A growing body of research and advocacy stresses the close links between ecocide and genocide, albeit with some different emphases. This has important implications for Israeli participation in climate change talks.

Ecocide is typically taken to mean the destruction of the natural environment, while genocide is the destruction of – or attempts to destroy – entire human groups. There is an emerging consensus that these two should be viewed together.

David Zierler (2011) observes that ecocide as a concept was created in response to US chemical warfare against Vietnam in the 1960s, when the US military used defoliants in attempts to destroy the natural shelter and food supply of the Vietnamese nationalist resistance. The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (the CWC) came into force some decades later, in the 1990s, after modification of an earlier Geneva Protocol to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons.

The “genocide–ecocide nexus” has been argued to require an expansion of the remit of the International Criminal Court (Lindgren 2018) to address the urgency and life-threatening character of the ongoing destruction of natural systems.

Most commonly it is argued that (1) the destruction of natural systems needs greater recognition in international law, or that (2) the natural world must be seen as at the centre of human existence, and/or that (3) environmental protection treaties should not ignore or sidestep the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples and their cultures, from Gaza to the Amazonian region.

This essay will discuss the main variants in conceptualising the ecocide-genocide nexus, along with the underlying concerns. It then argues that the Zionist Genocide and Ecocide in Gaza demonstrates a level of greenwashing, which should not be permitted in climate change talks.

1. Main variants of the ecocide-genocide nexus

Tale 1 below sets out the main arguments on the ecocide-genocide nexus.

1.1 Make ecocide a great crime

These arguments tend to assume that the great crimes against human beings are better recognised than crimes against the non-human living world. Based on this, they argue for the upgrade of ecocide into the status of a great crime, typically by incorporation into the Statute of Rome. Many of these analysts place their arguments in a wider context, but tend to focus on the recognition of ecocide as a great crime.

So, for example, Da Fonseca (2025) argues that ecocide should be recognised as an international crime, with the assumption that this may increase attention and policing of such destruction. In a follow-up, she also calls for a Global Climate Justice Observatory and “reform of climate finance to include justice-centred mechanisms." All of this is to address an “institutional vacuum”, which allows great crimes against nature to proceed without accountability. Similarly, Alvi (2022) sees ecocide as “an existential battle for humanity and accountability for the destruction of the environment [which] has to be visible, swift and impactful."

Eichler (2020) takes the matter a little further by equating ecocide with genocide, saying that the definition of genocide (which accounts only for human groups) should be widened to include “cultural genocide, social death and ecocide” which, like the genocide of human groups, are typical products of colonisation. She points out that this is consistent with the work of Raphael Lemkin, creator of the modern notion of genocide. Part of her argument says that resource depletion creates the conditions for future genocides. Galligan (2021) also uses Lemkin to reconceptualise genocide, which helps see the intersection between ecocide and genocide, with reference to deforestation in the Amazon. Ecocide is a form of violence that also “increases the likelihood of future genocides."

Lindgren (2018) says “Ecocide is a structurally reoccurring phenomenon contributing to a serious disequilibrium in the Earth-system that buttresses all planetary life." He stresses the importance of an international crime of ecocide (“a fifth crime against peace under the Rome Statute”), which can allow prosecution for ecocide, “as well as ecocidally induced physical and cultural genocide." This would not by itself solve the problem but would be “a tool for larger processes of decolonisation … coupled with alternative methods of enforcement and resistance.”

1.2 The natural world should be a protected subject

Some countries with strong indigenous cultures, like Bolivia and Ecuador, have incorporated recognition of Mother Earth into their constitutions, effectively making the natural world a legal subject with its own rights. So Article 33 of the Bolivian Constitution of 2009 (Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia 2009) guarantees “a healthy natural environment” alongside a priority for industrialisation (Art 355).  

