In 2012, indigenous leader Jimmy Liguyon was shot dead in front of his family in the Philippines, reportedly for refusing to sign away his land to miners. José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife Maria were assassinated by masked gunmen in Brazil in 2011 after having denounced the encroachment of loggers into their forest reserve. In 2012 in Cambodia, 14-year-old Hen Chantha was shot dead by military police who were evicting her village to make way for a rubber plantation.

A number of countries were more or less blank on our map, most notably in Africa. Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and Zimbabwe suffer fresh scars of resource conflict yet environmental defender deaths are practically invisible due to a lack of public records. There is also significant under-reporting in Myanmar, Central Asian countries and China, where human rights monitoring is prohibited or restricted.

This suggests that the problem could be far greater than we are currently in a position to comprehend.