Historically speaking, militant environmentalists have been targeting infrastructure, not people. The current mainstream movement is nonviolent to the point of absurdity, whereas their militant counterpart is basically nonexistent. It’s a bit counterintuitive if you think about it; a movement which objects to the very real violence that industry subjects both people and entire ecosystems to is completely nonviolent.

UK is in Europe. They have left the EU but are still in Europe.

Read the article, it mentions several EU countries where acts of sabotage have been increasing.

Criminalization does not mean “applying the laws”, or at least that is only one aspect of it. It can also mean creating new laws or even have nothing to do with the actual legal framework. In France for example, the government has taken the nasty habit of publically branding nature activists as terrorists. That is a form of criminalization even if it remains largely symbolical.

It can also mean that prosecution takes a harder stance or uses a different, harsher legal framework. In France again, vandalism and destruction of private or public property is of course illegal. However the definition of terrorism is rather loose and can also includes acts of sabotage.

So when nature activists break the law to perform acts of sabotage, the prosecution can choose to decide that it was vandalism and treat it as such, or as terrorism and treat it as such. The latter not only allows harsher punishment, but also gives police and prosecution much larger means and leeway, leveraging legislation that was passed not to fight political activism or sabotage, but as a reaction to a whole other kind of terrorism, you know, the kind that haphazardly murders dozens if not hundreds of citizens.

Criminalization can also mean allowing or encouraging the police to respond much more violently to peaceful protests, or the authorities trying to suppress various organisations taking isolated acts of sabotage as an excuse.

Edit: talking about France because that’s what I know best but there is a similar trend in several other Western European countries.

If you think any protest anywhere ever is about following rules then you have completely missed the point of protest