The Emerging Crime of Ecocide: How International Law Is Evolving to Protect the Planet
by Vansh Arora Edited by Dr Linda S. Spedding
Over the past two years, the campaign to recognize ecocide as an international crime has moved from the fringes of legal activism to the centre of global debate. Once dismissed as utopian, the idea that large-scale environmental destruction could be prosecuted like genocide or crimes against humanity now commands the attention of international courts, national parliaments, and global civil society. The proposal to include ecocide in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) would place it alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression—the four “core” international crimes.
In 2024 and 2025, the pace of development has been remarkable: new treaties, regional conventions, and draft laws across Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific are transforming the moral demand for accountability into binding legal frameworks. This moment represents more than a technical change to international law—it signals a profound reimagining of humanity’s duty to the planet.
Definition
Ecocide’s modern legal formulation was shaped by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide, which in 2021 proposed that it be defined as:
“Unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”
This definition—carefully drafted by international jurists including Philippe Sands KC and Dior Fall Sow—captures two crucial elements:
Defining “severe,” “widespread,” and “long-term” damage remains the legal fulcrum of ecocide.
According to the Expert Panel:
These thresholds are intentionally stringent. They ensure that ecocide prosecutions focus on extraordinary cases - mass deforestation, deliberate pollution of river systems, or wartime destruction of ecosystems - rather than routine environmental infractions. Yet their phrasing remains deliberately open-ended. These terms invite interpretation rather than impose rigid boundaries, granting international courts the flexibility to assess harm on a case-by-case basis in the light of evolving scientific and moral understanding.
This flexibility, while essential to accommodate the diversity of ecological contexts, carries its own risks. It may produce regional variations in the application of standards and leave room for inconsistency across jurisdictions. In states where judicial independence is fragile or environmental governance is weak, such discretion could render prosecutions vulnerable to political influence or selective enforcement. The challenge, therefore, lies in striking a careful balance between interpretive adaptability and the uniform application of global justice.
The mens rea requirement also presents its own constellation of challenges. Central among them is the question of awareness: must the perpetrator possess active, factual knowledge of the environmental consequences, or would recklessness - an informed disregard of an obvious risk- be sufficient? In complex organisational structures, whose awareness would even count? The board of directors? The engineers and managers who implement decisions? Or the corporate entity itself as a collective actor?
Further, to what extent can ignorance or wilful blindness serve as a defence? Environmental crimes often involve diffuse chains of command and layers of plausible deniability. If senior executives claim ignorance of the likely environmental impact of their policies, does that absolve them - or does the law expect a duty of inquiry proportionate to their power and position?
These are not minor technicalities. They strike at the heart of what ecocide seeks to achieve: to assign moral and legal responsibility for environmental devastation that is systemic, cumulative, and often bureaucratically dispersed. The drafters of the proposed definition have, perhaps deliberately, left these questions open-ended. This interpretive flexibility may allow future courts to adapt the standard of awareness to the evolving realities of environmental governance - ranging from individual recklessness to institutional complicity - while avoiding a rigidity that could render the law unenforceable.
In this sense, the unresolved nature of the mens rea element is not a flaw but a recognition of the unprecedented terrain ecocide occupies: a crime whose harm is planetary, whose causes are collective, and whose culpability may never reside in a single human mind.
In some states, ecocide is not a completely new concept. Several states already maintain domestic provisions addressing conduct closely aligned with contemporary definitions of ecocide. France’s Climate and Resilience Act (2021) criminalises conduct causing serious and lasting damage to health, flora, fauna, or environmental quality, with penalties of up to ten years’ imprisonment. Belgium’s new Penal Code recognises ecocide as an international crime, with implementation mechanisms forthcoming. Beyond Europe, criminal codes in Russia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Ukraine, and Belarus contain offences addressing large-scale environmental destruction or ecological catastrophe, often expressly labelled as ecocide and carrying severe custodial penalties.
Recent Momentum: From Concept to Convention
Despite persistent debate over the precise legal boundaries of ecocide, the past few years have witnessed a decisive shift in how large-scale environmental destruction is understood within international law. What began as a largely normative and academic proposition has increasingly moved into the realm of concrete legal and diplomatic action. The demand for criminal accountability for severe environmental harm - whether arising in the context of armed conflict or peacetime economic activity - is now firmly situated at the forefront of international legal discourse.
