“If we want to survive, we’ll have to work for them.” Pedro (not his real name) is a member of a riverside community in Amazonas, talking about criminal enterprises that are turning the forests into arid cattle pastures. A few years ago, Pedro’s community could depend on harvesting forest products, fishing, and hunting; these days, they struggle against lethal forces, both local and global. The loggers are encircling, cutting roads through the nearby forests, whilst global warming heats up the rivers, disrupts the seasons, and turns their forest to tinder and ashes. With no other livelihood, Pedro may be pulled into slave labor, turning the chainsaw on the very forests that are so vital for his community’s survival, demonstrating how the climate crisis fuels slavery.

A variety of research studies have established the intersection between climate change and modern-day slavery. Poverty, social exclusion, and a lack of worker rights have long been drivers of trafficking and bonded labor, but the ecological damage wreaked by climate change not only supercharges those forms of vulnerability but, in turn, leads desperate workers to carry out further destruction. We see this with bonded laborers across the South Asia brick kiln belt burning dirty fuels to turn precious topsoil into bricks, with children trafficked for illegal fishing enterprises in the protected Sundarbans mangrove forests of Bangladesh, and with young, exploited miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Around the world, as workers like Pedro are pushed to the margins of survival—increasingly, by the effects of our changing climate—they risk being drawn into slave labor in industries that actually accelerate climate change itself, showing how the climate crisis fuels slavery.

This vicious cycle of the climate crisis fueling slavery provides a point of intervention. Because climate change is too often treated as if trees make their own way to the sawmills, funders working against global warming rarely think of the enslavement of workers as part of the problem. Yet “A tree doesn’t just fall by itself,” as the Freedom Fund’s local partner organization, RETA—which works in the Brazilian Amazon—puts it. A powerful way to slow or stop deforestation is to strengthen the communities whose laborers otherwise have few other options.

International climate initiatives urgently need to support communities who are often positioned in just the right places, whose witness, their reporting, their action, and their liberation can help to save some of the most vital carbon stores around the world. The Brazilian Amazon is a perfect example. Deep in the forest, laborers shelter in makeshift tent camps for twelve-hour workdays, without protection; as a worker named João explained, “I just wear regular clothes, long sleeves, long trousers, and boots. I know of people who had serious accidents. Sometimes they get hit [by a machete], sometimes it’s a snakebite. Everything happens because you’re walking in the rough forest.”

Read the full article about the climate crisis and slavery by Ginny Baumann at Stanford Social Innovation Review.