According to a new report, the UK is a world leader in cracking down on climate activism – second only to Australia.

The research, which was led by the University of Bristol, examined global statistics on environmental protests and found a disturbing trend of increasingly harsh criminalisation and repression. More than 2000 climate protesters were killed between 2012 and 2023 (most frequently in Brazil, the Philippines, India and Peru) and governments around the world have implanted draconian new anti-protest legislation. 

The report reveals that the UK has been arresting climate protesters at a rate nearly three times higher than the global average. It also discusses how the UK has amped up criminalisation through the creation of new laws – such as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act – which have introduced new offences for tactics frequently used by climate activists and provided the police with a range of new powers, such as banning individuals from associating with certain people, going to certain areas or attending protests. 

The report mentions the disproportionately long prison sentences which have been handed out to climate activists in the UK (the longest being five years, for the crime of attending a Zoom call) and the efforts of judges to prevent defendants from being able to discuss their political motivations in court as part of their defence. 

According to lead author Dr Oscar Berglund, Senior Lecturer in International Public and Social Policy at Bristol University, the report “clearly shows a global crackdown in liberal democracies as well as autocracies. This is worrying because it focuses state policy on punishing dissent against inaction on climate and environmental change instead of taking adequate action on these issues. It also represents authoritarian moves that are inconsistent with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.”

The authors of this study are not the first to raise the alarm about the increasing repression of climate activism. Earlier this year, human right activist Michel Forst warned that “in many countries, the state response to peaceful environmental protest is increasingly to repress rather than to enable and protect those seeking to speak up for the environment.”

For anyone who has been paying attention to the ridiculously disproportionate sentences being meted out to activists in recent years, the findings of this report might not come as a surprise, but it’s still disturbing to have it confirmed that the UK government is arresting climate protests at a rate which outstrips every dictatorship in the world.