This momentum is visible first at the level of multilateral diplomacy. According to Stop Ecocide International, the concept of ecocide law was raised on three separate occasions during a United Nations Security Council conference addressing the environmental impacts of armed conflict and climate-driven security risks. The declared vision of Stop Ecocide on its website is to:
“Enable a new international legal framework to protect Earth and all its current and future inhabitants by establishing criminal liability for widespread destruction to ecosystems, so that human behavior is consciously aligned with a widely recognized moral code of respect, peace and duty of care for all life. Based on the principle: 'First do no Harm', this offers protection against ecocide and forms the bridge to a liveable world.”
Global indicators reinforce this vision and trajectory. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly highlighted the need for international legal mechanisms capable of addressing severe environmental destruction. A global survey across G20 states indicates that 72 per cent of respondents believe the most serious forms of environmental harm should be criminalised.
The Democratic Republic of Congo became the first African nation to formally endorse the creation of an international crime of ecocide, a development of particular importance given the ecological centrality of the Congo Basin. Belgium has gone further, becoming the first European state to recognise ecocide explicitly as an international-level crime within its new Penal Code, adopted in 2024. In Sweden, the country’s largest political party, the Social Democrats, has publicly endorsed ecocide law, signalling that the concept has entered mainstream political debate.
In Peru, a unified ecocide bill has advanced in Congress. Scotland has introduced the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill, positioning itself to potentially become the first constituent nation of the United Kingdom to criminalise ecocide. Argentina has likewise seen the introduction of a comprehensive ecocide bill before its Senate.
In September 2024, the Pacific Island states of Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa formally proposed an amendment to the Rome Statute to include ecocide as a fifth international crime. Their initiative carries particular moral and legal weight, as these states face existential threats from climate change and environmental degradation.
In Europe, the revised Environmental Crime Directive, adopted in 2024, closely mirrors the ecocide framework in substance, if not in name. It expands the scope of prosecutable conduct, strengthens corporate liability, and harmonises penalties across Member States, thereby enhancing the Union’s collective deterrence capacity and reducing regulatory fragmentation. In May 2025, the Council of Europe adopted the Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, representing the first binding regional treaty to explicitly reflect the principles underlying ecocide law. The Convention obliges states to criminalise conduct “tantamount to ecocide” and moves decisively beyond abstract environmental obligations by requiring enforcement against deliberate or reckless acts resulting in environmental disasters of an especially serious, widespread, or long-term nature. Its adoption marks a critical step toward the normalisation of criminal liability for extreme environmental harm.
Taken together, these developments point to a clear and accelerating trajectory. The past eighteen months have seen unprecedented legislative, judicial, and diplomatic progress, suggesting that ecocide has moved decisively from the margins of legal theory toward an emerging norm with tangible legal consequences across domestic, regional, and international legal orders.
Ecocide in Armed Conflict: The Gaza Case
The 2024–2025 conflict in Gaza has reignited debate on environmental accountability during war. Investigations and reports document how bombing campaigns devastated water infrastructure, agricultural land, and waste facilities, creating an ecological disaster that will persist for decades.
The Permanent Mission of Palestine to the Netherlands has denounced these actions as Ecocide, arguing that environmental destruction has been systematic and deliberate. Under existing law, Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute already prohibits “widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment” in conflict. Yet no successful prosecution has ever occurred under this provision.
The Gaza case exposes the gap between law and enforcement. While international humanitarian law prohibits unnecessary environmental destruction, the lack of precise standards and political will has rendered the norm toothless. Recognising ecocide as an independent crime could close that gap - ensuring that devastation of ecosystems during conflict is treated with the same gravity as attacks on civilians.
Ecocide beyond Armed Conflict: BHP Samarco environmental harm
The November 2025 High Court judgment against BHP in Municipio de Mariana v BHP represents a landmark moment in cross-border environmental accountability that resonates strongly with ongoing efforts to define and enforce ecocide as a crime.
In this decision, the UK’s High Court held the mining giant strictly liable as a polluter for the 2015 Fundão dam collapse in Brazil, a disaster that released tens of millions of tonnes of toxic waste, destroyed communities, and inflicted enduring environmental harm.
This is significant for ecocide’s current momentum for several reasons:
Courts are increasingly prepared to impose robust liability for large-scale ecological destruction, and legal actors are pushing beyond traditional domestic legal frameworks to secure accountability. This judicial momentum complements and strengthens the broader diplomatic and legislative push to formalise ecocide as an internationally recognised crime today.
