Supporting Environmental Defenders — EIA
A group of people wearing safety equipment paddle through a wetland

Supporting Environmental Defenders

The future of the world’s forests is intimately tied to the struggle of  forest-dependent indigenous and local communities. EIA is supporting  their fight to secure land rights, monitor and manage their forests, and  equitably participate in decisions on  forest governance. Local communities and their individual members, who are on the front lines of illegal logging and large-scale deforestation driven by agribusiness, are the victims of multiple threats and aggressions. Building on our partnerships with communities and community leaders around the world, EIA is supporting environmental defenders, by amplifying their voices, exposing the threats against them, helping mitigate the real life risks they face, and when necessary offer quick response in tragically common life-or-death situations.

Featured Work

Despite growing global attention, defenders continue to confront ongoing threats to their lives and livelihoods, as well as an eroding trust in local and national authorities. As forest communities around the world face increasing incursions into their territories and theft of their natural resources, there is an ever-present need for greater means of communication, monitoring, and protection.

Related Resources

Report

Tracing Timber in Liberia

EIA’s transparent traceability system for chainsaw-milled lumber in Liberia shows how simple mobile app technology can bring effective transparency and traceability at a low cost even in remote and complicated environments.

A truck hauling a load of logs
Blog

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Romania’s national timber traceability system is among the best in the world, but it still suffers from widespread fraud and noncompliance. The use of machine learning strategies offers an opportunity to more efficiently and effectively root out some of the common fraud techniques that enable evasion of Romania’s forest protections. 

The cover of
Report

Three Basins, Three Battlegrounds

Explore three cases that underline the current threats that extractive industries pose to these key ecosystems, highlight the ways that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are resisting, and offer recommendations for strengthening forest governance from the ground up.

Blog

Justice for Dom and Bruno: Victims of the global war on nature

Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira have been killed for searching and reporting the truth. Their lives were dedicated to protecting indigenous peoples and the Amazon forest they depend upon. Our heartbreak over these atrocities is beyond words, but we must turn our grief and anger into stronger determination to ensure their life’s work will continue. […]

Letters

Letter: Open Letter to President Castillo from the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP)

Given the current situation, the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (Aidesep), representing more than 1800 communities, 109 federations and 9 regions, states the following: Three weeks ago in a radio program, the now premier, Hector Valer accused indigenous peoples of being “tenacious landowners”, and “paralyzing the national economy”, proposed to convert […]

Blog

Open Letter to President Castillo from the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP)

Peru’s indigenous peoples have sent a strong public letter to Peru’s President, Pedro Castillo, protesting the appointment of the new president of the cabinet, Hector Valer, who has a public trajectory of attacking, insulting and criminalizing indigenous peoples. In its letter, the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP) refers to Valer’s […]