The campaign to Eradicate Ecocide aims to outlaw the destruction of ecosystems by making it the 5th international crime against peace. To help this happen, you can ask your Hebden Royd and Calderdale Councillors to support the creation of the law of ecocide, and send them a Template-motion-for-councillors that spells out a motion for them to put to the Council. Oxford Council has already done this, so it’s not unheard of.

If you want to address the Council yourself about this, here is a suggestion for what to say when Addressing-your-council-1.

If things carry on as they are, transnational corporations are on track to destroy or exhaust environmental resources such as water, soil and biodiversity – as well as overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions and so causing massive damage through human-made climate change. Already in 2009, climate change was killing 300,000 people a year, according to a report on the human impacts of global warming from the Global Humanitarian Forum, a thinktank directed by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

In this era of deregulated neo-liberal globalisation, transnational companies exceed the scale and power of nations and their governments.

For example, in 2006 the UK’s annual domestic carbon emissions amounted to around 2.5% of the global total – but according to its own Sustainability Reports, BP emitted around 5.6% of the global total – more than twice as much as the UK’s 62 million people. Of BP’s carbon emissions,only 6% came from the company’s oil extraction processes; 94% were released from what the company sold.(Source: p258,The Oil Road)

We need to make ecocide a crime that can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court. Polly Higgins, the barrister who’s started the campaign to make ecocide the 5th international crime against peace, explains what this means: