https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/environmental-activists-have-higher-death-rates-than-some-soldiers/

Claudelice Silva dos Santos was shocked but not surprised when her brother and his wife were murdered. For years José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva had been on the receiving end of death threats and attacks for their work combatting illegal logging and deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest, where they lived. “We knew that there was a high risk that it could happen,” Santos says. “But we always believed that it never would happen, that the resistance, the visibility of our fight—all the things we did to prevent the killing—would work out.”

Santos’s relatives were among more than 1,500 people across 50 countries to be murdered in retaliation for protecting land, water, forests and other natural resources between 2002 and 2017. The annual death toll doubled over that 15-year period, and the killings tended to take place in countries with high levels of corruption and weak rule of law, according to study findings published Monday in Nature Sustainability. As the authors report, in that period, murders of environmental defenders outweighed the combined deaths of soldiers from the U.K. and Australia deployed to overseas war zones.