Why a collective approach to protecting defenders matters

According to a recently released report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), over 2,000 people have been killed defending their land and environment since 2012. In 2023, almost half of those killed were Indigenous or Afro-descendant Peoples. Many of these defenders hail from countries such as Colombia and Brazil, home to globally vital tropical rainforests and other climate-critical ecosystems. The report places a particular emphasis on the families and communities of defenders who have been subject to violence and intimidation in their pursuit of justice, often because of the support these defenders give to their families and community members.

According to the concept of collective protection, defending human and environmental rights is an inherently collective endeavour, which also necessitates a collective approach to protecting these defenders. Existing protection mechanisms often focus on individual defenders, potentially neglecting contextual factors, relations, networks, and the communities in which they are immersed. Collective protection redefines protection for environmental defenders, highlighting the collective impact of violence and rights abuses on communities and collectives.

Collective protection recognizes the collective impact of violence on the Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples defending climate-critical ecosystems and supports the strengthening and unification of communities, drawing on their own wisdom and practices to protect themselves. Yet this approach lacks funding at a global scale.  

Deborah Sanchez, a long-time defender of the Miskitu forests and director of CLARIFI, an Indigenous-, Afro-descendant-, and local community-led climate finance mechanism designed by RRI and Campaign for Nature, believes that collective protection is a strategy that should be implemented at scale: “It helps reduce the overall vulnerability of defenders in their territories. We’re seeing increasing criminalization, so the level of funding and support for these kinds of initiatives must also increase.” 

Deborah explains that communities are becoming more vulnerable, and their civic spaces are shrinking. Therefore, supporting and financing collective protection initiatives, led by and for communities themselves, must be strategic and essential.

Community protection in Colombia’s Pacific region

In the heart of Colombia’s Pacific region, the Black communities of the Bajo and Medio San Juan have built their own model of collective protection against state neglect and armed violence. The General Community Council of San Juan (ACADESAN)’s work strengthens community organization by guaranteeing basic economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, such as access to education, health, and renewable energy, to reduce vulnerabilities that heighten risk. 

ACADESAN works using a collective protection model, one that aims to break this vicious cycle by protecting not just individuals, but the entire community structure that supports them. “When communities as a whole are protected, this has a significant impact on protecting ethnic authorities, leaders, and human rights defenders. The more communities are protected, the stronger the organizing process is with a lower risk for authorities, leaders, and human rights defenders,” says Felipe Nery Martínez Arboleda, legal representative of ACADESAN.

“We promote material measures to face armed conflict, including humanitarian boats, evacuation infrastructure, and safe community spaces for refuge, a model that links protection directly to dignity and collective well-being.”

Communities protect themselves by building collective power, not in isolation. Felipe adds: “It’s a bottom-up, rights-based model rooted in Afro-descendant traditions of solidarity and self-governance, and it shows that defending human rights is inseparable from defending land, culture, and community.”

However, the legal representative of ACADESAN highlights the limitations of the collective protection approach, which often faces barriers in practice both legally and institutionally. 

“It is essential that all institutions within the national government, which, in Colombia, include more than 40 entities, clearly define the collective protection measures they are responsible for implementing, taking into account the specific vulnerabilities and risks of each collective entity,” Felipe says. 

There are also challenges in terms of financial resources and knowledge, both technical and legal, for instance, establishing humanitarian minimum standards to ensure that collective protection measures are respected by the various violent actors. “Achieving this requires the development of corresponding humanitarian dialogues,” Felipe concludes.

Scaling collective defense

Collective defence was also the focus of an RRI co-organized event with Amazon Watch and the Alliance for Land, Indigenous and Environmental Defenders during Climate Week NYC  in September 2025. The event showcased strategies for collective protection and territorial defense amid escalating threats. 

“The insecurity of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights leads directly to human rights violations,” said Dinamam Tuxá, Executive Director of Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB, or the National Indigenous Mobilization in Brazil) at the event.

The ACADESAN–CLARIFI partnership

For CLARIFI’s director, every Indigenous woman defending Mother Earth and her community is also an environmental and human rights defender, and they need to be protected. “With CLARIFI’s partner ACADESAN, it was no different. CLARIFI saw the need to support communities and the work that ACADESAN was carrying out in collectively protecting activists in Colombia, recognizing that without such protection, defenders and their communities remain exposed to violence, intimidation, and displacement,” says Deborah.