Ecocide:Funded Destruction
Severe environmental destruction is planned, financed and paid for. It should also be a crime.
Ecocide doesn't begin when the first bomb falls or the first forest is cleared. It begins earlier — in an investment decision, a procurement contract, a mining licence, a line in a national budget. We are calling for ecocide to be recognised as the fifth international crime, for the forces responsible to be held to account, and for the de-escalation of ecocidal acts across the globe.
Legal status
What ecocide means, where the law currently stands, and why recognition changes what is possible.
Read → 02The evidence
Documented cases of military and resource ecocide, each with its sources.
Browse cases → 03Accountability
Who decides, who profits, and what each actor is structurally allowed to avoid.
See the table → 04Take action
Check where your money goes, question your pension, and demand legal recognition.
Start →01 — Legal status
What the word carries
Severe damage to ecosystems that is either widespread or long-term, caused by acts committed with knowledge of that likelihood.
This follows the definition proposed by the Independent Expert Panel convened by Stop Ecocide Foundation in 2021, which most current legal campaigns build from. It matters because it sets a threshold: not every pollution incident is ecocide, and the demand is stronger when the line is drawn precisely.
When the term ecocide finds its way into formal law it becomes possible to take proceedings against companies or even governments on that basis. That is why one of our main demands is to legally define the term and recognise it as a crime in domestic and international criminal law.
Read the legal frameworkWhere the law stands
02 — The evidence
Documented cases
Ecocide can happen through military action or through resource extraction and other industrial means. The two dimensions are not strictly separate. The deliberate destruction of nature can be used as a means of genocide. And war always happens within our capitalist, extractivist landscape — military aggression is often fuelled by economic interest in resources. So a war on people that leads to a military ecocide can also clear the path for intensive resource extraction, leading to another resource-driven ecocide.
Select any case to open it.
Military ecocide
Four casesDuring Operation Ranch Hand, the U.S. military sprayed over 19 million gallons of herbicides — primarily Agent Orange — across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to defoliate forests and destroy crops. The heavy contamination with TCDD dioxin resulted in the destruction of over 20,000 square kilometres of forests and wetlands, causing catastrophic ecological damage and severe health effects across generations.
As Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait during the Gulf War, they ignited more than 700 oil wells in a scorched-earth strategy. The fires burned for roughly ten months, releasing massive smoke plumes into the atmosphere, depositing soot across the region, and creating extensive oil lakes that severely contaminated desert soil and coastal ecosystems.
Extensive bombardment and ground operations have severely damaged Gaza's natural ecosystems, agricultural lands, water tables and municipal infrastructure. Over 80% of agricultural land and greenhouses have been degraded, raw sewage has flooded aquifers and coastal waters, and tens of millions of tons of rubble containing hazardous materials such as asbestos and heavy metals now cover the territory.
The breach and explosion of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam in June 2023 released billions of cubic metres of water, flooding vast swathes of protected nature reserves, sweeping industrial chemicals and landmines into the Dnipro River and Black Sea, and draining a major freshwater reservoir. Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating it as a state-level crime of ecocide under Article 441 of Ukraine's Criminal Code.
Resource ecocide
Seven casesOnce the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea shrank by roughly 90% after Soviet mega-irrigation projects diverted its feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, to cultivate cotton in the desert. The collapse destroyed local fisheries, eliminated endemic species, and left a toxic, salt-encrusted desert floor that generates heavy dust storms affecting regional human health and climate.
A catastrophic explosion and fire at reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant released massive amounts of radioactive isotopes across Europe. The surrounding area suffered intense radiation damage, leading to the death of nearby forests — the Red Forest — and long-term radioactive contamination of soil, groundwater and regional wildlife within the 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone.
Beyond the human tragedy, the accident constituted an extreme case of ecocide with persistent macroeconomic consequences. In Belarus, accumulated costs associated with lost productivity, healthcare, resettlement and unusable territory are estimated at USD 235 billion. For years, Ukraine allocated between 5% and 7% of its national budget to expenses directly or indirectly linked to the event. Four decades later, the fiscal and territorial impact remains active.
An explosion on the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig resulted in the discharge of approximately 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days. It stands as the largest marine oil spill in history, inflicting extensive damage on coastal wetlands, deep-sea coral communities, fish populations and marine wildlife.
The spill represented large-scale marine ecocide and one of the largest corporate liabilities in modern history. BP assumed between USD 40 and 60 billion in cleanup costs, fines and compensation. This was compounded by persistent losses in fishing and tourism, with sectoral estimates exceeding USD 8 billion in commercial fishing alone. The event durably altered the regulatory risk profile of the offshore industry.
Large-scale land clearing for cattle ranching, industrial soy farming and infrastructure continues to cause long-term destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Legal advocacy groups, including Stop Ecocide International and Indigenous coalitions, have submitted formal complaints to the International Criminal Court asking prosecutors to treat systematic Amazon deforestation as an ongoing act of ecocide.
Decades of continuous oil spills from pipelines, industrial neglect and illegal refining in the Niger Delta have rendered vast mangrove ecosystems, farmlands and freshwater bodies biologically dead. The contamination continues today, severely harming biodiversity and the health of local communities.
Wildcat gold mining across Brazil, Peru and Venezuela uses large quantities of elemental mercury to extract gold. This mercury is dumped directly into rivers, contaminating the aquatic food chain, poisoning Indigenous populations such as the Yanomami, and causing long-term neurological and ecological damage throughout the Amazon basin.
