Jojo Mehta, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Stop Ecocide International

This week's episode features Jojo Mehta, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Stop Ecocide International. During our conversation, we discuss humanity's dependence on nature and the urgent need to get ecocide recognized as an international crime. We also talk about how ecocide is one of the root causes of the climate emergency and about the campaign's mission to get the International Criminal Court to amend the Rome Statute to include ecocide.

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Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Otter AI

Kimberly White
Hello and welcome to Common Home Conversations. Today we're joined by Jojo Mehta, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Stop Ecocide International. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jojo!

Jojo Mehta
It's a pleasure. Lovely to be here.

Kimberly White
So you're the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Stop Ecocide International. Could you please share with our listeners, what is ecocide?

Jojo Mehta
Ecocide is broadly understood to mean mass damage and destruction of ecosystems, in other words, serious harm to nature. Our campaign exists to promote and progress the criminalization of ecocide, making it a crime at the international level.

Kimberly White
When did ecocide first enter into environmental law discussions? And when did your organization first get started?

Jojo Mehta
The word ecocide was first used in 1970 to describe the awful damage created by Agent Orange, the defoliant in Vietnam. It was first used on the international stage by Swedish premier Olaf Palme at the first UN Environment Conference in 1972. But the word, although it remained active in legal and political circles in terms of discussions of potentially looking at environmental crime, and so on, was mostly not in the public domain. The concept was resurrected really by a particular pioneering UK lawyer called Polly Higgins, who was a dear friend of mine and with whom I worked very closely. She's no longer with us; she died in 2019. She dedicated the last ten years of her life to this concept of making ecocide an international crime. We co-founded the public campaign together, which is now Stop Ecocide International, back in 2017. At the time, we thought we were doing it to raise funds, to crowdfund essentially, for the diplomatic work of moving this forward at the International Criminal Court. What we've realized over time, and our growing teams are aware of now, is that where we have teams on the ground, and we have teams or associate groups in about 17 or 18 countries now, where those conversations are happening at the grassroots level, we find it is also then landing in the political conversation as well. So we're very concretely seeing that the growth of the campaign has had a very direct impact on the work at the top level.

Kimberly White
Excellent. So can you share some examples of ecocide we're currently facing?

Jojo Mehta
I suppose the idea of ecocide as a crime is to encapsulate the most serious environmental damages because, as we know, much of our economy is ultimately based on using the environment as a resource and creating some levels of damage. But ecocide aims at those really large harms that could be put into the atrocity bracket of international crimes. So perhaps serious levels of deforestation, serious industrial incidents that could have been prevented had proper safety protocols been followed. I'm thinking of things like Deepwater Horizon or Fukushima, incidents like this which have a huge impact. Potentially, one could be looking at situations like the pollution levels in the Niger Delta, which have effectively been ecocidal now for some decades. And that's been very interesting in terms of recent legal cases, looking at where blame can be ascribed for these things. So, these are a few examples of the kinds of things that the ecocide might refer to.

Kimberly White
Now, who exactly would be held accountable- governments, corporations, etc.?

