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Environmental Justice

The Fund supports forty-one dynamic environmental justice groups in nine countries. Most importantly, the Fund’s grant-making programs are making a difference in a wide range of cutting edge human rights issues, from indigenous land rights in Guatemala, to defending the right to water in Morocco, to challenging extractive industries’ abuses in West Africa, to challenging mass displacement by mega-development projects in India and Pakistan.

Recent environmental justice victories:

In India, MAUJ organized a network of fisher folk, small farmers and river communities to challenge rights abuses associated with mega water development projects and to reclaim historic user rights over natural resources. Its documentation of the damage caused by the Taunsa irrigation project generated national media coverage and was included in the World Bank’s International Panel of Experts Report, which was eventually released after intense pressure from MAUJ and civil society allies. The Indian government and the World Bank agreed to: limit canal closures (which deprive farmers of water and cost them billions of rupees) to two months; provide wheat seeds and several hundred water pumps in severely-affected areas; construct spurs to protect communities along the Indus River from erosion by mega water projects; and construct a surface drain to protect lands near the Taunsa project from water logging, which destroys crops and floods villages. The World Bank Inspection Panel also agreed that fisher folk be permitted to form an independent (as opposed to government-run) cooperative with fishing rights and the power to issue licenses; the government of Punjab has yet to approve the policy. MAUJ did all this with a budget of $10,000, all of which the Fund provides.
Fund grantees in Mexico, working jointly, won a groundbreaking legal victory in August 2007 when a federal judge in Guerrero ordered the temporary suspension of all work related to the construction of the La Parota Hydroelectric Dam. The judge’s decision sought to prevent irreversible damage to the farmers’ constitutional rights to a healthy environment, a fair trial, and adequate judicial protection. The dam would have flooded approximately 41,000 acres of land, displacing 25,000 poor farmers and indigenous people with no opportunity for genuine participation. Another 75,000 people would have lost access to their farmlands and forests. This legal decision is the culmination of two years of public education and legal work by the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, Institute for Environmental Law, and Maderas del Pueblo.
In Liberia, thanks to the efforts of Fund grantees, the Liberian legislature passed the Reform Forestry Law, which promotes access to information, transparency and accountability; establishes safeguards for the environment; explicitly prohibits illicit activities in the forest sector, providing specific penalties for corruption; and provides for benefit sharing and greater participation of local forest communities. Now that the policy framework is in place, Fund grantees will provide affected communities with organizing and campaign tools to monitor and report rights violations and to make concrete proposals to share in the benefits of resource extraction.
In response to large-scale demonstrations organized by the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE), the Sugar Corporation of Uganda recently renounced its plans to build a sugarcane plantation in the Mabira Central Forest Reserve, one of the few remaining protected forests in Uganda.
In India, several Fund grantees, including DISHA and ASTHA, won landmark legislation for the rights of India’s long-oppressed indigenous populations. After decades of struggle by grassroots indigenous peoples’ rights movements, the lower house of India’s parliament passed the Recognition of Forest Rights bill. The law, which took effect in 2007, recognizes the historical and legal rights of indigenous peoples to their homeland and livelihoods, and strengthens the rights of indigenous peoples and other forest dwellers to protect their lands against ongoing, rapid de-forestation efforts by logging, mining, and other industries. This bill affects the estimated 40-50 million forest dwellers in India who previously had little if any protections in the face of abusive interlopers after their traditional land.
In Liberia, Citizen Advocacy for the Protection of the Ancestral Land in Grand Bassa County (CCAPAL) and Bassa Concerned Citizens Movement (BCCM) convinced the Liberian government to address egregious violations by a long-time corporate abuser: the Liberian Agricultural Company (LAC). Last year, working with Green Advocates, CCAPAL and BCCM were able to secure both a Liberian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision and a presidential order establishing a moratorium on further LAC expansion. The EPA decision cited extensive reports from civil society detailing the company’s responsibility for forced displacement, destruction of property and toxic dumping. Despite these decisions, however, LAC security guards and police invaded two villages last year, displacing residents and arresting community leaders. Over the coming year, CCAPAL will press the government to restore the disputed land to the communities, which, without land, currently have no means to earn livelihoods.
In March 2008, the Jalisco Indigenous Support Association (AJAGI), an indigenous people's rights group, won a potentially precedent-setting victory reinforcing community consent requirements when a judge in Guadalajara, Mexico ordered the government to cease and desist with a planned highway project. The project would have cut through a historic cultural area and had already destroyed indigenous monuments that were over a thousand years old.

» Read about the work of Green Advocates in Liberia

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