Global Legal Evolution
Across continents, the legal tide is turning. The African Union and the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) have endorsed Ecocide as part of Africa’s collective environmental agenda, calling for its integration into national penal codes. In Latin America, countries like Peru and Argentina are drafting similar legislation.
At the international level, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark 2025 advisory opinion affirming that states have an obligation not only to prevent environmental harm but also to repair and compensate for it - a principle that strengthens the legal rationale for criminal accountability.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s investigations into environmental destruction caused by the Kakhovka Dam explosion illustrate how national jurisdictions can pioneer prosecutions even before the ICC formally adopts ecocide. The country has opened over 200 environmental war-crime cases, treating ecological damage as integral to human suffering and national security.
These developments are converging toward a shared norm: that large-scale environmental destruction is a violation of international peace and security, not merely a domestic regulatory failure.
The Path Ahead: Law as a Tool of Planetary Survival
The recognition of ecocide would mark a historic evolution in international criminal law - a recognition that human rights and environmental integrity are inseparable.
For decades, the international legal order treated the environment as a secondary concern, something to be managed through treaties, not protected through justice. That approach is no longer tenable. The planetary crisis - climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse - demands tools commensurate with its scale.
Criminal law is not a panacea. But it is a powerful statement of values. It tells future generations that we chose accountability over apathy. As Jojo Mehta, co-founder of Stop Ecocide International, said in her 2025 keynote at Harvard:
“Criminalising ecocide is not about punishing the past - it’s about protecting the future.”
The coming years will determine whether this principle becomes the fifth pillar of international justice. If states, courts, and citizens act decisively, ecocide law could anchor a new era of global solidarity - one in which environmental protection is not a policy preference but a legal obligation.
Conclusion
Ecocide is no longer a radical dream. It is an emerging reality - a synthesis of law, morality, and ecological necessity. From the Council of Europe to the Pacific Islands, the legal architecture for planetary protection is taking shape. This discussion will be followed in future articles.
The challenge now lies in implementation: defining thresholds clearly, building prosecutorial capacity, and maintaining political courage in the face of powerful interests. The recognition of ecocide would affirm a simple yet revolutionary idea: that destroying the Earth is the ultimate crime against humanity itself.
In 2024 and 2025, the pace of development has been remarkable: new treaties, regional conventions, and draft laws across Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific are transforming the moral demand for accountability into binding legal frameworks. This moment represents more than a technical change to international law—it signals a profound reimagining of humanity’s duty to the planet.
Definition
Ecocide’s modern legal formulation was shaped by the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide, which in 2021 proposed that it be defined as:
“Unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”
This definition—carefully drafted by international jurists including Philippe Sands KC and Dior Fall Sow—captures two crucial elements:
- Actus reus (the act): the unlawful or reckless destruction of ecosystems, and
- Mens rea (the mindset): awareness that the conduct risks severe and lasting harm.
Defining “severe,” “widespread,” and “long-term” damage remains the legal fulcrum of ecocide.
According to the Expert Panel:
- Severe means “very serious adverse changes or harm” to natural, cultural, or economic resources.
- Widespread refers to damage extending beyond a limited area or across national borders.
- Long-term denotes harm that is irreversible or cannot be naturally repaired within a reasonable time.
These thresholds are intentionally stringent. They ensure that ecocide prosecutions focus on extraordinary cases - mass deforestation, deliberate pollution of river systems, or wartime destruction of ecosystems - rather than routine environmental infractions. Yet their phrasing remains deliberately open-ended. These terms invite interpretation rather than impose rigid boundaries, granting international courts the flexibility to assess harm on a case-by-case basis in the light of evolving scientific and moral understanding.
This flexibility, while essential to accommodate the diversity of ecological contexts, carries its own risks. It may produce regional variations in the application of standards and leave room for inconsistency across jurisdictions. In states where judicial independence is fragile or environmental governance is weak, such discretion could render prosecutions vulnerable to political influence or selective enforcement. The challenge, therefore, lies in striking a careful balance between interpretive adaptability and the uniform application of global justice.
The mens rea requirement also presents its own constellation of challenges. Central among them is the question of awareness: must the perpetrator possess active, factual knowledge of the environmental consequences, or would recklessness - an informed disregard of an obvious risk- be sufficient? In complex organisational structures, whose awareness would even count? The board of directors? The engineers and managers who implement decisions? Or the corporate entity itself as a collective actor?
