Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders

For many of the world’s Indigenous Peoples, defending the environment is inseparable from defending their collective rights, identities, cultures, livelihoods, and ways of life. Their spiritual and material relationships with their lands, territories, waters, and resources sustain their communities and carry responsibilities to future generations. These relationships are protected under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the rights to maintain their institutions and cultures, determine their own development priorities, and conserve and protect their environment.

The Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders (APNED) stands in solidarity with the Pala’wan Indigenous communities and fellow environmental defenders in Brooke’s Point, Palawan, who continue to defend their ancestral lands, forests, watersheds, and communities from large-scale nickel mining.

As we reach halfway 2026, the Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders (APNED) we dive head one despite arising challenges for environmental human rights defenders in the Asia-Pacific. Read about the latest updates our network has followed, as well as promising developments in environmental rights from April to June 2026! Following five years of imprisonment […]

The Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders (APNED) joins Indigenous Peoples’ organizations, environmental defenders, human rights groups, and civil society in calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Pranab Doley, an Indigenous land and environmental rights defender arrested by Assam Police in Guwahati, India, on 12 July 2026.