On this constitutional basis, the Bolivian law ‘Derechos de la Madre Tierra’ (2010) recognises legal rights of Mother Earth, creating for it a collective subject legal status of public interest and setting out duties required for its protection. Similarly, the law ‘Marco de la Madre Tierra y Desarrollo Integral para Vivir Bien’ (2012) establishes the duty of the state to respect the regenerative capacities of the Mother Earth and promotes a model of “Living Well” (Vivir Bien) which refers to an equilibrium between human development and the natural world. 

The constitution of Ecuador (Republica del Ecuador 2008) has similar innovations in article 71, which gives a juridical personality to nature or the PachaMama (the Quechua name for Mother Earth). In Article 71, it is recognised that this Mother Earth “reproduces and realises life” and has the right to an integral respect. Article 72 sets out the duty of the state to encourage all to protect the natural world and to establish mechanisms to assist in its restoration, including through both preventive and restrictive measures on destructive activities. At the same time, Article 74 sets out the human rights to use the natural world consistent with the principles of Buen Vivir (good living in harmony with nature). 

As Harris (2021) points out, there are legal differences in these Bolivia-Ecuador formulations, but the concept is similar. Human communities depend on the healthy survival of the natural world. The PachaMama Alliance (2025) says Mother Earth is the source of harvests and all other production by which we all survive and are able to lead a good life in harmony with nature – also known as Sumak Kawsay, the Quechua equivalent of Living Well (Vivir Bien or Buen Vivir). 

The Constitution of the United Mexican States (as of 2012) does not go so far but has provisions (Article 127) which designate the lands and waters of its territories as properties of the nation, which has the right to transmit ownership on the conditions that the state can regulate to secure just and sustainable usage. This is sometimes spoken of as securing the rights of nature. 

Yet the Ecuadorian and Bolivian formulations are stronger and more closely linked to indigenous custodial ideas. In 2021, Bolivian Vice-President David Choquehuanca reaffirmed his country’s affirmation of rights of nature, recognition of the crime of ecocide, and the defence of Mother Earth in the face of climate change. He says re-establishing connections with the Pachamama could avert pandemics, extinctions, GMOs, and other unsustainable patterns of consumption. (Kaufman et al, 2025) 

Broader implications of these experiences suggest the incorporation of indigenous justice systems, as argued at the 2010 World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC) (Lindgren 2018), as a “vital starting point for larger processes of decolonisation” by delivering “a counterhegemonic legal logic that may reach structural and systemic drivers of violence” against the living world.

1.3 Ecological protection must reject genocide and ethnic cleansing

There is a third group of writers who stress the need to recognise and incorporate lessons from the Gaza genocide, in many respects, the great moral issue of our day. 

There are certainly other contemporary examples of great crimes in the world (e.g. in the Congo and Sudan), but in the case of the great Israeli crimes in Gaza, we see a widespread Western refusal to address and confront an otherwise well-recognised genocide (recognised by the ICJ and several UN experts), which is also poisoning the historic lands of Palestine. The denial of and complicity in this genocide by powerful nations makes a mockery of the idea that elevating ecocide to the level of a great crimes in the Statute of Rome would by itself resolve the matter. If genocide can be selectively and cynically ignored, the big powers can do the same for ecocide.

Hamouchene (2025) says that the Israeli genocide in Gaza well illustrates “critical intersections” between the climate/ecological crisis and the struggle for indigenous Palestinian liberation. The great crime in Gaza is not only a genocide, it is an ecocide and might also be called a “holocide: the deliberate annihilation of an entire social and ecological fabric." The Israeli bombardment of civilians has created millions of tonnes of toxic rubble while contaminating soil and groundwater. Yet a “racist environmental narrative” suggests the Palestinians are “ecological savages” who do not and have not cared for the land, while the colonists are improving the land or, as they put it, “greening the desert” (Jewish National Fund 2025) in the wake of their ethnic cleansing. This greenwashing of a vicious genocide carries with it conservation stories, which aim to: justify land grabs, prevent the return of Palestinian refugees, dehistoricise and colonise the land and its ancient cultures, suppressing resistance to "Israel|" and greenwashing its apartheid reality.