Further, to what extent can ignorance or wilful blindness serve as a defence? Environmental crimes often involve diffuse chains of command and layers of plausible deniability. If senior executives claim ignorance of the likely environmental impact of their policies, does that absolve them - or does the law expect a duty of inquiry proportionate to their power and position?
These are not minor technicalities. They strike at the heart of what ecocide seeks to achieve: to assign moral and legal responsibility for environmental devastation that is systemic, cumulative, and often bureaucratically dispersed. The drafters of the proposed definition have, perhaps deliberately, left these questions open-ended. This interpretive flexibility may allow future courts to adapt the standard of awareness to the evolving realities of environmental governance - ranging from individual recklessness to institutional complicity - while avoiding a rigidity that could render the law unenforceable.
In this sense, the unresolved nature of the mens rea element is not a flaw but a recognition of the unprecedented terrain ecocide occupies: a crime whose harm is planetary, whose causes are collective, and whose culpability may never reside in a single human mind.
In some states, ecocide is not a completely new concept. Several states already maintain domestic provisions addressing conduct closely aligned with contemporary definitions of ecocide. France’s Climate and Resilience Act (2021) criminalises conduct causing serious and lasting damage to health, flora, fauna, or environmental quality, with penalties of up to ten years’ imprisonment. Belgium’s new Penal Code recognises ecocide as an international crime, with implementation mechanisms forthcoming. Beyond Europe, criminal codes in Russia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Ukraine, and Belarus contain offences addressing large-scale environmental destruction or ecological catastrophe, often expressly labelled as ecocide and carrying severe custodial penalties.
Recent Momentum: From Concept to Convention
Despite persistent debate over the precise legal boundaries of ecocide, the past few years have witnessed a decisive shift in how large-scale environmental destruction is understood within international law. What began as a largely normative and academic proposition has increasingly moved into the realm of concrete legal and diplomatic action. The demand for criminal accountability for severe environmental harm - whether arising in the context of armed conflict or peacetime economic activity - is now firmly situated at the forefront of international legal discourse.
This momentum is visible first at the level of multilateral diplomacy. According to Stop Ecocide International, the concept of ecocide law was raised on three separate occasions during a United Nations Security Council conference addressing the environmental impacts of armed conflict and climate-driven security risks. The declared vision of Stop Ecocide on its website is to:
“Enable a new international legal framework to protect Earth and all its current and future inhabitants by establishing criminal liability for widespread destruction to ecosystems, so that human behavior is consciously aligned with a widely recognized moral code of respect, peace and duty of care for all life. Based on the principle: 'First do no Harm', this offers protection against ecocide and forms the bridge to a liveable world.”
Global indicators reinforce this vision and trajectory. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly highlighted the need for international legal mechanisms capable of addressing severe environmental destruction. A global survey across G20 states indicates that 72 per cent of respondents believe the most serious forms of environmental harm should be criminalised.
The Democratic Republic of Congo became the first African nation to formally endorse the creation of an international crime of ecocide, a development of particular importance given the ecological centrality of the Congo Basin. Belgium has gone further, becoming the first European state to recognise ecocide explicitly as an international-level crime within its new Penal Code, adopted in 2024. In Sweden, the country’s largest political party, the Social Democrats, has publicly endorsed ecocide law, signalling that the concept has entered mainstream political debate.
In Peru, a unified ecocide bill has advanced in Congress. Scotland has introduced the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill, positioning itself to potentially become the first constituent nation of the United Kingdom to criminalise ecocide. Argentina has likewise seen the introduction of a comprehensive ecocide bill before its Senate.
In September 2024, the Pacific Island states of Vanuatu, Fiji, and Samoa formally proposed an amendment to the Rome Statute to include ecocide as a fifth international crime. Their initiative carries particular moral and legal weight, as these states face existential threats from climate change and environmental degradation.
In Europe, the revised Environmental Crime Directive, adopted in 2024, closely mirrors the ecocide framework in substance, if not in name. It expands the scope of prosecutable conduct, strengthens corporate liability, and harmonises penalties across Member States, thereby enhancing the Union’s collective deterrence capacity and reducing regulatory fragmentation. In May 2025, the Council of Europe adopted the Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, representing the first binding regional treaty to explicitly reflect the principles underlying ecocide law. The Convention obliges states to criminalise conduct “tantamount to ecocide” and moves decisively beyond abstract environmental obligations by requiring enforcement against deliberate or reckless acts resulting in environmental disasters of an especially serious, widespread, or long-term nature. Its adoption marks a critical step toward the normalisation of criminal liability for extreme environmental harm.
