By Dylis McDonald | CANARI | 2026
I want to begin with a name—but I can’t. She has to be protected from further threats and harassment.
What I can share is this: a member of an environmental organisation has described, across various spaces, the intimidation and reprisals she faced for speaking out against the impacts of the bauxite industry. She experienced verbal abuse and targeted social media campaigns designed to damage her credibility—campaigns that labelled her and fellow activists as ‘hysterical’, ‘anti-development’ and ‘tree huggers’.
Her story is not exceptional; it is representative.
When we talk about access rights for women environmental defenders in the Caribbean, we are talking about three interlocking rights: access to information, access to participation in decision-making and access to justice. These are the three pillars of the Escazú Agreement. And they are the very rights being systematically denied to women defenders across our region.
The context: vulnerability, courage and a hidden cost
The Caribbean is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Small island developing states face sea-level rise, coral bleaching, saltwater intrusion into freshwater systems and increasingly destructive hurricane seasons.
Women—particularly rural, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant women—are not merely victims of this ecological crisis. They are among its most informed and courageous respondents. They monitor watersheds. They protect mangroves. They resist extractive mining and deep-sea mining operations that destabilise coastlines.
And they pay a price for it.
In the Caribbean sub-region specifically, harm and violence against environmental defenders is chronically underreported. This is an important point to sit with: the region is not necessarily safer. The fear of victimisation shapes what defenders are willing to report, which in turn shapes the data—and distorts the picture of our reality.
Women environmental human rights defenders face gender-specific challenges and violence. They are targeted not only as defenders of rights, land, and natural resources, but as women defying discriminatory societal gender norms. Threats include gender-based violence, assault, threats to their families, defamation campaigns and other forms of intimidation—both offline and online.
Nearly 1,000 defenders have been murdered or disappeared in Latin America and the Caribbean since the adoption of the Escazú Agreement alone—a regional treaty designed to protect them.
The threats do not only come from violence. They come from exclusion.
Access to information is routinely denied. Environmental impact assessments are not made publicly available, are released only in technical language inaccessible to communities or are withheld entirely under business secrecy clauses.
Access to participation is undermined. Consultation processes for extractive or tourism mega-projects are too often conducted on paper only: communities are notified, but never genuinely heard. And within community hierarchies that already underrepresent women, their voices are doubly marginalised.
Access to justice remains out of reach. When defenders file complaints about environmental damage or threats to their safety, they encounter slow courts, unsympathetic prosecutors and unavailable legal aid.
These are not procedural failures. They are structural exclusions — and they fall hardest on women.
The Escazú Agreement: promise and gap
The Escazú Agreement represents a genuine milestone. Article 9 specifically calls on states to take appropriate and effective measures to recognise, protect and promote the rights of environmental human rights defenders. This is historic.
The Caribbean sub-region has the largest number of nations adhering to the region’s first environmental treaty: 10 of its 19 States Parties are from the Caribbean. That is significant and should be acknowledged.
But ratification and implementation are not the same thing. And implementation is where the promises stall.
Almost no national action plans include gender-specific provisions for defenders. There are no safe reporting mechanisms that women can use without fear of retaliation from within their own communities. There are no special provisions that acknowledge the specific realities of women defenders. And there is almost no integration between national gender equality frameworks and environmental law.
There is also the growing threat of criminalisation. Across the region, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—SLAPPs—are being used against defenders. A woman who organises a coastal community against a hotel development finds herself facing a defamation suit. A woman who documents chemical runoff near a resort is accused of damaging tourism infrastructure. The legal system that should be her shield becomes the weapon used against her.
Toxic anti-defender narratives, combined with SLAPPs and laws specifically targeting protesters, are intensifying crackdowns on land and climate activists across multiple jurisdictions.
What meaningful progress looks like
Five things need to happen—not eventually, but now.
First, the remaining Caribbean states must ratify Escazú. And ratification must be paired with gender-responsive national implementation plans that include specific protections, monitoring mechanisms, and dedicated budget lines for women defenders. Ratification alone is a paper commitment.
Second, we need early warning and protection systems designed with and for women. Regional bodies like CARICOM and the OECS have been largely silent on defender protection. That must change. We need a sub-regional Caribbean Defender Protection Network—one that documents threats, coordinates legal support and maintains relocation pathways for defenders at acute risk.
Third, anti-SLAPP legislation. This is a rule-of-law ask, not a radical one. Defenders should not be financially and legally crushed for speaking out.
Fourth, investment in women-led environmental organisations—not only through project funding, but through institutional capacity support, legal literacy training and communication security tools. Commitments made at the regional level must be translated into concrete actions that respond to local contexts. That requires political will, resources and active participation from civil society.
Fifth—and this is the point I want to close on—we must centre the knowledge these women carry.
Women environmental defenders in the Caribbean are not only activists. They are scientists. They know which fish are disappearing. They know when the dry season comes earlier. They know which rivers now run brown. They are defending land, water, natural resources, territories and communities from environmental harm and climate impacts, often at great personal risk.
Their knowledge is a regional asset. And it is being lost every time a defender is threatened into silence.
The defender I mentioned at the opening should not have had to leave her home to be safe. The defenders who remain should not have to choose between their communities and their lives.
The Escazú Agreement gave us a legal foundation. What we need now is the political will to build on it—with women at the centre, not at the margin.
Dylis McDonald is a Senior Technical Officer at the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI).
This piece is adapted from a panellist intervention delivered at the Recognising, supporting and promoting Environmental Defenders in the Caribbean online discussion, held on April 20, 2026.