of forests between 2000 and 2024; the State of the Forest Report for 2022 notes that between 2015 and 2021, 31,36,700 ha of dense forests have degraded to open or scrub categories, and 9.4 million trees have been felled for road, mining, hydel and other projects. And this onslaught on biodiversity goes on relentlessly with approved projects such as the Great Nicobar terminal, the Kancha Gachibowli in Hyderabad, destruction of 9,000 mangroves for a Mumbai Coastal Road project, the Char Dham NH, a special road to Rishikesh (at a cost of 33,000 trees) for Yogi’s Kanwariyas, the iron ore mining project in Sanders forest of Karnataka which will result in the removal of 99,000 trees, a pumped storage project in the Shahabad forests of Rajasthan’s Baran district which will fell more than 100,000 mature trees. It is a never-ending and heart-breaking list of environmental apocalypse.

This level of environmental massacre and extinction of biodiversity is, in a way, worse than genocide because it affects not just one or two communities but the entire planet. Temperatures, CO2 levels and biodiversity loss do not recognise political, ethnic or national frontiers. And these effects persist not for just a generation or two, but for thousands of years. It is now beginning to be recognised by scientists, naturalists, climate activists and even politicians that such actions amount to a crime against humanity, and a new word has been coined to describe them — ecocide.

Ecocide is another variant of homicide or genocide because it too involves killing, but on a planetary scale. It can be defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with the knowledge that there would be a severe and widespread and long-term damage to the environment caused by these acts”. In 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa proposed that ecocide be recognised as a crime by the International Criminal Court. They argued that it should be added as the fifth crime in the Rome Statute, along with genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. It is no coincidence that these three South Pacific nations would be the first to be submerged by rising sea levels as a result of climate change.

Many countries already have laws against environmental destruction, but these are ineffective as large-scale ecocide is usually committed by the governments themselves. The calamitous effects extend far beyond borders. That is why an international law or covenant is needed to hold them to account or to dissuade them. The same logic applies to large multinationals, which are mostly immune from nation-specific laws because of their spread and influence.

Covenants, treaties, conferences have not worked. The time has perhaps come to punish nations and leaders who continue to be irresponsible. We cannot allow leaders and corporates, without any vision and driven by material lust, to, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “strip the world bare like locusts”. As Ronald Reagan said: “If you can’t make them see the light, let them feel the heat.” Ecocide must be recognised as the worst crime against humanity.

— The writer is a retired IAS officer