Taken together, these developments point to a clear and accelerating trajectory. The past eighteen months have seen unprecedented legislative, judicial, and diplomatic progress, suggesting that ecocide has moved decisively from the margins of legal theory toward an emerging norm with tangible legal consequences across domestic, regional, and international legal orders.
Ecocide in Armed Conflict: The Gaza Case
The 2024–2025 conflict in Gaza has reignited debate on environmental accountability during war. Investigations and reports document how bombing campaigns devastated water infrastructure, agricultural land, and waste facilities, creating an ecological disaster that will persist for decades.
The Permanent Mission of Palestine to the Netherlands has denounced these actions as Ecocide, arguing that environmental destruction has been systematic and deliberate. Under existing law, Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute already prohibits “widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment” in conflict. Yet no successful prosecution has ever occurred under this provision.
The Gaza case exposes the gap between law and enforcement. While international humanitarian law prohibits unnecessary environmental destruction, the lack of precise standards and political will has rendered the norm toothless. Recognising ecocide as an independent crime could close that gap - ensuring that devastation of ecosystems during conflict is treated with the same gravity as attacks on civilians.
Ecocide beyond Armed Conflict: BHP Samarco environmental harm
The November 2025 High Court judgment against BHP in Municipio de Mariana v BHP represents a landmark moment in cross-border environmental accountability that resonates strongly with ongoing efforts to define and enforce ecocide as a crime.
In this decision, the UK’s High Court held the mining giant strictly liable as a polluter for the 2015 Fundão dam collapse in Brazil, a disaster that released tens of millions of tonnes of toxic waste, destroyed communities, and inflicted enduring environmental harm.
This is significant for ecocide’s current momentum for several reasons:
- The ruling expands legal responsibility beyond national borders.
- The judgment reinforces foreseeability and corporate duty as enforceable legal norms.
- The case could catalyse further litigation and legislative pressure.
Courts are increasingly prepared to impose robust liability for large-scale ecological destruction, and legal actors are pushing beyond traditional domestic legal frameworks to secure accountability. This judicial momentum complements and strengthens the broader diplomatic and legislative push to formalise ecocide as an internationally recognised crime today.
Global Legal Evolution
Across continents, the legal tide is turning. The African Union and the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) have endorsed Ecocide as part of Africa’s collective environmental agenda, calling for its integration into national penal codes. In Latin America, countries like Peru and Argentina are drafting similar legislation.
At the international level, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark 2025 advisory opinion affirming that states have an obligation not only to prevent environmental harm but also to repair and compensate for it - a principle that strengthens the legal rationale for criminal accountability.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s investigations into environmental destruction caused by the Kakhovka Dam explosion illustrate how national jurisdictions can pioneer prosecutions even before the ICC formally adopts ecocide. The country has opened over 200 environmental war-crime cases, treating ecological damage as integral to human suffering and national security.
These developments are converging toward a shared norm: that large-scale environmental destruction is a violation of international peace and security, not merely a domestic regulatory failure.
The Path Ahead: Law as a Tool of Planetary Survival
The recognition of ecocide would mark a historic evolution in international criminal law - a recognition that human rights and environmental integrity are inseparable.
For decades, the international legal order treated the environment as a secondary concern, something to be managed through treaties, not protected through justice. That approach is no longer tenable. The planetary crisis - climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse - demands tools commensurate with its scale.
Criminal law is not a panacea. But it is a powerful statement of values. It tells future generations that we chose accountability over apathy. As Jojo Mehta, co-founder of Stop Ecocide International, said in her 2025 keynote at Harvard:
“Criminalising ecocide is not about punishing the past - it’s about protecting the future.”
The coming years will determine whether this principle becomes the fifth pillar of international justice. If states, courts, and citizens act decisively, ecocide law could anchor a new era of global solidarity - one in which environmental protection is not a policy preference but a legal obligation.
Conclusion
Ecocide is no longer a radical dream. It is an emerging reality - a synthesis of law, morality, and ecological necessity. From the Council of Europe to the Pacific Islands, the legal architecture for planetary protection is taking shape. This discussion will be followed in future articles.
The challenge now lies in implementation: defining thresholds clearly, building prosecutorial capacity, and maintaining political courage in the face of powerful interests. The recognition of ecocide would affirm a simple yet revolutionary idea: that destroying the Earth is the ultimate crime against humanity itself.