The Challenge
Throughout the world, it is increasingly dangerous for people to take a stand for the environment. Widespread restrictions, repression, and outright attacks put the work and lives of many environmental activists at risk.
The stories often follow a similar pattern – land and natural resources are threatened by corporate and government interests in unsustainable development – projects that will bring pollution, poverty, and a destruction of community and cultural practices. The goal is simple: intimidate environmental defenders into silence, and leave other members of their community too afraid to raise their voices.
In a survey conducted in 2017 of our grantees, nearly half of grantees acknowledged receiving some type of threat to their work. Types of restrictions and threats included: increased bureaucracy, fabricated criminal charges and other legal challenges, limitations on funding and activities, surveillance, and threats, as well as actual violence.
Our Solutions
Global Greengrants works to protect the rights of individuals and communities to defend the environment. The ability for environmental defenders to organize, voice their opinions, access environmental and social information, protest, and meaningfully participate in decisions about their environment and livelihoods are fundamental to a healthy civil society.
We support environmental defenders in multiple ways. One is through our traditional grantmaking method, providing funding to environmental defenders at risk identified through our global network of advisors.
The second is by housing the Environmental Defenders Collaborative (EDC) a pooled fund of 14 funders, including The Cold Mountain Fund, The Overbrook Foundation, Wallace Global Fund and others, aiming to support environmental activists by increasing access to funding and strategic resources.
The network of volunteer advisors at Global Greengrants Fund, combined with funding from the EDC, ensure that the environmental defenders at risk have improved access to resources and strategic assistance.
Global Greengrants and the Environmental Defenders Collaborative support environmental defenders through grants using the following strategies:
- Addressing root causes of violence and threats
- Building resilient communities and organizations
- Supporting those under threat through urgent funding and other means
- Holding perpetrators accountable
