Category: Impact Stories

Peru’s rainforests are among the most diverse in the world, providing habitat for an array of endemic species and land, water, and livelihoods for half a million people. Both the forest itself and the people and species that depend on it are facing an existential threat from rampant illegal logging, the world’s most lucrative environmental crime.

From 2012 to 2016, CIEL Fellow Rolando Navarro Gómez had the support, independence, and autonomy to fight the illegal logging mafia, as the head of the Peruvian Agency for Supervision of Forest Resources and Wildlife (OSINFOR). Forced into exile in 2016, Rolando has continued his work from a new home at CIEL, developing systems to identify illegal timber exports, building capacity for sustainable and legal community forestry, and providing critical information about illegal activities to authorities that has been essential in reducing illegal deforestation. 

Rolando’s six-year investigation contributed to Peru’s largest case on illegal logging and its associated trade, and resulted in the filing of criminal charges. In September 2021, a Special Prosecutor in Loreto, Peru, presented the charges against alleged perpetrators of illegal logging and trade of Amazonian wood intended for export to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the United States​​. These charges are a serious blow to the timber mafia and organized crime networks that operate within the forestry and environmental sectors. The cases represent an important step in a near decade-long process to hold dozens of forest regents, concessionaires, business people, and public officials responsible for their role in illegal logging and its associated trade. 

The criminal charges filed in Peru came only weeks after another important advance in September 2021, when Global Plywood and Lumber Trading LLC pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, which combats illegal trafficking of wildlife, fish, and plants. Global Plywood purchased 85% of the wood in a 2015 shipment of illegal timber from Peru to the United States. As a result, the court sentenced the company to pay $200,000 in restitution to Peru’s Ministry of the Environment along with an additional fine. The charges and guilty plea stem from Operación Amazonas 2015, an investigation of illegal timber in Peru, which was led by OSINFOR under Rolando’s leadership, and the Peruvian Customs and Tax authority, in coordination with other national offices, the World Customs Organization, and Interpol. CIEL’s publications contributed to the pressure on both the US and Peruvian authorities to continue to pursue the cases.

“While the administration of justice has taken six years, the decision to file criminal charges provides some degree of hope that there will be meaningful accountability. This represents a new chapter in the effort to respond to illegal logging in the Peruvian Amazon and it is one that will dissuade others from engaging in similar activities.”

– Rolando Navarro Gómez

Along the remote Atlantic Coast of Panama, the Movement for the Defense of the Territories and Ecosystems of Bocas del Toro (MODETEAB) has been actively organizing to raise Indigenous communities’ concerns about a proposed electrical transmission line (Line IV) since 2018.

The Line IV project threatens the rights of Indigenous Ngäbe and Buglé communities and could destroy one of the last intact tropical forests in Panama. For years, CIEL has accompanied MODETEAB in engaging with the United Nations and World Bank to highlight the threat the project poses and to demand that Indigenous Peoples’ rights be respected before it goes forward.

In June, there was a breakthrough in the case. In response to a complaint the Ngäbe and Buglé communities submitted four years ago, the independent accountability mechanism of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) found that the IFC violated its own sustainability policy when it backed the project. This landmark case is an example of these accountability processes working, and the actions that the IFC committed to take in response represent an important step toward ensuring that Indigenous Peoples’ rights are respected — not just in policy, but in practice. This investigation confirmed that respect for Indigenous Peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent is a prerequisite for sustainable development. And it sets the critical precedent that development finance actors cannot shirk their responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples with impunity.

Even as the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels becomes clearer, the oil and gas industry continues to expand into new regions around the world.

CIEL provides ongoing support to partners who are fighting to protect their communities from being harmed and prevent their countries from being pulled into new or greater dependence on a product that, despite having no future of its own, threatens the future of communities, ecosystems, and humanity as a whole.

In the Caribbean, where new offshore oil and gas projects are putting not only the climate at risk, but also biodiverse coastal and marine environments and the millions of people whose lives and livelihoods depend on them, we are working with local partners to develop a cohesive strategy to fight fossil fuel expansion. In September 2021, we co-convened civil society partners from eleven countries to collaborate, exchange ideas, and strengthen the movement working to make oceans everywhere off-limits to oil and gas development. Just two months later, thirty-two Caribbean networks and organizations from nine countries, supported by CIEL and more than a dozen international partners, issued a first-of-its-kind declaration calling for a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Caribbean Sea.

Across the globe in East Africa, we are supporting local organizations working to stop the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). The project, which is already causing harm to affected populations, would open up massive new oil fields, unleash millions of tons of greenhouse gases, and threaten communities and biodiverse habitats all along the pipeline route. With international allies, we are warning banks not to finance EACOP, raising concerns with international human rights bodies, and amplifying legal challenges. Our advocacy has helped put a major Japanese bank involved in the project under the spotlight, secured commitments from at least twenty banks and thirteen insurers not to support EACOP, and brought concerns about the pipeline’s impacts in Tanzania before the UN Human Rights Committee. These efforts are part of a broader movement building opposition to EACOP and supporting local demands for fossil-free, community-driven alternatives.

