I've never thought of environmental journalism as a particularly risky career (except to my bank account).

But in fact, reporters around the world face threats ranging from intimidation to murder for reporting on pollution, global warming, and other environmental abuses.  The problem is not new, but is getting worse, according to Vincent Brossel, head of the Asia desk of Reporters Without Borders/Reporters Sans Frontiers. I heard him speak at a "side event" during the Copenhagen climate talks last month.

RSF has produced a report about threats to reporters on the enviro beat.

“When the journalists are exposing companies and local governments that’s when they are in trouble," Brossel said. While enviro-related threats to journalists amounted to "just a few cases a year" not too long ago, about 15 percent of the cases RSF now monitors are linked with environmental issues like logging, pollution, and climate change impacts.

In just one example, Uzbek journalist Solidzhon Abdurakhmanov was arrested last year, charged with drug trafficking charge in June 2008 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He had been reporting on the deterioration of the Aral Sea -- including the govenment's responsibilty for the ecological disaster.

"I'd like to ask the Uzbekistan delegation here" about how they expect to fight global warming," said Brossel, "when they're putting someone in jail for reporting on what they're doing right here."

Sometimes reporters who are detained or threatened are trying to cover logging in developing nations -- an issue that is central the climate change mitigation/funding for developments combos being negotiated under the UN's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) program.

In one case noted in the RSF report, a correspondent in Southeast Asia for several French news outlets, was investigating illegal logging in Sumatra last year. Cyril Payen and his crew were arrested last July by security guards of the PT Lontar Papirup Pulp and Papers company. (PT Lontar's corporate parent is Sinar Mas, a major Indonesian conglomerate.)

The company's head of security and local police tried to suppress video the crew had taken of trucks being loaded with timber. Of Sinar Mas, Payen told RSF, "They buy journalists or threaten them with lawsuits. Although the Indonesian media are free, they do not do enough reporting on the rampant deforestation that is taking place.”

All this seems comfortably distant from North America, but intimidation of environmental journalists is not limited to developing nations. "In the US, we're seeing climate reporters being subjected to hate mail," said James Bonn, the director of the Earth Journalism Network, at the event. He noted an incident last year when right wing pundit Rush Limbaugh suggested that then-New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin kill himself over a blog post about overpopulation, prompting a flood of hate mail and blog comments.

"Ask a lot of these journalists," said Bonn. "They receive some very vicious mail." (So do bloggers and online journalists, I can attest.)

Blogger Betwa Sharma of the Columbia Journalism Review's Observatory blog spoke with Samoan reporter Cherelle Jackson in Copenhagen. Jackson fled Samoa for New Zealand three years ago after her office was set on fire.

She had been reporting on a government-sponsored development project that was going forward despite a doubtful environmental impact assessment; two articles of the three-part series had been published when she felt forced to leave. “Part of your job is to deal with the threat," she told Sharma. "So, I usually ignore the calls, but the burning down of my office is not easy to ignore.”