Rights of Nature Laws Are Coming Up Against Legal Systems Designed for Destruction
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Years after landmark court rulings in Colombia and Bangladesh recognized rivers as legal persons, the waterways remain polluted and under threat—an outcome a new study attributes in part to a systemic issue: Legal systems are still overwhelmingly designed to treat nature as an object for humans to use and profit from.
The report, released Monday by the nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, focused on how rights of river laws are being implemented and found that legal recognition is not, by itself, enough to stop toxic contamination and the destruction of ecosystems. Instead, researchers concluded that it is only a first step. Whether it leads to healthier rivers depends on what follows: who is empowered to act on the river’s behalf, whether Indigenous and local communities have meaningful decision-making power, whether governments make systemic policy shifts away from treating nature as a bundle of extractable resources and whether officials have the political will to enforce the law. “There are so many wider structural issues that need to change in order for rights of nature to be successfully enacted,” said Alison Dyke, a political ecologist with the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the report.
Dyke pointed to the significant power that businesses have in most legal systems—and the fact that corporations have long held legal rights, while nature has not. That asymmetry, she said, reflects a broader global struggle between a powerful political and economic sector that views the natural world “as a resource to be exploited,” and a grassroots movement pushing for humans to remember they are part of nature, and dependent upon it. “The resources that those two sides have are quite unequal,” Dyke said. The rights of nature movement has grown rapidly over the past two decades, with courts and legislatures around the world recognizing wild animals and ecosystems as legal persons with inherent rights to maintain their unique characteristics and ecological functions. But relatively little research has examined whether those legal shifts have translated into better environmental outcomes.
Dyke and her co-authors sought to answer that question by looking at two high-profile cases: Colombia’s Atrato River, recognized as a legal subject with rights by the nation’s Constitutional Court in 2016 after Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities challenged widespread environmental destruction from mining, and Bangladesh’s landmark 2019 decision extending legal personhood to every river in the country. While courts established legal personhood, they left key questions of implementation unresolved, and governments have largely failed to fill the gap, the researchers found.
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