Hamouchene (2025) speaks of apartheid, occupation, and dispossession creating “profound asymmetries” in the impact of the climate crisis in historic Palestine, including over access to water. Citing Shqair (2023), he discusses “eco-normalisation” in which collaborators are drawn on to build a green colonialism to cover up great crimes against the Palestinian people, “by posing as a green and advanced country in an arid and regressive Middle East." This has involved projects like Enlight Green Energy and NewMed Energy, to further greenwash and integrate the Israeli regime in the Arab region. By contrast, Palestinian resistance and “eco-sumud” (steadfast land care) confront this “green” colonialism.

Similarly, Poureisa (2025) speaks of a “scorched earth strategy” in Gaza, which “spared nothing: land, sky and sea … if the ethnic cleansing of all 2.3 million people was impossible, the alternative was ecological destruction, ensuring that the land itself could no longer sustain its inhabitants.” She asks how any ceasefire can be celebrated “when the soil is poisoned by bombs, where forests have been reduced to ashes and more than 90% of agricultural land has been destroyed?” The ecocide in Gaza has been driven by thousands of tonnes of explosives, along with a climate liability calculated at $148 billion in military emissions (Poureisa 2025).  

Some analysts make links between these three notional groups I have set out. Polly Higgins (2010), for example, adopts the Earth Rights approach of Ecuador and Bolivia, while seeking to develop a law criminalising ecocide and arguing that neither negotiation of climate change through carbon transactions nor discussions of “corporate social responsibility” have anything to do with protecting people and the planet. Yet national and international law could create a foundation for international governance and controls over the destruction of Mother Nature (Higgins 2010).

2. No place for Zionist ecocide and greenwashing in climate change talks

None of this devastation, military emissions, and poisoned soil finds mention in the multiple Israeli climate change reports, which pretend that a well-organised emissions reduction strategy is on target (Axelrod 2010; IMEP 2025). Indeed, the Israeli regime has become a master at greenwashing its ethnic cleansing and genocide, including by covering up great crimes with fake emissions data and reports. That deception puts at risk the thin veneer of indigenous culture layered over the climate change talks in Amazonian Brazil (Anderson 2025).

It is well recognised that militaries account for a significant quantity of global warming emissions, estimated at 5.5% worldwide (Weir 2024). But the Israeli contribution through its ecocide in Gaza is the worst recent example of these. One study shows that, in the first 15 months of the assault on Gaza, as well as slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians – more than 80% of them women and children (Graham-Harrison and Abraham 2025) –  the “projected emissions from 15 months of direct war activities were greater than the annual emissions of 36 individual countries and territories”. The contribution by the Palestinian resistance, by comparison, was tiny, at 0.2% of total of the total direct conflict emissions (Neimark et al. 2025; Lakhani 2025). No serious discussion of climate change can allow this to pass unchallenged.

Yet successive Israeli climate change reports have systematically lied to cover up the apartheid, asymmetry of impacts, as well as the genocide in Gaza. Deception begins with the population data. In a 2010 report, the Israelis speak of a 2009 population of “7.5 million”, a figure which completely excludes the similar number of Palestinians in Israeli-controlled territories. There is no mention at all of the Palestinian population and their natural environment (Axelrod 2010). As a result, all of the subsequent claims about water resources, agriculture, energy, and “adaptation to climate change” are meaningless. Much the same applies to the 2025 report, which claims remarkable progress “toward achieving sectoral and economy-wide targets," including through international partnerships and “comprehensive policies and measures across sectors to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainability (IMEP 2025). There is no mention at all of an occupied, brutalised and dispossessed indigenous population, nor the environmental impact of this dispossession.

Delinking ‘emissions’ from broader ecological understandings was always artificial, but apartheid reports on climate change goals and mechanisms are positively poisonous. Such mendacious claims should not be allowed to pollute climate change talks. Ecological treaties should positively reject and exclude regimes engaged in ecocidal campaigns, including the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples. Ecocidal greenwash should be seen as an enemy of any honest discussion about protecting our living planet.

References:

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