Jojo Mehta
The thing with ecocide as a crime is that when we're looking at an international crime, we're looking at individual responsibility and being able to point a finger effectively and say that decision is likely to lead to really severe environmental destruction or potentially severe damage to a large population, or those kinds of things via environmental damage. I would emphasize that at the International Criminal Court, we are talking about individual responsibility. So you wouldn't be holding a government to account or a corporation to account. You would be holding a government minister to account or the head of a corporation, for example. And that brings me to a really key point around this whole movement, because it is now a growing global movement, and that is the serious damage that we've seen taking place around the world, which has ultimately led us to the climate and ecological crisis that we're in. Where we've seen these things happening, they often take place either with impunity, they take place legally, or they take place where a corporation might get a slap on the wrist or a small fine, or sometimes even a really big fine, but the point is what that does not lead to is a change in practice. And that is what a criminal law potentially has the power to provoke- a change in practice and changing behavior. Because if you're the CEO, the project manager, or whatever it is at the highest point of making decisions on a certain project, and you can see that the knowledge is in the public domain, or it should be certainly within your knowledge, that the decision that you make, could lead to severe environmental damage, then you're going to be thinking, "Hang on a minute, my freedom could be on the line here. And therefore, I'm going to think very carefully about this decision that I make." It may even mean that a project doesn't get off the drawing board because it potentially could head in that direction. I think it's interesting to think in this context, and this, again, this underlines the power of it being a criminal law is that you're not going to find a company wondering whether they could almost, but not quite kill a few hundred people, which is the approach that is often taken towards regulation, "We can spill this many toxins, but not that many toxins." In other words, what can we get away with? Whereas once you make something a crime, once you put it in that criminal sphere, it does become more equivalent to, you're not going to say, "How do I almost kill a whole bunch of people?" You're going to say, "Well, I'm not going to go in that direction because that might kill people; I'm going to go in a different direction." And that is the potential power of creating this individual level of criminal responsibility at the highest level.

Kimberly White
That's an excellent way of putting it. How many countries so far have criminalized ecocide within their legal systems or are in discussions about it?

Jojo Mehta
There are ten countries that have had ecocide or something very similar to it within their penal codes for some years. Most of them are ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe that based those laws on the draft code that later became the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which is the document that we're ultimately trying to amend with our campaign. But what we can say is that those particular crimes have not been utilized in those countries. One could speculate why I mean, potentially, some more basic issues like rule of law or corruption or various other issues have obviously been problematic in some of those areas. However, in terms of the more recent developments and taking environmental crime seriously, and approaching it from the perspective of what we're trying to do with this campaign, France is so far the only country to legislate and have the word ecocide added to their law. And in a very recent, literally, weeks ago, the climate and resilience law was passed there. But that brings up a very interesting, further discussion, which is that the word ecocide, as used in that law, doesn't refer to what we refer to when we say ecocide. And indeed, what the French citizens, when they called for that law, were referring to. What it's been used to refer to is a kind of a serious pollution event, but potentially a local one. Effectively, it's the kind of crime that could or almost really could be covered by a European directive that was put in place over ten years ago. So effectively, what's happened is it's been watered down in order to get into the French legislation. But what's interesting about that is it really underlines a key aspect of our campaign, which is that one of the reasons we aim for criminalization at the international level is that it takes a certain amount of time, there are several reasons, but this is one. And that is very important because if you try to create this legislation overnight, what can happen is you can alienate your corporate sector, and you can end up with a lot of antagonisms and people feeling that they can't meet this new law. There's a certain resistance and certain chaos that can ensue. And that's what France has been living through; it's been quite an object lesson in this. Whereas, if you aim for this to happen at the international level, at the International Criminal Court, you're, almost by default, creating a timescale because it takes time to recruit a large number of countries, and you need two-thirds of member states to agree to an amendment to add that crime. But what you do with that time period is very important because what you're doing is you're showing that this law is approaching, but it's not here yet. Actually, that is hugely powerful. Because the situation that we're in globally is very much like having a leak in a boat. You can't sit at one end of the boat and point at the other end and say, you're the ones that have the leak. Everybody's got to move together. And so, if we want the entire global economy to start to shift its approach, which is what we ultimately believe this law has the power to drive. Everybody concerned, from local businesses to big conglomerates, they all need to be able to see this coming, and to know what they need to do about it, and to engage their strategic departments, people right across their sector, in how do we approach this so that we come out ahead of this game, and that needs to be an inspiring thing, not a constraining thing. And I like to use this example, which comes from a UK cookery program, I don't know if you've ever come across it, but we had a program that was really big in the '90s, called Ready, Steady, Cook. Does that ring any bells to you?

Kimberly White
Yes, it does.

