Literature Review

The ecocentric rights paradigm – also expressed as ‘rights of nature’– gains increasing traction at the national and international levels. While in some countries revolutionary ecocentric laws have been adopted for the recognition and protection of the rights of nature in her entirety; in others an emerging jurisprudence built on ecocentric rights-based approaches to environmental protection is admitting the intrinsic value of non-human elements of nature – such as rivers, mountains and forests – recognising them as subjects of rights. Precisely, one country where such jurisprudential paradigm shift took place recently is Colombia, one of the world’s mega-diverse countries.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation to give rights to nature when it ratified constitutional amendments (new articles 71-74) that grant the environment the inalienable right to exist, persist, and be respected. Environmentalists hope Ecuador’s amendments will lead to improvement in a country devastated by resource exploitation, and that other countries will follow. Yet, many wonder whether the amendments will be enforced. This comment argues that—all things considered—successful execution of the amendments is unlikely. Ecuador’s President has not demonstrated a sincere intention or ability to implement the amendments. Further, plaintiffs who sue under the amendments face significant legal barriers, such as Ecuador’s lack of a standing doctrine and a history of judicial corruption and dysfunction. To counteract these problems, Ecuador should grant lifetime tenure to its constitutional court judges, codify a standing doctrine, create an independent enforcement body, and create an independent environmental tribunal with criminal contempt power.

In a number of States all over the world civil society actors have turned to climate litigation as a strategy to compel States to address climate change, and Uganda is no exception. Despite the absence of a climate-focused legal regulatory framework, Ugandan non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have adopted a rights-based litigation strategy to secure anthropogenic environmental rights and the rights of Nature. In this quest, however, they have encountered obstacles in the form of security for costs and adverse costs orders. This article examines Ugandan Courts’ approach to awarding security of costs and costs in climate litigation initiated by NGOs. We argue that security of costs and costs threaten access to environmental justice by making climate activists very reluctant to approach the courts. We conclude by proposing ways to overcome these hurdles.

This Article analyzes the rise and persistence of the U.S.-based nature rights movement and its engagement with social movements in the Global South and with Indigenous ideas. The story told here of the U.S. nature rights movement is also significant because it reveals dynamics about the circulation of legal ideas across borders and legal traditions. Scholars have argued that, in the transnational flow of legal ideas, states in developing regions like Latin America act as sites of reception of transnational theories of law rather than sites of production. Legal actors based in the periphery have the role of receiving canonical theories, doctrine, and institutions of law developed in and for the North and adapting them to local experience and politics. The causes of this lopsided exchange are both material and cultural. Northern scholars have more funding and greater access to knowledge, as well as a greater ability to export their ideas. They also enjoy more prestige or symbolic capital. To counterbalance these dynamics, some scholars have promoted the idea of the South as an underutilized source of innovative intellectual production. This scholarship highlights ways in which ideas from the Global South can exert influence in the North and how Indigenous legal ideas can find expression in the national legal system and beyond—a process sometimes referred to as “interlegality in reverse.” Similarly, in scholarship on climate change in particular, the idea that the West can learn from Indigenous systems of knowledge has recently been given much weight. This Article contributes to these debates. It shows a path by which legal ideas developed in the periphery can influence and nourish U.S. social movements and even local laws. Part I introduces the origins of the global rights of nature movement, with emphasis on several sources: U.S. Indian tribes; U.S. NGOs; and Latin American laws and social movements. Part II shows how the movement in the United States has persisted by shifting toward more aspirational and symbolic uses of law, by redefining itself as part of a transnational movement, and by turning toward engagement with Indigenous peoples and ideas. Part III presents the implications of this case study for our thinking about the symbolic use of law and about how legal ideas are deployed and travel—between the periphery and core and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples—in a time of perceived environmental crisis

The Rights of Nature movement is at the precipice of watershed social changes. Leaders of this international, Indigenous-led movement call upon the public to radically re-imagine the human relationship with nature. This symposium Article comes at a crucial moment when some leading environmental law scholars are questioning the potential Rights of Nature within the United States. This Article responds by building upon the ideas of Christopher Stone to chart the theoretical and doctrinal pathways that breathe life into the legal framework of Rights of Nature. It sketches the present status of Rights of Nature in the United States and links this overview to environmental, animal, and natural resources law literatures. Most scholarly discourse about the Rights of Nature focuses on a few well-known examples outside of the United States, such as constitutional rights in Ecuador or New Zealand and Australia granting rights to wind and rivers. In fact, the United States has a growing body of diverse Rights of Nature that legal scholars have largely overlooked. For example, in six federal statutes, natural resource damages have resulted in over ten billion dollars of tort remedies that benefit nature. Indigenous governments located throughout the United States — including the Band of Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk Nation, Navajo Nation, and Ponca Nation — have created legal personhood, statutory personhood, and constitutional provisions in tribal government. Additionally, wildlife holds many rights hidden in federal statutes, as with bald eagles claiming property rights superior to those of humans in the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Collectively, this diffuse and innovative set of laws forms a body of existing Rights of Nature, showing that such rights exist in the United States today — examples that deserve discussion, consideration, and potential extension. This Article seeks to uncover and elevate these rights, thus promoting, amplifying, and calling attention to many diffuse efforts to capitalize upon their collective potential to reshape the human relationship with nature and address the environmental problems of our time. It links popular discourse on the Rights of Nature with its theoretical foundations and well-established statutory systems of environmental law. It seeks to help and inspire legal thinkers in disparate fields to collectively co-create a more robust role for Rights of Nature — within the United States and beyond.

