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2025-2029 Strategic Plan

Strategic Plan 2025-2029

Executive Summary

EarthRights International is proud to present its strategic plan for 2025–2029, charting an ambitious course for advancing justice, corporate accountability, environmental protection, and climate resilience worldwide. This plan builds on three decades of impactful legal and advocacy work that has addressed the most pressing challenges of our time: the climate crisis, corporate and institutional impunity for harms, and rising threats against defenders of justice.

With a unified global team and strong partnerships across the United States, Mekong region, Latin America, and beyond, EarthRights combines the power of law and the power of people to defend human rights and the environment. This strategic vision draws on the deep expertise of our staff, allies, and partners, to offer a clear framework for transformative impact.

We currently stand at a critical juncture in the future of our earth and our communities. The accelerated rollback of environmental protections, erosion of democratic norms, and the rise in nationalist policies, especially in the U.S., have made our mission more urgent than ever. This strategic plan is a call to action to center the power of the most affected communities, harness the strength of local-to-global advocacy tools, and foster a more just and sustainable future.

Harnessing 30 Years of Impact

Since 1995, EarthRights International has been advancing human rights, environmental protection, and corporate accountability globally through precedent-setting cases and campaigns, and by training generations of civil society leaders and legal advocates in the most remote regions in the Mekong and the Amazon. Here are some examples of our impact:

We hold powerful actors to account. We hold the largest and most powerful corporations, institutions, and governments accountable to the individuals and communities they have harmed. For example: We challenged and continue to challenge the complicity of companies enabling the Myanmar junta’s crimes, including by advocating for targeted sanctions on key industries that fuel the military regime. We set a global precedent in Doe v. Unocal, one of the first cases to hold a corporation accountable in U.S. courts for complicity in human rights abuses – including forced labor, rape, and killings – linked to a gas pipeline project in Myanmar. The case was pioneering in establishing the potential of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) as a tool for addressing transnational corporate misconduct. Despite evolving limitations in the application of the ATS in the U.S., we reinforced that corporations can still face legal repercussions for their actions abroad through our more recent jury victory in Doe v. Chiquita on behalf of survivors and relatives of victims of paramilitary violence in Colombia. We also secured a groundbreaking decision in Jam v. International Finance Corporation, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that international financial institutions like the IFC are not immune from lawsuits in U.S. courts, opening pathways for communities to seek redress against powerful financial institutions for environmental and human rights abuses – in this case the displacement, pollution, and illness caused by a coal-fired power plant in India – resulting from their projects.

We amplify and invigorate movements for justice, community rights, and environmental protection. Through transformative education initiatives, we have trained over 700 grassroots activists through intensive programs, and grown networks of community leaders. Programs such as the EarthRights School in the Mekong, Seminario in the Amazon, and École du Fleuve Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo equip advocates with the skills, knowledge, and support systems to address human rights violations, environmental harms, and climate impacts in their communities. Alumni go on to lead grassroots movements and organizations, document abuses, and hold powerful actors accountable in their respective regions. Our school and training initiatives harness local power, strengthen transnational solidarity, and create lasting, community-driven change.

We protect and stand beside environmental defenders. EarthRights has stood in solidarity with and fought for the safety of environmental defenders worldwide – offering critical legal counsel and defense, creating trusted regional and international networks of support, and advocating for stronger local and global norms to safeguard their work. By amplifying the messages of Indigenous leaders and local advocates and providing legal representation, we also ensure their efforts to protect lands and rights are recognized, addressed, and protected.

Challenges We Face

In the U.S. and around the world, democratic governance is facing increasing challenges amid rising authoritarianism, with a growing number of governments undermining democratic institutions, restricting civil liberties, and consolidating power – even as pro-democracy movements persist and adapt in response. Within this context, human rights and environmental abuses continue globally, leaving many communities, especially those traditionally marginalized and underrepresented, with few effective means to assert their rights and access remedies for widespread harms.

These trends have led to a troubling rise in threats and attacks against community advocates, journalists, activists, lawyers, and whistleblowers who carry out work that is vital for advancing justice and accountability. These challenges play out differently everywhere we work:

The United States faces an existential threat to the democratic institutions upon which the rights of individuals and communities depend. Within this context, significant challenges, including climate change, pollution, the erosion of environmental regulations, and attacks on the right to protest compound the risks and barriers faced by communities. Indigenous and marginalized communities, particularly Black and Brown communities, bear the brunt of these systemic failures, often living in sacrifice zones with disproportionate exposure to pollution.

In the Mekong region, communities grapple with the destructive impacts of extractive industries, deforestation, and climate change within a closed and repressive political environment. Indigenous and frontline communities are frequently marginalized and dispossessed by powerful interests, facing threats to their livelihoods, land, and cultural heritage. The authoritarian nature of regimes in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and beyond, complicates and intensifies the risk in pursuing accountability, making actions taken by environmental defenders and communities ever more challenging.

In Latin America, oil and gas development, mineral mining, and agribusiness are leading to deforestation and toxic legacies. Indigenous communities, particularly in the Amazon, are at the forefront of resistance against these destructive forces, but face serious challenges particularly due to economic and political models that favor corporations and other powerful interests over environmental protection.

Globally, environmental defenders face increasing threats, such as criminalization, harassment, and violence, as they strive to protect their communities and the planet.

Strategic Goals for 2025-2029

Against this backdrop of systemic challenges, EarthRights has crafted a bold plan to build on 30 years of impact.

To confront the intersecting crises of climate change, corporate impunity, and rising attacks on defenders, our integrated regional strategies aim to collectively create transformative impact. Our efforts will focus on fostering four foundational conditions essential for lasting change:

Communities have the power, agency and resources to decide the futures of their territories, secure remedy for injustices, and assert control over decisions that affect their lives and environments.
Corporations and institutions are consistently held accountable for their human rights, environmental, and climate abuses. They recognize their legal and moral liability, provide redress for harms, and adopt measures to prevent recurring harms.
Human rights and environmental defenders are free to exercise their rights to organize, advocate, and protest without fear of retaliation or violence, ensuring their vital work can continue unabated.
Strong, enforceable legal and regulatory frameworks safeguard human rights and environmental integrity, and prevent future harms.

These interconnected conditions form the cornerstone of our vision: a world where every community has the power to seek justice, defend their rights, and hold corporations, financial institutions, and governments accountable; where people live with dignity and self-determination, and where the environments that sustain us are fiercely protected and restored. To achieve this vision and address the multi-faceted challenges we face, we have articulated four ambitious goal areas that will guide our efforts across all our geographies over the next five years. These four goal areas are:

We strive to advance the justice goals of partner communities in relation to human rights, environmental, and climate harms perpetrated by government and corporate entities in our priority geographies.

We strive to hold corporations and financial institutions accountable by exposing, challenging, and remedying their complicity in human rights and climate abuses and environmental destruction.

We strive to ensure that human rights and environmental defenders can operate without fear by strengthening protections within the law and in practice that guarantee the right to organize, protest free from retaliation.

We strive to shape legal and regulatory frameworks that establish strong, enforceable safeguards for human rights and environmental protections, and to prevent future harms.

Community members come together for a screening in Brunswick County.

Together, these goals represent a comprehensive framework for action. By centering communities, confronting abusive actors, and reshaping the structures that perpetuate harm, we are laying the groundwork for our vision of the future.

Download the full 2025-2029 Strategic Plan.