Jojo Mehta
Yes, I love that. I mean, the UK went mad for this. You'd have these chefs on the program, and they would be given a time limit. And they would be given a set of ingredients, and they didn't know in advance what ingredients they were going to be given. But the point is, they were given a set of parameters, and within that time, they had to create their most beautiful dish. That is the way we want the corporate world, the political world; this is how we want everybody looking at this. Here comes a parameter that we're going to have to deal with, and it's going to kick in at this point in the future. We may not know exactly what the point is, but within a few years. So, your beautiful ingredients are the expertise that you have around your own industry. It's like, how do those things measure up? One beautiful example is an energy company, I believe, from Norway. They were one of the biggest oil and gas companies in Norway, and they transformed themselves into the biggest renewable energy company in that country. So effectively, they were in the energy industry, right, all they did was change the material facts of what they were producing, but all the rest of the structure was already there. There is huge potential, where people can see that there are particular parameters that you can think of it almost as a health and safety law. How do we comply with this new health and safety regulation for the planet that is a criminal law? How do we approach that?

The other part of your question was about who's discussing it now. So parliamentary motions, resolutions, or proposals of law have been submitted in Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Brazil, France, Bolivia, Bangladesh, the UK, and Chile. So that's quite a number, to varying degrees of success and in various degrees of process. There are also at least eight ICC (International Criminal Court) member states who have recorded some kind of interest publicly in an amendment to the Rome Statute, and those are Vanuatu, the Maldives, France, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Canada, and Luxembourg. So as you can see, there's quite a lot of countries already discussing this. We can certainly say that there are more who are discussing it behind closed doors, but obviously, we can't say anything about that until they do. I also think it's worth saying that some of the key global figures like Pope Francis, like António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, like Frans Timmermans, the Vice President of the European Commission, are vocally expressing interest and/or strong support for the whole move towards criminalizing ecocide, which is very encouraging.

Kimberly White
That is very encouraging. And it's great to hear how many countries are currently discussing it and working towards that. I'm looking forward to seeing more step up, too, especially after the IPCC report, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. Now, currently, there are four crimes listed under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court- genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. Ecocide was initially considered by the ICC in 1998 but was removed from the drafting process of the Rome Statute. Why should ecocide be listed alongside crimes such as genocide?

Jojo Mehta
Yeah, this is a really good question. We do sometimes have people saying to us, "How can you possibly say that ecocide is as bad as genocide?" But we do strongly believe that the International Criminal Court is where this crime belongs. To specifically address the genocide question, I think what's interesting here is one has to separate the intention from the consequence because, at the level of intention, genocide is indeed the most heinous crime one could think of. Somebody has to intend to destroy a people in whole or in part, and that's massive, I mean, it's unbelievably atrocious. Most ecocide happens as collateral damage to making money or growing food or whatever it is. But when you look at the consequences, then you start to see why ecocide needs to be at the level of an international atrocity crime. Because effectively, if we continue with the levels of ecosystem destruction that our culture has developed over the last few decades, we're not just looking at a part of a people being destroyed; we're looking at the end of human civilization as we know it. Because, without healthy ecosystems, we simply can't survive. And we certainly can't support large cities and all of this. Plus, of course, ecocide is ultimately a root cause of the climate crisis. You know, the climate crisis is essentially a symptom of decades upon decades of ecocide. We can reduce emissions as much as we like, but if we carry on destroying ecosystems, we're going to find ourselves continually in the same position. So, I think it's also worth just looking at the wording of the document itself that governs the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute, which describes the court as having jurisdiction over those most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. Now, I think nobody can deny that the global challenge facing us right now is the climate and ecological crisis. So to say that ecocide doesn't belong at that level is nonsense now. It's become very clear that the ever more apocalyptically visible consequences of ecocide are telling us very, very surely that this is a crime that should be up there amongst the crimes, the most serious concern to humanity as a whole.

Kimberly White
Absolutely. And recent reports from the World Bank and the "code red" IPCC report continue to say how interconnected we are with nature- and we've been hearing this same message from Indigenous communities for hundreds of years. We are totally dependent upon nature for our survival, for our well-being, for our economic prosperity. We cannot continue on with business-as-usual. We are at a point now where, as the UN Secretary-General said, the alarm bells are deafening. We need to protect these ecosystems that are so vital to us, or we will hit a point of no return.