- Amazon Conservation — MAAP reports on illegal gold mining
- Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) url needed
Industrial bottom trawling involves dragging heavy weighted nets across the seabed. This technique destroys ancient deep-sea coral reefs, sponge grounds and benthic habitats within minutes, severely threatening ocean biodiversity. Marine scientists frequently classify deep-sea trawling as one of the clearest ongoing examples of marine ecocide.
- Deep Sea Conservation Coalition
- High Seas Alliance url needed
The scale
03 — The campaign
Who we are
We are a group of five people from four countries who met during the AEMS 2026 summer school on Alternative Economic and Monetary Systems in Vienna.
It is important for us to emphasise the involvement of civil society through pension investments and bank activities — which happens most of the time unknowingly, because these institutions are not transparent about their connections to environmental destruction, and because of a lack of available knowledge.
This is what we want to address with this website. We want to bring attention to how you are involved in ecocide, and how you can re-think your decisions so that you no longer contribute to environmental destruction through inaction. We call on you to check where your money goes, and to take action.
A world where governments, corporations, financial institutions and military organisations are held accountable for severe environmental harm — legally, financially and publicly.
What we are asking for
- Attention to the term ecocide, and to environmental destruction itself.
- Recognition that it takes many forms — through war and military invasion, but equally through extractivism and the exploitation of resources and environments.
- Legal recognition of ecocide as a crime, and accountability for the forces responsible: companies, nations and financial institutions.
- Most importantly, a de-escalation of ecocidal tendencies and acts across the globe.
- While legal responsibility is not the only means we believe can contribute to eliminating environmental destruction, we stand with the recognition of ecocide as the fifth international crime.
04 — Accountability
Who profits, and who carries the cost
Responsibility is fragmented on purpose. Broken into enough separate decisions — a loan here, an index inclusion there, an export licence somewhere else — no single actor appears to have destroyed anything.
| Actor | Decision they make | What they gain | What they avoid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Governments | Budgets, procurement, mining and export licences, exemptions | Capacity, industrial policy, jobs in constituencies | Reporting obligations and liability for long-term damage |
| Companies | Extraction, production and expansion against forward orders | Margin, backlog, share price | Responsibility for downstream and long-term effects |
| Banks | Lending, underwriting, project finance | Fees and interest | Exposure once the loan is syndicated onward |
| Asset managers | Index construction, fund inclusion, proxy votes | Management fees on scale | Choice — "the index made us hold it" |
| Insurers | Underwriting the operation | Premiums | Named association with the outcome |
| Pension funds | Mandates handed to external managers | Returns for members | A conversation with those same members |
| Shareholders | Holding, voting, staying quiet | Dividends | Any obligation to look |
The questions we put to each of them: who financed this, who insured it, who approved it, who profited from it, and who is paying to clean it up?
05 — Further reading
Read further
Here is a list of academic papers and websites that explore different aspects of ecocide. There are many interesting readings out there, so feel free to look further based on your own needs and judgment. We wanted to provide a few that could give a general overview while also identifying the need for full recognition of the term. We would also like to bring attention to the interconnectedness of systems of oppression — colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, classism and ableism — and how they impact environments, ecosystems, communities, and human and non-human animals. Finally, we want to highlight the intrinsic value of nature, ecosystems and all forms of existence on Earth.
Examines the legal and conceptual challenges of adding ecocide as an international crime.
tandfonline.comA legal proposal to add severe, widespread or long-term environmental destruction to the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute.
intrechtdok.deDocuments ecosystem destruction from military tactics, appraises the failure of existing laws to restrain such harm, and proposes a new international convention to criminalise ecocide.
journals.sagepub.comConnects environmental destruction to the physical and cultural destruction of human groups, using Lemkin's sociological view of genocide alongside Marx's critique of capitalist exploitation and ecological disruption.
tandfonline.comThe destruction of nature and of the land is not separate from the destruction of a group — meaning the official definition of genocide must include ecocide to properly address the systematic erasure of Indigenous peoples.
digitalcommons.usf.eduArgues that the interconnected forces of capitalism and colonialism drive both ecocide and genocide, with destructive consequences for Indigenous communities and local-to-global ecosystems.
journals.sagepub.comLandmines as military waste that creates complex ecological and human entanglements exceeding their original geopolitical function.
journal.culanth.orgExplores how war-driven environmental destruction impacts human life and society, using ecofeminist ideas to connect gender, violence and nature.
ampr.ust.edu.uaProposes making mass ecosystem destruction an international crime, to hold leaders and nations legally responsible for environmental harm.
link.springer.comPrimary documents & organisations
The commentary and core text behind the definition this campaign uses.
PDF · stopecocide.earthThe organisation leading the international campaign for legal recognition.
stopecocide.earthTracks where ecocide has been defined and criminalised in domestic legislation.
ecocidelaw.com06 — Take action
Start with your own money
Most of us are connected to environmental destruction without ever choosing it — through a pension, a bank account, a fund we never picked. The useful question isn't whether, but where, and what can be moved.
Audit your bank
- Check lending disclosures for the sectors in the evidence section
- Ask for the bank's policy on extraction and defence financing
- Compare it against a bank that publishes exclusions
Question your pension
- Do you hold weapons manufacturers or extractive companies, and in which funds?
- Do any of them sit inside funds labelled ESG or sustainable?
- Is there an exclusion option available to members?
- How did you vote on relevant shareholder resolutions?
Press decision-makers
- Write to your representative
- Ask why military and industrial emissions are reported voluntarily
- Send a case from this site to a journalist who covers finance
Demand legal recognition
- Many states have already criminalised ecocide
- Check whether it is defined and stated in your domestic law
- Back recognition of ecocide in domestic and international law