Rising temperatures, melting ice caps, deforestation, drought, and mass extinctions-we are on the verge of the abyss as correctly identified by Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres. We need to start treating this crisis like a real crisis. There’s now a push for a new crime – ecocide – to be included in the International Criminal Court. According to some environmental activists, making ecocide a serious crime alongside war crimes and genocide could really underpin and strengthen the whole edifice of environmental law.
The term isn’t new and has been there since the 1970s.
During the Vietnam War, the US military destroyed vast areas of crops by spraying toxic herbicides including Agent Orange. The American botanist, Arthur Galston used the term ecocide to describe the damage wrought by Agent Orange in the forests of Vietnam and Cambodia and now people are talking about it again. Human activities have caused the world’s wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds in the last 50 years.
The Living Planet Report 2020 report drew on wildlife monitoring of more than 4,300 different vertebrate species – mammals, fish, birds, and amphibians – from around the world. It found that population sizes for those monitored species declined by an average of 68 percent from 1970 to 2016.
The findings show that decline is occurring at an unprecedented rate and it threatens human life as well as observed in recent events all over the world. Our relationship with nature is broken. Researchers have since quite a while ago cautioned that the world is entering a 6th mass extinction, driven by human’s utilization of natural life and wild spaces, and the consumption of fossil fuels.
Damage to nature has become so extensive and widespread around the world that many environmentalists speak of ecocide for describing numerous environmentally devastated hot spots. Ecocide is defined as:
“Unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.
The addition of ecocide to the list of crimes considered “of most serious concern to the international community as a whole” would make key corporate and political entertainers actually obligated to criminal arraignment in any ratifying state, should their choices compromise serious and either boundless or long haul ecological harm — thus creating an enforceable deterrent to assist with keeping finance from streaming to projects causing climate change.
Condemning environment obliteration at the most significant level could likewise support and reinforce the entire structure of environmental law, supporting every one of those attempting to work on improving regulation, from forefront activists to scholastics, researchers, NGOs, and policymakers. While it is gullible to accept that establishing this crime would be a silver bullet for the entirety of our climate change woes. This year’s NDC synthesis report from the UNFCCC certainly suggests that we’re not doing well without it. Goodwill agreements and raised ambitions are clearly not up to the task.
Criminalizing ecocide as 5th crime may serve as the beginning of ending unwarranted environmental destruction at hands of humans. Calling out and denouncing ecocide for what it is might be actually what is required in case we are to start to change our relationship with the Earth from one of harm to one of harmony. That might be the most ideal approach to ensure that our future generations will still be able to call this lovely planet “home.”