Jojo Mehta
I think you're right. I think the warning signals have been there for an awfully long time, as you say, from Indigenous communities, but more recently from the scientific community, and also from the corporates themselves. But in the case of the oil and gas companies, they've been trying to cover up that information that they've discovered. So, this is the IPCC report that came out this week is, in fact, it was interesting. Somebody asked me in an interview earlier today- how did you feel when that report came out? And I have to say, it's going to sound weird, but on one level, I felt a kind of a relief because it felt like finally, this kind of globally accepted body is telling it like it is. It's actually being clear and stark about what has happened, what's likely to happen. It's terrifying, of course, but it's very hard to tackle a problem head-on unless you can see what that problem is. So I think that it's important that these reports are coming out. And I'm really sympathetic and have huge empathy for the kind of panic that can create in people. But at the same time, one of the things that psychological research has shown around climate anxiety and environmental anxiety over the last couple of years is that taking action is the best cure, or is the best way to ameliorate how you feel about what's going on in the world. And this sense of disempowerment is perhaps one of the biggest obstacles that we face.

Kimberly White
Absolutely. And, while the IPCC report did provide that stark warning to our global community, I think it also kind of offered a little bit of a glimmer of hope, especially for those working in this field. Because we still do have that chance of meeting the Paris Agreement target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, but it requires urgent and concrete action and substantial and sustained reductions of carbon dioxide. And with less than 30 days now until COP26, the UN and the UK Government have been saying that they want this to be the most ambitious and inclusive climate talks in the history of the COP conference. But for that to happen, governments and world leaders need to take notice of this landmark assessment from the IPCC and enhance their nation's Nationally Determined Contributions accordingly. I mean, the writing is on the wall.

Jojo Mehta
Not only that, but they need to be looking at some solutions that start changing the rules. The Nationally Determined Contributions are important, of course. You've got to have the highest ambition possible. But what we have seen, if you look at the NDC reports from earlier this year, it's pathetic how far we've got in relation to the targets we set ourselves. The predictions that by 2030, we'd be one percent of the way to a point we should have been 45 percent of the way towards. That's where we come in. That's where ecocide law comes in, because all of the Nationally Determined Contributions, all of that ambition, the whole goodwill agreement principle, ultimately, all of that is about saying the right things and intending the right things and playing the game better. And actually, the problem is the game. We need to change the rules of the game. That's something that Greta Thunberg said very clearly a couple of years ago, and Polly Higgins used to say it, too. The difference with bringing in criminal law is that you're changing the ground rules. You're not just changing the way the game is played.

A good way to illustrate this is by looking at, and this is an example from a year ago now, which was a big multinational company, Siemens from Germany, was getting a lot of flack for supporting the activities of a coal mine in Australia, in terms of something they were providing for them. The CEO wrote a really interesting essay, a response in the press, and what he said was that his company, Siemens, was doing huge amounts to meet their sustainability goals, to move all of their activities towards more sustainable practices. They were quite far ahead in their field. And, of course, lots of companies would say this, but what he said was that they were nonetheless bound by existing contracts and fiduciary duties. So that, effectively, they were beholden to the shareholders to do what they had agreed to do within what was lawful. That's the key phrase. So if the laws within the framework of which those fiduciary duties are being carried out change, then so do the duties. So what that means is that instead of a CEO just having to think about "How do I go about my next project without killing people?" They have to think, "How do I go about my next project without killing people and without destroying the environment?" It just becomes one of those ground rules.

The interesting thing about ecocide law, we like to think of it almost as a kind of acupunctural intervention. It's very precise; it's very strategic. It's one simple thing- make ecocide an international crime; just add it to this document. That simple thing is very doable, it's achievable, and it has huge potential to change practice and to change attitudes. The UK Government, for example, has an incredible opportunity right now. They have the presidency of the COP talks, and they're going to want to make it successful. They don't want to look like France did it better in 2015.

Kimberly White
Competitive.

