Killings of environmental defenders in the Philippines continue to rise with about 80 percent of cases allegedly linked to state security forces, with most killings carried out in death squad fashion.
This year, the Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) monitored 46 extrajudicial killings.
In its report “Taking Lands, Taking Lives—2019 year-end Report on the Situation of Filipino Environmental Defenders,” the group said even forest rangers and other government officials working to protect the environment are not spared from what it describes as a “climate of impunity.”
A vocal critic of the Duterte administration, Kalikasan PNE called for a national inquiry into the killings, reiterating its earlier call in September this year for the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to take the lead.
“We urge the CHR to conduct a national inquiry, particularly into the nexus of human-rights violations and business and other environmentally destructive entities,” the group said.
The group said that a joint congressional investigation by the House of Representatives and the Senate should be conducted “to look into policies that promote extractives and consequently instigate attacks against environmental defenders.”
The report, released in time for the global celebration of Human Rights Day on December 10, said the deaths represent the arduous people’s struggles to protect a total of 1.2 million hectares of forest and agricultural landscapes that provide valuable ecosystem services amounting to P212.8 billion annually.
According to Kalikasan PNE, the killings highlight the importance of protecting the rights of environmental defenders who hold the most effective and most urgent solutions to the climate crisis as governments around the world gear up for next year’s negotiations in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
By sector, the report said, a total of 29, or 63 percent of the total, are agricultural workers and farmers. Ten of the cases, or 22 percent are government officials. A total of nine, or 20 percent of the victims, are from the Indigenous People sector; six or 13 percent is forest rangers; one lawyer and one church worker.
By concern, 21 of the cases, or 46 percent, are linked to agribusiness and land grabs, 12 percent or 26 percent related to mining, 11 percent or 25 percent related to plantations, 9 percent or 20 percent related to logging; two cases linked to coal mining and one case of killing related to quarrying and climate.
“A significant trend this year is the rise of attacks against government forest rangers and other local government officials, which combine for 22 percent of all recorded cases. Last September 4, El Nido forest ranger Bienvenido Venguilla Jr. was hacked to death by illegal loggers from which they confiscated a chainsaw, despite having a firearm with him for protection,” the report said.
A spatial analysis of the spread of killings would show how areas subjected to heavy militarization supposedly for internal security are the areas where the most number of environmental defenders are being killed, according to the report.
Based on the geographic distribution of the killings this year, the group noted that most of the killings took place in the Visayas with a total of 21 cases, 16 cases of which happened in Negros Oriental followed by Mindanao with a total of 19 cases, 10 of which happened in Bukidnon. Luzon has five reported cases of extrajudicial killings.
“Negros is clearly the epicenter, as it continues to face a crackdown initiated first through President Duterte’s Memorandum Order 32 declaring a ‘State of Emergency from Lawless Violence’ over the areas of Negros, Bicol and Leyte-Samar,” the report pointed out.
Meanwhile, the report said Mindanao remains a restive hot spot with the extended declaration of martial law over the island being leveraged to crack down on mineral-rich and agricultural lands within indigenous Lumad territories and land-reform struggles.
“Eleven Mindanao defenders were murdered with positive identification or corroborating circumstances linking to state forces such as 8th, 75th, and 88th Infantry Battalions and their attached paramilitary groups such as the Alamara,” the report said.
Meanwhile, the report noted that a total of 26 cases were the result of active police or military combat operations or hits where perpetrators were identified by witnesses.
“Death squad assassinations that followed the modus of ‘drug war’ operations were observed in at least 11 of the cases,” the report added.
Resources at risk
These fallen environmental defenders worked to protect ancestral lands and farmlands and to hold accountable agribusiness, mining and other extractive projects over the destruction of ecosystems and the plunder of natural resources. In total, the defenders stood in defense of almost 1.2 million hectares of forest areas, whether old growth, secondary, or converted, and fertile agroforestry areas or agricultural plains.
Using ecosystem value baselines established by various studies, it is estimated that the forest areas, if remained under the protection or successfully pushed for rehabilitation by efforts of environmental defenders, provide the Filipino public a total of P146.3 billion in annual social costs of carbon sequestration, water provision, non-timber forest product revenue, and soil conservation savings.
According to the group, the agricultural lands that environmental defenders are working on would provide an annual P66.5-billion agricultural productivity and savings gleaned from climate resilience “if these areas were successfully subjected to land reform and agro-ecological practice.”
Because of the killings, the country stands to lose P212.8 billion worth of ecosystem services every year. “These are ecosystem services fundamental to our country’s resilience in the face of the global climate emergency,” the report said.
“The country is already losing P61.2 billion annually from disasters. We can expect this to worsen soon, as the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reveals that the Philippines will already experience climate-change disruptions in our fisheries, coastal floods, and extreme weather events within the next 11 years,” the group added.