This research analyses the collective discourse of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) promoting the Rights-of-Nature (RoN) in Uganda, which have recently gained legal recognition. Findings reveal the framing of RoN by NGOs challenges anthropocentric law, claiming to protect the intrinsic value of Uganda‟s nature. Importantly, RoN is claimed to facilitate greater recognition of customary-ecological-governance systems, which are being revived in specific communities in western Uganda, and are understood to traditionally value the RoN through their protection of sacred-natural-sites. The NGOs‟ orchestrated professional strategies and cohesive vision suggests they are an 'epistemic community' which has gained agency to promote their discourse at national, regional and international levels of decisionmaking. The discourse risks being somewhat essentialist, and there are future uncertainties regarding RoN‟s implementation and enforcement. Nevertheless, this study argues NGOs assembled as an epistemic community can play a positive role in realising radical environmentalism by creating legislative instruments upon which grassroot actors may use to strengthen their claims.

With the growth of the ecocentric approach to protecting non-human natural entities and the increase in the number of countries granting legal personhood to non-human natural entities in different parts of the world, it is worth questioning whether this approach can be extended to Africa and shift the African approach of protecting non-human natural entities from anthropocentric to ecocentric. Therefore, this chapter applies a doctrinal research method, with the use of primary and secondary sources of materials to analyze the current African approaches to protecting non-human natural entities. This is juxtaposed with the existing approach of granting legal personhood to non-human natural entities and helps to determine how viable this concept will be in Africa.

The Rights of Nature Movement, a global political movement that seeks to expand the legal rights traditionally granted to humans and corporations to natural entities like lakes, rivers, and ecosystems, is becoming more mainstream. In the United States, the movement has had successes in passing local ordinances that grant lakes and rivers the right to exist and flourish. The most high-profile of these victories for the movement was the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, an ordinance that passed in Toledo, Ohio, in February of 2019. This Note explores the Rights of Nature Movement in the United States. The ordinances that have been enacted by various local governments generally establish the right of a river or lake to exist and flourish, and some ordinances strip corporations of their rights under state and federal law. While some saw the Lake Erie Bill of Rights ordinance as a big victory for the movement, a federal district court invalidated the ordinance in February of 2020. This Note analyzes that district court case and uses it as a foil to explore the weaknesses of the movement. This Note argues that the movement should stop focusing on local governments, and instead seek more nuanced policies at the state level, including a guardianship scheme for entities like lakes and rivers.

An international consensus of scientific experts is now demanding “immediate action” in response to the environmental, climate, and biodiversity crises. But are our legal and regulatory frameworks equipped to respond to the rapid pace of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change? What incidence is there, transnationally, of laws that seek to protect the Earth from the humans that inhabit it? In the past few decades, there is a growing social, legal, and political movement towards more ecocentric regulation of the planet, where new laws and institutions seek to protect natural resources for their own intrinsic value. In this paper, I consider recent efforts to protect the rights of rivers in the U.S. and Mexico, which are novel and emerging attempts to discover new pathways for enhanced protection of vulnerable waterways. These attempts are being pragmatically driven from the bottom up to the highest levels of the legislature or judiciary as local communities (and sometimes Indigenous Peoples) become increasingly frustrated with apathetic and complacent governmental responses to environmental challenges, using whatever legal tools and processes are available to them. However, rather than an Earth-centred revolution, efforts to protect the rights of nature are distinctly “human”; as communities appeal to human rights laws, and their enhanced constitutional status, to upset the status quo. There are important lessons to be learned from these experiences in other countries in terms of the ability to entrench transformative environmental protections via constitutional hierarchies and the potential for the rights and interests of humans to be both an enabler of, as well as a threat to, nature’s rights.

Around the world, the legal standing of nature is gaining ground. Since the 2008 precedent-setting case in Ecuador, where the Rights of Nature were written into the Ecuadorian Constitution, a number of cases around the world have resulted in the recognition of the legal standing of nature. The growing number of Rights of Nature cases suggests a new legal precedent could be forming. The legal standing of nature, therefore, could increasingly become an instrument for Indigenous rights to be realised, while at the same time operationalising commitments made by states to climate change action and international treaties. In the context of rapidly accelerating climate change, it is likely only a matter of time before extractive industries operating in Canada must address the rights of Indigenous peoples, but also consider the legal standing of nature. This commentary explores how the Rights of Nature could influence the duty to consult with First Nations in Canada in the context of climate change.

This report provides a synthesis of information on the current state of development of climate change litigation in Europe (the European Union and European countries outside the EU). It was written for the European Forum of Judges for the Environment (EUFJE) Annual Conference, which took place in October 2022. The report draws on three key sources of information: (i) the national reports provided by EUFJE members summarising developments in their domestic jurisdictions; (ii) the annual Global Trends in Climate Litigation reports published by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and (iii) the global climate change litigation databases maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University with support from the Grantham Research Institute and others. Further information on these data sources can be found in Box 1.

A growing number of jurisdictions throughout the world have recognized some type of legal rights of nature. This jurisprudential trend has thus far made few inroads in Europe. However, its apparent absence is misleading. In this article we argue that, explicit or not, nature as protected by European Union (EU) law already has certain legal rights in the Hohfeldian sense because other entities have legal obligations towards it. Moreover, we argue that recent decisions of the Court of Justice of the EU can be interpreted to support our claim that nature, as protected by EU law, already enjoys some legal rights that cannot be trumped by mere utilitarian interests, and that these rights can in turn be recognized and applied by national courts. We further suggest that public interest litigation can contribute to developing rights for nature in Europe, even absent any explicit recognition of these rights in EU law or in national legislation.