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A newly released investigation has revealed that environmental and land defenders faced persistent, deadly violence worldwide in 2025, with Latin America bearing the vast majority of the lethal toll. According to an annual report compiled by the advocacy organization Global Witness, at least 124 frontline defenders were killed across the globe last year as struggles to protect natural ecosystems, community territories, and vital resources continued to place vulnerable populations in direct danger.
The findings highlight an overwhelming geographic concentration of fatal attacks in Latin America, which accounted for roughly 85 percent of all recorded killings worldwide. The organization verified 105 fatal incidents across the region during 2025, underscoring how deeply entrenched resource competition, systemic territorial conflicts, and commercial development pressures continue to jeopardize local communities across Central and South America.
For the fourth year in a row, Colombia ranked as the world's most perilous nation for environmental activists, recording 39 documented killings. Brazil followed as the second deadliest country, registering 26 deaths. Together, these two South American nations represented 52 percent—more than half—of all lethal attacks against land and environmental defenders documented worldwide over the course of the year.
Beyond the two regional hotspots, lethal violence remained severe in other parts of the world as well. Both Honduras and the Southeast Asian nation of the Philippines recorded 12 killings each in 2025. In Mexico, documented homicides involving environmental defenders fell to 10, representing a noticeable decrease from the 19 killings documented by researchers in the country during the previous year.
Although the global aggregate of 124 killings marked a reduction in fatalities for the second consecutive year—down from 142 killings and four disappearances in 2024 and 196 killings in 2023—Global Witness warned against interpreting the declining total as a sign of genuine progress. The organization emphasized that lower figures do not mean that frontline defenders are experiencing safer conditions or that the structural dangers threatening their lives have subsided.
Advocates pointed out that lethal attacks against environmental protectors continue to suffer from widespread underreporting, concealing the full magnitude of the crisis. Moreover, researchers stressed that local defenders are navigating an increasingly hostile landscape where unresolved land tenure disputes, aggressive resource extraction, and powerful organized crime syndicates frequently intersect in regions where communities are attempting to safeguard ancestral territories, water systems, and standing forests.
The report defines land and environmental defenders as individuals who actively mobilize to protect their local ecosystems, natural resources, and community lands from the harmful consequences of industrial expansion, extractive projects, logging operations, and large-scale agribusiness. These advocates often find themselves targeted because they document ecological destruction, organize grassroots community resistance, or conduct physical patrols across their native territories.
The human toll of these conflicts disproportionately impacted marginalized and rural populations. Global Witness reported that more than three-quarters of all victims killed in 2025 were small-scale farmers, Indigenous people, or Afro-descendant community members. These groups frequently operate on the front lines of territorial defense with limited institutional support, making them acutely susceptible to violence from encroaching interests.
In terms of specific demographic breakdowns, small-scale agricultural workers represented the largest single group of victims, with 47 individuals killed across the globe in 2025. Indigenous advocates accounted for another 44 deaths worldwide. Among the Indigenous victims, at least seven were active members of community guard networks that had been formally organized by local populations to patrol and defend their sovereign territories against unauthorized intrusion.
In Colombia, where the overall death toll dropped from 48 in 2024 to 39 in 2025, Indigenous people and rural farmers continued to experience intense peril. Nearly half of the 39 victims murdered in Colombia belonged to Indigenous communities, while an additional 15 victims were small-scale farmers who had been defending their local environments and agrarian rights from ongoing territorial encroachment.
Conversely, Brazil experienced a dramatic surge in lethal violence against ecological defenders, with verified killings more than doubling from 12 deaths in 2024 to 26 in 2025. Among the high-profile fatalities was Vicente Fernandes Vilhalva, a 36-year-old member of Brazil's Guarani Kaiowa Indigenous group. Vilhalva was fatally shot in November during an armed assault launched against his community in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where local Indigenous people have long been embroiled in contentious battles to reclaim their ancestral lands.
Honduras similarly registered a sharp spike in lethal incidents, with its total number of documented defender deaths doubling to 12 in 2025. The diverging national trajectories between countries experiencing declines and those facing dramatic surges demonstrate that the localized risks facing environmental advocates remain highly volatile and dependent on national and regional security dynamics.
When examining the specific economic drivers behind the violence, researchers determined that territorial and land disputes were linked to the majority of lethal encounters, accounting for 84 killings—more than half of the global total. Extractive activities and mining projects were connected to 11 homicides, illicit and commercial logging operations were linked to eight deaths, and agribusiness developments were tied to six documented fatalities.
The report also drew attention to the prominent role played by criminal syndicates in silencing local opposition. Organized crime networks and contract hitmen were suspected of direct involvement in more than one-third of the murders documented during the year. Global Witness noted that this finding illustrates an expanding and dangerous convergence between criminal enterprises and the commercial exploitation of natural resources and communal lands.
Since Global Witness first initiated its systematic tracking efforts in 2012, the organization has recorded a cumulative total of 2,375 killings and disappearances of land and environmental defenders globally. This long-term monitoring project represents one of the only global initiatives dedicated to compiling and analyzing fatal attacks directed against environmental defenders worldwide.
To compile its annual assessments, Global Witness collaborates with a broad network comprising more than 30 partner organizations operating across more than 20 countries. The research team rigorously cross-examines reported incidents against multiple independent sources, including official judicial records, legal documentation, and investigative media reports, to verify that each recorded death was directly linked to the victim's environmental defense work.
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