You either bow your head and watch in silence as your land and the environment are destroyed, or you die. A war is under way and the numbers are alarming: every week two environmental activists are killed, and in most cases the crime goes unpunished.

"Environmental killings" increased by 20 per cent in 2014, according to a disturbing new report by Global Witness, entitled "How Many More?". The British human rights NGO documented 116 killings that took place in 2014 across 17 different countries; the grim record, however, belongs to Brazil, where 29 activists lost their lives.

The report is also, the organisation specifies, necessarily incomplete, given the enormous difficulty of gathering data, particularly in Africa and Asia. "Around the world, environmental defenders are being killed in broad daylight, kidnapped, threatened or prosecuted as terrorists in the name of so-called 'development'," said Billy Kyte, an activist with Global Witness. "The real perpetrators of these crimes, in which governments and large corporations have a strong interest, go unpunished."

The majority of deaths are linked to land disputes: on one side, small communities that refuse to see their territory devastated; on the other, large companies involved in building major dams (which flood lands that have been inhabited for millennia), mining, and large-scale agricultural production entailing massive deforestation. The clash, as one might imagine, is an unequal one.

40 per cent of the victims are representatives of indigenous tribes — communities already diminished over the years by land dispossession and the advent of modernity. The highest number of killings was recorded in Brazil; according to Global Witness, however, the most dangerous place for an environmental activist is Honduras, where an estimated 101 people were killed between 2010 and 2014, giving the Central American country the highest number of environmental killings per capita.

In many countries, those who protect the environment and the ecosystems that have sustained their ancestors for millennia are regarded as enemies of progress and condemned to the ultimate penalty. Over the past ten years, out of more than a thousand recorded killings of this kind, the perpetrators were tracked down and punished in only ten cases.

It is, without doubt, an effective deterrent. And yet, despite intimidation, violence and murder, there are those who choose not to bow their heads and to keep on fighting.