Climate Protesters Face Greater Risk of Crackdown Amid Rising Authoritarianism

A new study published this month in the journal Environmental Politics reveals that efforts to repress climate and environmental protest are growing worldwide through a combination of new legislation, novel uses of existing legal processes, police actions, vilification of activists, and both violence and killings. The authors contend that acts of repression are likely to expand and intensify as authoritarian regimes roll back climate policies, with a particular focus on President Donald Trump’s actions in office criminalizing protest, increasing police power, and publicly attacking climate and environmental commitments.

The authors say the effects of this “repertoire of repression” are threefold. First, a risk of legal sanctions, carceral punishment, and violence diverts resources from movements and deters environmental action. Second, criminalization delegitimizes climate movements in the public eye by framing them as counterproductive, criminal, or dangerous. And third, that criminalization and enforcement of new legislation diverts attention from climate change by focusing conversations on ‘extremists’ and ‘eco-terrorists’ opposed to the public interest.

“Underlying all of this, we can see very clearly over the last few years there’s been an incessant vilification of climate and environmental activists around the world,” said Oscar Berglund, a co-author of the report. “Media and politicians are very much involved and this kind of vilification feeds into all these kinds of repressions.”