Aarhus Convention

• So much so that after his visit to the UK in January, Michel Forst, the UN representative for environmental defenders, stated that he found their treatment “extremely worrying”.
• This ambitious international environmental agreement, which I have spent more than ten years studying and writing a book about, was designed to empower and protect environmental defenders.
• But environmental defenders insist that these desperate and disruptive actions are nothing compared to the risks that political inaction pose to human health and that of our planet.
• Here are three reasons not to be mad at the protestors.

1. Democracies depend on citizen engagement

• Healthy democracies welcome and depend on an active and engaged citizens to thrive.
• These examples are all worrying signals for the state of our democracy, and our planet.
• The repression and criminalisation of environmental protesters and those undertaking acts of civil disobedience spells trouble for our democracies as well as our planet.

2. Environmental problems need diverse solutions

• Environmental harm can operate in ways that are not always well understood by those in power.
• Planetary problems therefore need a diverse range of solutions and everyone affected needs to be represented and have their interests heard.
• The Aarhus Convention also promotes active public participation in relation to environmental decision-making.

3. Suppressing protest won’t solve the planetary crisis

• Lethal air, filthy rivers, collapsing food chains, the climate crisis – these problems will all continue unabated, and soon become much more inconvenient than having to get off the bus to walk the last mile to work.
• Forst, in his report, puts it like this: “states must address the root causes of mobilisation” not the mobilisation itself.

Emily Barritt is a trustee of the Environmental Law Foundation