Global Witness

For 18 years, Global Witness has run pioneering campaigns against natural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses. From Cambodia to Congo, Sierra Leone to Angola, it has exposed the brutality and injustice that results from the fight to access and control natural resource wealth, and has sought to bring the […]

At A Glance

For 18 years, Global Witness has run pioneering campaigns against natural resource-related conflict and corruption and associated environmental and human rights abuses. From Cambodia to Congo, Sierra Leone to Angola, it has exposed the brutality and injustice that results from the fight to access and control natural resource wealth, and has sought to bring the perpetrators of this corruption and conflict to light.

Synchronicity Earth has funded Global Witness to advocate against the ‘failed paradigm’ of industrial logging in natural forests. This project targeted key players in the international donor community, the certification industry and related NGOs, with the aim of persuading them to critically review and drop misguided policies that support industrial forest use for development, and instead support alternative methods of forest protection and management. This support helped Global Witness produce a report ‘Pandering to the Loggers’, which investigated the timber trade.

Synchronicity Earth also supported Global Witness in a new piece of investigative research on fisheries corruption and overexploitation in West Africa, the results of which were published in 2012.

Further, we helped Global Witness in their investigation on Chinese rubber investments in Myanmar, highlighting the environmental, social and human rights abuses and corrupt practices committed by Chinese rubber companies in Myanmar. The investigation set out to expose the supply chain links between these abuses and the big-named global tire companies sourcing rubber from these Chinese companies’ plantations.