On the morning of 8 February 2023, deep within the Amazon, military police officers intercepted investigative reporter Bram Ebus and his two-camera crew at a riverside outpost along the Puruê River. Over the previous two days, the three journalists had navigated from one dredging site to another, documenting the multimillion-dollar illegal gold mining industry and the law enforcement role in it.
During the confrontation, the chief officer demanded to review the material they had collected. He knew that videographer Andrés Cardona and photographer Alex Rufino had been taking photos and filming. “Everything happening here is illegal,” he warned the crew menacingly. In his view, miners were too naive and talked freely without understanding the implications of having media journalists on the river.
In an attempt to de-escalate the situation, Ebus complied. A second officer, his face concealed by a balaclava and brandishing an automatic weapon, scrutinised the material. The officers then forced the crew into deleting the photos and footage. “Anything could happen in here,” the chief had threatened Ebus and the crew moments before, “and I can do whatever I want.” Unsatisfied with merely erasing the material, the officers confiscated the memory cards, returned to their boat, and sailed away.
Simultaneously, thousands of miles away on the Zezë River in South-East Europe, investigative reporter Antela Lika, and her crew faced a similar attack. While documenting illegal gravel mining, the drone they were using was shot down by a local man working in the dredge. Confronting her and the crew at gunpoint, the man shouted “This river is ours.” As Lika attempted to negotiate their way out, another masked man, also armed, hit another member of the crew, forcing the camera off their hands, and smashing it into the ground.
“Why did you come? People have been killed in this river, don’t you know?” the men threatened Lika and the crew. After a tense half-hour and unsuccessful pleas for police intervention, the news crew narrowly escaped.
Beyond the oddity of occurring simultaneously, these two incidents highlight some of the unique risks associated with covering environmental issues, namely, reporting from remote locations, the overlap of environmental issues with licit and illicit economies, a complex tapestry of actors—illegal and legal, private and state-sponsored—, and their readiness to resort to violence to protect their economic interests. In that sense, they exemplify widespread issues that affect journalists covering the environment globally.
Below, you will find further stories, highlighting the risks journalists face on the frontline, when seeking to report on environmental issues, often facing threats and attacks, and in the worst case, death for simply doing their job to share the truth.
“Write about land-grabbing in Africa and you will get sued”
When Agnes Rousseaux and two of her colleagues at French investigative media Basta! magazine were hit with a defamation lawsuit by a private international conglomerate for covering land-grabbing issues in West Africa, she knew they were not the first ones. She couldn’t imagine, however, how litigious the complainant would be.
In the five-year legal battle that ensued, the conglomerate’s lawyers unsuccessfully appealed two verdicts affirming Basta!’s reporting. They also sued Basta! over a second article discussing the land-grabbing issue, brought another lawsuit against another news outlet for listing the original Basta! piece in its newsletter, and sued three other reporters and bloggers who . One of the bloggers, a retired teacher, expressed confusion when he found himself at a Paris courthouse surrounded by journalists. “I did nothing. I just read the article,” Rousseaux remembers him saying.
From 2009 and 2019, the conglomerate filed defamation claims against at least twenty-eight journalists and outlets covering land disputes and its operations in Africa. “If you’re the first journalist or media outlet who is sued, you’re frightened. But when it’s twenty, thirty, forty people, you understand that you’re not the problem. The company is the problem,” Rousseaux said.
Fortunately for Basta!, a small outlet, its readers donated to cover the legal bills piled up during the years-long litigation. Rousseaux and the rest of affected journalists united in public campaigns to raise awareness about the negative impact of gag lawsuits. They also advocated for legal and policy changes to prevent the next wave of suits. “But no law or institution really changed, just the public perception of the problem,” Rousseaux added. “And I don't know what could happen in the next case. We will have to fight from scratch again, as raising public awareness takes time.”
Extreme weather endangers everyone—including those covering it
Rising global temperatures have led to more frequent and more severe extreme weather. The news media is covering these stories more frequently, sometimes with live breaking news crews reporting on heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and droughts from the field. These assignments expose journalists to significant risks: accessing or leaving affected areas can be difficult, the dynamic nature of these events is volatile, and oftentimes the reporters lack training or protective gear.
These risks have been fatal. In the Pakistan floods of 2010, for instance, hundreds of journalists had their homes washed away in floods, while one reporter, Asma Anwar, died while on assignment in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Similarly, three Indian journalists lost their lives while reporting on catastrophic floods: photojournalist Shafat Sidiq in September 2014 while on assignment in a flooded area in the Kashmir Valley, and KK Saji and Bibin Babu in July 2018, after their boat capsized while returning from interviewing flood victims who had relocated to a shelter.
Deforestation across Southeast Asia forests
While global deforestation rates have recently slowed down, biodiverse tropical rainforests of South-East Asia continue to face significant threats from illegal logging and the expansion of palm-oil plantations. Over the past 15 years, at least 34 journalists investigating these issues, and in some cases chronicling the role of local authorities, have been threatened and assaulted. Furthermore, seven journalists were killed: Maraden Sianipar, Maratua Siregar, Desidario Camangyan, Ardiansyah Matra'is, Hang Serei Oudom, Taing Try, and Soe Moe Tun.
An eighth journalist, Muhammad Yusuf, died in jail in unclear circumstances while awaiting trial in a defamation case. Between November 2017 and March 2018, Yusuf wrote several times on the plights of small farmers who had lost land and crops to an expanding palm-oil corporation in Pulau Laut, a small island off Borneo, according to Mongabay, an environmental news outlet. In March 2018, following a complaint by a palm-oil company, Yusuf was arrested and charged with defamation and hate speech. He died in jail a few months later, while awaiting trial.