Jojo Mehta
Competitive. But what's interesting is that this is such a win-win issue. They can be competitive by being the first on the block, if you like, by taking up this conversation around ecocide. But it's also collaborative, and that is what is being invited in so many different ways now. It's being invited by the IPCC report, but it's being invited by every global voice on this. We all have to act together. So, we think that this conversation needs to be a major conversation at COP talks because it's not going to be enough to increase ambition. Yes, we need to increase ambition. Yes, we need to adjust the NDCs. But we've got to take some concrete steps that go a bit further and start shifting the rules of the game. This is not about fixing everything. I mean, murder has been a crime since time immemorial. But people still murder people. But can you imagine how many murders would take place if murder wasn't a crime? The point is, the normative is there, and that's what this can affect. So although it won't fix everything without putting some kind of hard stop parameter in place, such as ecocide law, it's hard to see how we can fix anything. Because we carry on talking about emissions reductions and not doing them, we carry on talking about taking steps towards making practices more sustainable, but it's all kind of baby steps without some kind of more enforceable parameter.

Kimberly White
A lot of great talk, not enough action.

Jojo Mehta
Exactly.

Kimberly White
Now, your organization started this in 2017. Can you tell us a little bit more about your mission to amend the Rome Statute to include the crime of ecocide? And what have been some of the challenges along the way?

Jojo Mehta
We're in an interesting position in that we're kind of situated between the legal developments, and this is where the recently emerged definition of ecocide comes in. We convened a panel of twelve top international criminal and environmental lawyers to spend several months discussing and drafting a legal definition of ecocide that could be used by states to take forward at the international level. That's been a huge milestone and has somehow brought it into a kind of reality for many people. We've already got several governments discussing this, which is very interesting. So there's that, and then obviously that leads on to the political discussion, which much of this goes on initially behind closed doors, so that sort of growing political traction. Then the third aspect, which is very much where we're visible, is in the public narrative. So being placed in that way is very interesting because we get to kind of see how those influence each other and how we can amplify things. That's been very useful; it's been a very interesting place to be in. In terms of the public narrative, as I mentioned earlier about the fact that where we have conversations on the ground, we see political progress happening. That's important because there's an interesting aspect to ecocide as a concept that comes into play here. Ecocide as a word is very powerful. Many of us, I think, to be honest, probably pretty much everybody has a sense that nature is being severely damaged in many different ways, whether that's the marine environment, the forests, the climate, there are so many different ways. And this word, ecocide, brings it all together as this is all serious harm to nature. We see people literally having a kind of a light bulb moment, where they kind of go, "Oh my god, this is all ecocide." As soon as that happens, you know it's wrong, and you want to stop it. It's obvious that it's a problem. So the internal momentum of the concept is very helpful in the area of the public narrative. What it means is that we see a kind of snowball effect as that conversation grows into different sectors. It may or may not be linked directly to our campaign, but that doesn't matter because effectively, just the conversation itself creates its own momentum. It also has its own kind of- this is going to sound quite strange- but it's almost got a positive effect built into it. Because I've yet to encounter anybody, one to one, that says to me, "Ecocide should not be a crime."

It doesn't happen. People talk about it, and even if, on a corporate level, or a political party level, they might not be vocal in supporting it. You talk to anybody on a personal level, and they'll say, "Of course, it should be a crime." You even end up in a situation where the oil and gas industry has spent 30-odd years greenwashing. Are they going to now come out and say, "Oh, no, we don't think ecocide should be a crime."? Well, it's going to destroy millions and billions of pounds worth of PR overnight. Of course, they're not going to say that. So on one level, it has this kind of unstoppable quality to it. That's hugely encouraging.

Kimberly White
That is very encouraging. You just reminded me of a story I just saw recently from Grist on how big oil spent nearly $10 million on Facebook ads alone last year to essentially greenwash. Rather than climate denial, the ads focused more on undermining action by painting oil and gas as a solution to climate change rather than one of the causes.