Thirty-two years ago, the international community was asking itself a critical question: “Is the right to a healthy environment a universal human right?” This year, the world asked again, louder than ever, and the United Nations answered clearly and resoundingly. In a long-awaited vote at the UN General Assembly, 161 countries voted to recognize the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

This historic victory for humanity was more than fifty years in the making, and CIEL has its fingerprints on many of the milestones leading to today, from the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, to the creation of the first UN independent expert on human rights and environment, and beyond. 

As with all ambitious, system-changing work, the path to secure the right to a healthy environment was long and rarely straightforward. It was a marathon, not a sprint. But by 2020, millions of people had joined the effort, and the pace of this work swiftly accelerated. We coordinated a global call to action that garnered support from more than 1,300 organizations — representing Indigenous Peoples, trade unions, women, youth, people with disabilities, and more — and this led to the swift adoption of the resolution by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 and the General Assembly in 2022, with overwhelming support from States.

This recognition was only possible because of the persistent advocacy and pressure from civil society and Indigenous Peoples organizations who continually held decision makers and leaders accountable to deliver on their commitments, even when support seemed to waver. 

The decision comes at a time of intersecting planetary crises — the climate emergency, the collapse of ecosystems, and toxic threats that are pushing us beyond planetary boundaries, with widespread impacts on human rights. This recognition provides one more tool for communities as they defend their rights and the environment, and opens new opportunities to strengthen accountability and environmental governance in the years ahead. And it represents the breaking of barriers: the recognition of this right means governments can no longer deny they have obligations to protect and respect it. 

This victory moves us one step closer to making the law and international legal framework better serve ecosystems and communities. Now, we are pushing institutions, governments, and businesses to mobilize resources and take concrete action to make this right a reality, beginning with protecting environmental defenders and climate-vulnerable communities.

Human Rights and Environment Timeline

1972
Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration recognizes the fundamental right to live in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.

1990
The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) forms and highlights how their cultures, peoples, and very survival as nations are threatened by climate change. Former Maldives President declares, “Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is a human rights issue.”

1992

UN Rio Principle 1 recognizes that “human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.”

1995
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action recognizes the deep intersections between the environment and human rights, and their particular implications for the rights of women.

2001
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognizes the property rights of the Awas Tingni Indigenous community’s traditional lands and illustrates an awakening around human rights violations involving economic, cultural, and social rights.

2004
The Inuit Circumpolar Conference files a landmark petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the United States illustrating the connection between the effects of global warming and Inuit human rights.

2007
The Malé Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change codifies the international community’s recognition of the fundamental right to an environment capable of supporting human society and the full enjoyment of human rights.

2008-2009
The UN Human Rights Council adopts a series of resolutions linking climate change to human rights impacts. Human rights emerge in the climate agenda at negotiations at COP14 in Copenhagen.

2012
The UN Human Rights Council establishes an Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment to advance the linkages between human rights and the environment. It selects Professor John Knox, a counselor to CIEL, as its first appointee.

2015
The preamble to the Paris Climate Agreement includes States’ responsibility to respect, protect, and promote human rights.

2021
The UN Human Rights Council recognizes the right to a healthy environment.

2022
The UN General Assembly adopts global recognition of the right to a healthy environment.

Mandate to Negotiate a Plastics Treaty

When CIEL and partners began advocating for a global plastics treaty in 2016, many thought it was ambitious — too ambitious, even impossible. But this year, we celebrated a historic victory that brings our collective vision one step closer to reality. During the resumed fifth UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi, Kenya, 175 countries adopted a mandate calling for the development of a legally binding global treaty to end plastic pollution.

When the gavel dropped and the words “It is so decided” echoed over the microphone, cheers erupted throughout the room and across the globe via streaming video. Negotiators, civil society advocates, and rights-holders alike cried and hugged in celebration. After years of organized advocacy, many long and late-night meetings, and countless bars of chocolate shared across the negotiation table, the CIEL team and our partners succeeded in broadening a previously narrow focus on plastic as an ocean litter issue to one that includes the full polluting life cycle of plastics, from production to consumption to waste and disposal.

But not every moment of the global negotiating process is so electric. CIEL has been at the table since the first whispers of a global response to the plastics crisis, and we’ve helped to build the diverse coalition pushing this work forward. Coordinating this group of over 100 global members requires slow and steady spadework: scheduling meetings across time zones, preparing effective agendas, sharing detailed strategies, aligning diverse positions, juggling live translation, and keeping track of conversations across a multitude of communications platforms. And we supported partners with a steady stream of cutting edge research and analysis. This critical work built the strong, credible, collective platform for the coalition to persuade State delegates. Now, the momentum behind this treaty is palpable, and it is already accelerating action to address the plastics crisis at the local and regional levels.

This plastics treaty mandate is no small feat, and the work toward a plastic-free future is far from over. CIEL and partners are now focused on negotiating a just and effective treaty, and ensuring that public participation, human rights, and social and environmental justice are front and center.