Another summer of heat waves, wildfires, floods, and tornadoes is upon us. For climate activists, these alarming weather events offer a chance to speak up against destructive fossil fuel projects. Unfortunately, they also provide the backers of these projects further opportunity to vilify those who oppose them.
Climate advocacy is a dangerous business. In the past six months, two United Nations Special Rapporteurs issued separate reports calling on countries to do more to end legal and other reprisals against climate advocates. According to one of the reports, young people are most likely to be attacked when speaking out for climate action and the least likely to have access to the funding and legal help needed to fight back.
Frontline movements challenging fossil fuel projects are highly effective. Yet those working to protect the planet are regularly silenced. The greater their success, the more likely climate defenders are to face a startlingly diverse set of retaliatory tactics. Advocates supporting renewable energy have been audited and jailed for tax fraud; people protecting land have been prosecuted for criminal trespass and domestic terrorism; and activists are being surveilled, doxxed, and digitally harassed.
Climate advocates are the ones taking the heat for all of us, and more needs to be done to protect them. That’s why legal defense of climate defenders must be part of philanthropic strategies to address the climate crisis. This will require more willingness to fund legal protection and defense to protect those engaged in this inherently risky work.
To do that effectively, funders first need to understand who needs protection. While disproportionately depicted in the media as street protesters or activists splattering works of art with paint, climate defenders use a much wider range of tactics to call attention to environmental threats. Those tactics include writing articles, conducting research, bringing or defending against lawsuits, advocating for or funding climate work — all of which are necessary to change laws, policies, hearts, and minds.
And while protest is a critical and highly visible type of climate dissent, many of these forms of peaceful climate advocacy around the world increasingly generate reprisals, including arrest and criminal prosecution.
At our organization, Global Climate Legal Defense, known as CliDef, we define a climate defender broadly because fossil fuel companies and governments that seek to stop them do the same. A climate defender can be anyone who acts to stop greenhouse gas emissions or advocates for renewable energy. They are students and parents; those who live close to the land and city dwellers; journalists, philanthropists, scientists, lawyers, and more.
Corporate Playbook
In many countries, the fossil fuel industry’s close partnerships with governments makes the weaponization of the law against climate activists both easy and inevitable.
Activists aren’t only prosecuted and jailed. They are also sued civilly, tying them up for years in financially and emotionally crippling litigation. In the United States alone, EarthRights International has identified more than 150 instances in the past decade in which fossil fuel companies have used strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPP suits, to silence or punish critics. That number is exponentially higher across the globe. This work needs support in every region and every country where people are challenging the energy status quo.
In the United States, CliDef, in collaboration with our sister organization Equation Campaign, works with frontline activists facing civil lawsuits for their opposition to the fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia, as well as those battling fossil fuel projects in more remote areas that don’t make national news and lack the legal infrastructure to defend large numbers of climate activists.
Since 2022 in Kampala, Uganda, for example, more than 35 student activists have been arrested and jailed for challenging a controversial crude oil pipeline connecting Uganda’s landlocked oil fields to the eastern coast of Tanzania. Many of the students experienced violence in detention and some had to be relocated for their safety. With CliDef’s help, and in partnership with local lawyers, all have been released, and the charges against some have been dropped. But the peril continues, as evidenced by the recent abduction and torture of an advocate who was dumped by the side of the road after five days in secret detention.
How Funders Can Help
Given the vast power imbalances between climate advocates and the fossil fuel industry and its government collaborators, climate defense invariably entails some risk. Philanthropy, like most industries, is risk averse. Climate defenders know this. The tension between these different perspectives may prevent funders and their grantees from having honest conversations.
Legal threats may be particularly worrying to grant makers who don’t have legal expertise. The same may be true of other risks, such as digital surveillance, specious tax audits, reputational attacks on social media, and texts threatening physical violence to the activists or their family members. It’s rare for a climate defender to experience legal reprisals in isolation from these other kinds of threats, since the whole point is to use any means possible to intimidate and stop the activism.
How might philanthropies address these thorny issues while ensuring the safety of their grantees and fulfilling their duty of care to them?
First, grant makers could raise the issue of legal risks at the outset and ask grantees about the specific threats they face, as well as their ideas about what types of support or resources could help mitigate them. Given the sensitive nature of the content, we recommend doing this in direct or encrypted conversations, such as on Zoom, WhatsApp, or Signal, rather than through emails or as part of an online application process.
Second, funds for legal defense could be appended to every climate grant, recognizing that climate defenders often won’t use program dollars to prioritize their own safety, even if the grant is for general support. Foundations can emphasize their commitment to grantee safety by providing separate money for legal security, as well as by offering “beyond the grant” support, including legal training, advice, and related security services like digital audits or temporary relocation.
Third, climate grant makers could take advantage of intermediary funders with legal expertise such as CliDef, Environmental Defenders Collaborative, Equation Campaign, and the Foundation for International Law for the Environment. Each channels philanthropic dollars where they’re needed most and can make support for legal work less risky. These organizations understand legal risk, work closely with climate defenders on the ground, and have established trusted relationships with a diverse community of vetted lawyers and legal groups.
As the climate clock ticks, climate defenders around the world are winning some of the most important fights to reduce current and future greenhouse gas emissions and advance the world’s transition to renewable energy. The fossil fuel industry and its government partners have armies of lawyers and deploy the law to achieve their own ends. Grant makers committed to addressing the climate crisis need to do the same. To have a fighting chance, those advocating for our planet’s future need a strong defense.
