By Claudia Ituarte-Lima

As the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 30) unfolded in Belém, Brazil, the University of Pará hosted the Cupula dos Povos – the People’s Summit – in parallel with the official negotiations. The Summit served as a space for a pluriverse of perspectives, where Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, women, youth, grassroots, and union leaders articulated climate solutions grounded in lived experience. For COP 30 outcomes to be effective and durable, these voices must inform not only public discourse but also the formal negotiation process itself.

Cupula dos Povos and Climate March

The People’s Summit illustrated why. An all-women ensemble performing Como la cigarra – the iconic song written by Argentinian poet María Elena Wals and popularized by Mercedes Sosa. Cicadas, after years underground, emerge to sing in full light. Their cycle mirrors the perseverance of environmental defenders, whose calls for justice often come after long periods of silence, risk, or repression. The refrain, “many times they killed you, many times you are reborn,” resonated against a mural honoring Gabriel Pimenta from Belém – a human rights lawyer murdered in 1982 while defending rural communities. His story, like that of more than 2,100 land and environmental defenders killed globally between 2012 and 2023 according to Global Witness, echoes across generations.

Recent cases highlight the continuing urgency of tackling the root causes of unsustainability and injustice. In July 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures to Julia Chuñil, a 72-year-old Mapuche land defender in Chile who disappeared in 2024. Her image, carried through the streets with the words “Julia Chuñil is missing,” served as a stark reminder that enforced disappearances and attacks against defenders remain a present danger, particularly in Latin America.

After my presentation in a COP 30 side event on the need to recognize environmental human rights defenders in UNFCCC processes, one participant who is experiencing threats for her efforts defending the salares – salt flats – in the lithium triangle approached me in tears. “I do not want to be the next Julia Chuñil but if I am to be, let it be for something that matters,” she said. Her words reflected not an analogy but a daily reality. Across the world, defenders face criminalization, harassment, displacement, and lethal violence for safeguarding lands, waters, and ecosystems that benefit us all. The lithium triangle in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, hosts numerous high-Andean salares which host unique fragile biodiversity and sustain nature contributions to people such as regulating water availability in arid basins and contributing directly to livelihoods and regenerative economies.

We often hear cicadas before we see them. Their chorus emerges after drought, signaling resilience and regeneration. In climate and biodiversity diplomacy, some hear defenders’ voices as “noise,” even framing them as destabilizing or – even more worryingly – as threats to the State. But others understand their contributions as essential, from early warnings and place-grounded knowledge to proposals shaped by generations of coexistence with ecosystems. As climate negotiators seek pathways for just transition and resilient governance, learning to listen to these voices and respecting their rights is crucial, as acknowledged in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

ICJ and IACtHR advisory opinions: Obligations for grounding defenders’ rights

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 2025 Advisory Opinion on climate change stated that a State may be internationally responsible where it “has failed to exercise due diligence by not taking the necessary regulatory and legislative measures to limit the quantity of emissions caused by private actors under its jurisdiction.” Hence, States are accountable not only for their own actions but also for failing to prevent harm arising from activities they are in a position to regulate.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) in its Advisory Opinion OC‑32/25 explicitly affirms that States have “have an obligation, subject to the standard of enhanced diligence, to investigate, prosecute and punish the crimes committed against environmental defenders… This obligation extends to acts committed by private parties because, if these are not investigated diligently, those parties are aided in a sense by the government.”

Importantly, OC‑32/25 demands an intersectional approach. The Court recognizes that Indigenous Peoples, Afro‑descendant communities, rural women, journalists, and others face differentiated and overlapping forms of discrimination and that they therefore must be meaningfully included in risk assessments and the design of protection measures. Moreover, the Court confirms that the obligations of States extend beyond defenders’ civil and political rights to include their economic, social, and cultural rights. This is important because defenders’ actions are often deeply rooted in collective, place‑based realities and cannot be separated from the social contexts in which they operate.

