124 Land Defenders Killed in 2025 as Organised Crime Plays a Bigger Role
At least 124 people defending land, forests, rivers and other ecosystems were killed worldwide in 2025, about one every three days, according to Global Witness figures published on 16 September 2026. The Guardian
The toll was concentrated in a few countries. Latin America accounted for 85% of deaths in 2025. Colombia recorded 39 killings, the highest national count. Brazil followed with 26 killings. Honduras recorded 12. In Asia, the Philippines was the most dangerous country for land defenders, also with 12 killings.
Organised crime groups or professional killers were implicated in more than a third of the 124 killings. Seven Indigenous guards were murdered in 2025, with at least five of those killings linked to organised crime.
Almost three-quarters of those documented as killed in 2025 were Indigenous people and small-scale farmers. Global Witness, which documents killings and long-term disappearances of land and environmental defenders globally, says that share has held over time. The organisation issued its 2025 findings under the title "At least 124 land and environmental defenders killed globally in 2025."
Annual counts show a decline from recent peaks but continued high lethality. Global Witness recorded 196 defender killings in 2023 and 142 in 2024, before the 124 in 2025. Since it began compiling statistics in 2012, the cumulative tally of deaths and disappearances has reached 2,375.
Peru shows how communities respond where state protection is absent or distrusted. Six leaders of the Kakataibo Indigenous Guard in the Peruvian Amazon have been killed since 2020. The Guard grew from a few dozen recruits in 2022 to more than 150 volunteers across 10 bases. At least a dozen other communities in Peru have organised self-defence units, a shift from reliance on police and prosecutors to community patrols and territorial control.
The broader context here is a reordering of risk. Environmental defence was once framed mainly as conflict with concessions, state permits for logging, mining or farming on specific land, plus state projects or private firms. The 2025 data describe a landscape where criminal organisations act as enforcers, employers or competitors for territorial control, a bit like a subcontracted supply chain for violence, and where paid killers obscure responsibility. For analysts of political violence, that complicates attribution and prosecution. Homicides with no clear intellectual author, or identified person who ordered the killing, rarely produce convictions, and deterrence erodes.
Looking at what this means for protection policy, the Peruvian experience carries weight beyond the Amazon. Self-defence units can restore a measure of local authority and monitoring capacity in the short term. They also raise difficult questions about legal mandate, use of force, exposure to retaliation, and long-term relations with the state. Donors, human rights mechanisms and climate finance institutions that depend on Indigenous stewardship for forest protection face a narrow set of options: strengthen collective land rights and early-warning systems, fund community-led security on terms those communities set, and press for investigations that reach beyond material perpetrators, the gunmen, to criminal networks. Without that shift, the annual decline in numbers risks masking consolidation of control by armed actors over territories most critical for biodiversity and carbon storage.