Journalism as a tool to defend land and water rights
In Latin America, land in the name of Catholic saints does not stop corporations and real estate developers from taking over.
Consider Saint Mary of the Assumption, “owner” of a six-million dollar, 27,000-square-metre property. “Well, Saint Mary doesn’t really own the land,” Miryam Vargas, an indigenous radio journalist, clarifies. “It’s my nation, the Cholulteca people, that has owned it for hundreds of years. But our communal lands are titled under the name of the patrons that we worship, so Saint Mary, St. James or St. Diego of Alcala, are the legal landowners.”
Years ago, through an alleged network of fictitious buyers and forged property records, the land was from the Cholulteca and now is registered under private individuals.
Just like this one, Vargas has covered many disputes between indigenous groups and powerful corporations in the state of Puebla for the past five years. “Communication actions,” she calls them. Namely, live-reporting protests and other actions carried out to defend the community’s water and land resources. Her reporting not only informs the audience about environmental issues like water over-pumping, she said, but also serves as a deterrent for potential attacks against them. Something she knows too well.
In at least three instances, unidentified individuals have broken into Vargas’s home and the offices of Radio Cholollan, stealing documents she was reporting on in addition to other valuables. Once, the attackers left a knife on her bed. Between 2021 and 2022, Vargas was harassed and threatened on multiple occasions by individuals she associates with real estate developers. Police officers also physically assaulted her while she was live-reporting a June 2021 protest against companies accused of illegally drilling and over-pumping water.
Vargas denounces the chilling effect of all the attacks. “I think about the risks of this job, the attacks I’ve suffered, the complex situations that we have faced, and I fear what could happen in the next assignment,” she said. “But my community’s dignity and the defence of our land merits it.”
"Beat it [***]. Let the environment be exploited, that’s what it is for. Be careful to keep mourning over nothing”
A late-night tweet was the first in a series of death threats and episodes of harassment that would ultimately force Maria Lourdes Zimmerman and Alberto Castaño to flee their home country and seek refuge abroad.
For years, the couple aired hard-hitting investigations on radio, shedding light into the environmental impact of government-sponsored development in Colombia. Their muckraking, for instance, led to the suspension of the construction of a port endangering mangrove ecosystem and a temporary injunction against a major dam that violated environmental safeguards.
“When you cover the environment—and not just to say how nice it is and such, but when you put your finger on environmental damage and its impact on local communities, that’s when you become a nuisance,” Castaño said. “And we became uncomfortable for powerful economic actors.”
Despite the on-going threats and harassment, the Colombian couple continued their investigative work. When the radio station owners ended their show abruptly, they moved their investigation to their own website. But in February 2018, after publishing an investigation into the killings of environmental defenders and the issue of deforestation in Colombia’s rainforests, their website was hacked and death threats escalated. For days, unidentified men followed them, brandishing guns in public. At a traffic stop, a motorcycle rider approached Castaño and told him ‘How’s it gonna be, [****] hack? Keep whining and we’ll shoot you.’
After three months, the couple fled the country and arrived in Canada. But even after leaving, the threats continued and the investigation was not pursued in Colombia.
Employed as a school bus driver now, Castaño tries to publish articles from time to time, just to keep the news site alive. Afraid of the consequences of doing investigative journalism and unable to report from the ground, he finds himself writing listicles. “The most venomous animals or the most lethal sharks. Just click-bait, that’s what our journalism was reduced to,” he said.
Zimmerman, who won a national journalism award in 2016, is taking English classes and recently found a job in a pet shop. The store has a dedicated section for rainforest animals, where she goes to find solace. “Being there I get to feel the closest to my country, to the places I wrote so many times about.”
Risk assessments and safety protocols. A South American experience
Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira’s killing in the Amazon in June 2022 sent shockwaves through the community of environmental journalists in Brazil and around the world.
Karla Mendes, Brazilian reporter for Mongabay, said that the tragedy served as a grim reminder of the dangers journalists face, leading to a broader reevaluation of safety protocols within the journalist community. Mendes herself adopted stricter safety measures, such as carrying a satellite tracker and conducting more thorough risk assessments before field assignments.
Katia Brasil, editor for Amazônia Real, shared that the organisation has implemented comprehensive safety protocols to protect its journalists, particularly in high-risk environments. These protocols include strict travel restrictions to prevent nighttime travel, rigorous communication guidelines (requiring regular check-ins and prior notification areas with no phone coverage). Amazônia Real journalists, Brasil said, are also provided with health and accident insurance (something that many of the interviewed journalists all around the world reflected they lacked).
For Luís Indriunas, editor for De Olho nos Ruralistas, a digital investigative outlet focused on the ranching industry and its impacts on Brazil’s environment and politics, the success of safety protocols lies in counting with insights from local social movements and organisations that are experts in the local context. This approach, he said, provides journalists with guidance on where to go, whom to talk to, and areas to avoid for safety reasons.
Bram Ebus, who was attacked in February 2023 while reporting in the Amazon, emphasises on safety protocols specifically designed for the unique challenges of the region. For instance, in some parts of the Amazon transportation is primarily river-based, posing unique risks and logistical constraints. He shared that his safety protocol includes detailed planning that accounts for the geographical and infrastructural limitations, such as long travel distances by boat and limited escape routes. Echoing Mendes’ remarks on monitoring and live-tracking, Ebus also carries real-time monitoring devices that remain operational in remote areas.