The Court’s guidance aligns closely with calls emerging from Belém, urging that COP 30 outputs explicitly recognize defenders, integrate human rights frameworks consistently across workstreams, and ensure that climate action does not contribute to further harm.

Learning to listen beyond legal comfort zones

As international human rights lawyers, we often work in structured, air-conditioned rooms, speaking technical language shaped by institutions in distant capitals. But robust protection frameworks cannot be built solely from these spaces. They require stepping into 30°C heat, leaving conference halls, meeting defenders where they live and organize, and listening to them speak in their own terms that do not always map neatly onto legal categories.

Cicadas “speak” in frequencies that require attuned listening. So do defenders. When we expand our listening – beyond jargon, beyond comfort zones – the law itself becomes more responsive, context-grounded, and capable of nurturing innovative ways of addressing the systemic drivers identified in OC-32/25.

After completing my law degree many years ago, my own understanding of law has been shaped by the time I spent in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon. There, law is not only a codified system. It is woven through the relationships among peoples, territories, waters, and forests. For example, a recent legal empowerment workshop in the Colombian Amazon highlighted the diversity of these realities, but also their shared patterns of resilience and solidarity – qualities that are helping heal after Indigenous territories were declared victims of conflict by Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) in Colombia. Nature has also been key in peacebuilding efforts after the Peru-Ecuador conflict of the 1990s. Interspecies and intra-generational solidarity remain equally vital today as environmental defenders face transboundary threats.

Towards climate law and governance processes that listen?

Environmental defenders are key agents of change in climate and biodiversity, yet their contributions remain insufficiently integrated into UNFCCC processes. As noted at a COP 30 side event on defenders, the UNFCCC still lags behind the standards set in international human rights law and the GBF. If the climate process is to deliver outcomes aligned with justice, resilience, and the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, it must substantively incorporate the perspectives of those who work daily to defend ecosystems and collective rights.

Contradictions emerged at COP 30. Private actors the ICJ says must be regulated were instead influencing the very norms meant to constrain them – in a direct contradiction to the legal obligations clarified by the Court. According to an analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, more than 1,600 fossil fuel corporate lobbyists participated in COP 30, outnumbering every country delegation except Brazil.

Parties at COP 30 couldn’t agree on a roadmap to a just, equitable, and fully financed transition away from fossil fuels – the main driver of the climate crisis. Yet, there were also certain hard-won victories by joint efforts of a diversity of constituencies. The Just Transition Mechanism found its way into the COP 30 outcome in a rare and powerful moment of convergence. This mechanism, also popularly known as the Belém Action Mechanism, or BAM, is a concrete, ground-up proposal shaped by the collaborative power of trade unions, communities, social movements, Indigenous Peoples’ organizations, and civil society over many years. Despite geopolitical polarization, COP 30 also adopted the Belém Gender Action Plan which explicitly refers to women environmental defenders, following the example set by the UN Biodiversity Gender Action Plan adopted in 2022. Despite women environmental defenders often facing gender-based violence intertwined with violence stemming from their work, they continue to be vital Earth stewards.

Cicadas rise from the soil not to make noise, but to signal renewal. Listening to them – and to those who defend the territories sustaining our shared survival – is one of the most important tasks before negotiators in multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Just like our Earth, multilateralism is fragile and vulnerable. But if we listen to ground-up proposals from biosphere defenders, law can become not just a shield, but a foundation for sustainability transformations – a roadmap for all people, other beings, and ecosystems not only to survive but thrive.

* * *

Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima ([email protected]) is a thematic leader on human rights and environment and senior researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) as well as Principal Investigator of Defendbio. She is also Director of the Global Network for Human Rights and Environment.

Research for this article was conducted with funding from the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas) for the project, Environmental Human Rights Defenders (2022-697 01684), and by Formas and Biodiversa+ under the Defendbio project, Biosphere Defenders Leveraging Legal and Governance Tools For Just Sustainability Transformation (2024-00900).