Over the last years, increasing awareness of environmental issues has highlighted the need to enact laws against actions that are harmful to the health of ecosystems. At the nation-state level, this resulted in various environmental crimes being introduced in the Penal Code of some countries, European ones in particular: among others, the crime of “Disastro ambientale” (environmental disaster) was instituted in Italy in 2015, and a few years later France adopted the “Loi Climat et Rèsilience” (climate and resilience law), which includes the word “ecocide”, a term that generally describes the deliberate destruction or damage of the natural environment of an area. In the international arena – addressing the need to involve as many actors as possible – governments, NGOs, and panels of experts have been recently pushing to include environmental crimes into international criminal law. To this aim, in 2019 Vanuatu and the Maldives, both low-
lying archipelagic countries greatly threatened by climate change, expressed interest in making such crimes punishable by the International Criminal Court (ICC). And in 2021, the Stop Ecocide Foundation, an NGO that has been advocating for the recognition of environmental damage as an international crime for many years, convened a legal panel to draft a legal definition of ecocide.
In this context, many questions remain open. For instance, to what extent could human needs legitimate environmental damages? Furthermore, is pressing the ICC to adopt the notion of ecocide a good idea, given the limitations of international law? Finding a solution to these and other issues is an urgent and fundamental task to deal effectively with the damage caused by human beings to the environment.