Jojo Mehta
I was asked at a talk recently, what about all this awful greenwashing, and I said, "You know what? I'm going to say something really controversial. I love greenwashing. You know why? Because it means that they can't speak out against what we're doing." Because, effectively, obviously greenwashing is all mouth and no trousers, so to speak, as we say in the UK, but at least they feel they have to do it. And the fact they feel they have to do it means that the public consciousness has gotten to the point where that is necessary. And that, in the same way, means that it's impossible for them to publicly counter a suggestion, like the worst harms to nature should be criminalized. How are you going to counter that? In that context? You can't. There's something about greenwashing that shows that okay, it is not there yet, by any means, and it is very frustrating when one thing is being said and something else completely is being done. But 40 years ago, they weren't even saying they were doing anything nice. They were just doing the same nasty stuff, and it was still happening. It shows the direction of travel. On some level, that's all it does, but it shows the direction of travel while at the same time creating a narrative, kind of a restriction for them where they have to be positive about the green side of things.

Kimberly White
I think that's a great way of putting it. I've never thought of greenwashing that way. Because they really can't come out against these initiatives. They can't say it is really important that we solve it and then keep kicking the can down the road. Now, I know we touched on this a little bit, but I want to go into it a little further. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the latest installment of the IPCC report is a code red for humanity. How can making ecocide a crime help us battle the climate crisis?

Jojo Mehta
Very simply, it goes back to root causes. I mean, we touched on this earlier a little bit. But, we see the climate crisis as effectively a symptom. Ecocide is one of the key root causes. If we reduced all our of all of our emissions tomorrow but continued to deforest, continued to destroy the seabed, continued to engage in activities that lead to oil spills, nuclear disasters, etc., then we're going to continue finding ourselves back to square one and square one is going to be hotter every time. It doesn't work. So ecocide addresses those root causes, including potentially key decisions that we know could lead to serious climate disruption, and so on. So it's a concrete tool for addressing the crisis that we're in. I think, yeah, code red is pretty much where it's at. I mean, a few years ago, it sometimes felt really difficult to put across what we were doing because people saw it as extreme. And it's this kind of tragic human thing of not feeling how extreme something is until it's literally burning up your town. So there is this extraordinary kind of phenomenon for us where the worse it gets out there, the more people listen. I think that when you've got the UN Secretary-General saying this is a red alert, with the World Bank, the global voices are finally catching up, and that creates a space for change. A crisis is always two things; it's always terrifying, and it's always an opportunity. We just need to hold on to the fact that that opportunity is there. And that, with all the horror, and all the death, and all the persecution and everything that is happening, that there is another way that can emerge out of this chaos. And we believe that ecocide law can help create the bridge for that.

Kimberly White
Absolutely. Now, in your opinion, what should be included in the Civil Society Draft Declaration, which will be discussed at the Stockholm+49 summit this month, for it to be a true Game Changer?

Jojo Mehta
Any declaration or document that wants to have a chance of creating a concrete impact, positive impact on the global climate and ecological crisis must include ecocide law because without a hard stop parameter, which can act as a safety guardrail for corporate activity, for economic and policy decisions, without that we can't possibly approach Paris targets or Sustainable Development Goals, or indeed a working human civilization. So I think that that draft must absolutely include ecocide law as part of it.

Kimberly White
Thank you, Jojo.

Jojo Mehta
It's been an absolute pleasure.

Kimberly White
All right, and there you have it. Ecocide causes mass damage and destruction of ecosystems, serious widespread and long-term harm to nature, and it is one of the root causes of the climate emergency. If we continue with the levels of ecosystem destruction that we've developed over the past decades, we're not just looking at losing our ecosystems; we could be looking at our extinction because, without healthy ecosystems, we cannot survive. Ecocide law is a concrete tool for addressing the root causes of the climate crisis and should be listed as an international crime by the International Criminal Court. That is all for today, and thank you for joining us for this episode of Common Home Conversations Pathway to 2022. Please subscribe, share, and be sure to tune in next time to continue the conversation. And visit us at www.ThePlanetaryPress.com for more episodes and the latest news in sustainability, climate change, and the environment.