The following is a report sent to the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to a Healthy Environment. This follows a call for contribution by the Special Rapporteur on an upcoming report on the situation of environmental human rights defenders, working in the context of the triple planetary crises, focusing on how violations against them also affect the realization of the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The NCF argues for the personhood of nature, on a nature itself has rights basis:
Rights of Nature: A Necessary Compliment to Human Rights
The Next Century Foundation has argued for some time now, in public meetings and in our own blog commentary, that any rights-based approach to climate change has to include the rights of nature. We are not alone in that view. Organisations like the More Than Human (MoTH) Rights Group at New York University and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) have been making versions of this case for years, and this report is meant to add to that work rather than reinvent it.
It’s worth saying plainly: this is not an ideological position dressed up as policy. Around 35 countries already have some form of law protecting the rights of nature, according to GARN’s 2023 COP28 white paper. What we are calling for is the continuation of reforms already underway in places like New Zealand and Ecuador, and their eventual adoption by international bodies. Nature doesn’t answer to borders, and the law should not pretend otherwise.
Going Beyond Human Rights
None of this is meant to play down what climate change is doing to human rights. It hits women, children, and indigenous groups hardest, a finding the IPCC confirmed in its 2022 report, and it’s a subject the NCF returns to often, given how much of our work covers abuses against women, children, and minorities in conflict zones across the Middle East. We welcomed the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution of 8 July 2025. But there’s a problem with it: it stays locked inside a human-rights frame, even as it lists an enormous range of rights under threat, from health and indigenous rights to gender equality and the right to a clean, sustainable environment.
That list is itself the tell. When climate change endangers this many distinct human rights at once, it’s because those rights were never really separable from nature in the first place. People don’t stand outside the environment looking in; we live inside it. A climate policy built purely on human-rights language is going to misread the problem at a fairly basic level. Protecting human rights properly means protecting nature’s rights too, and understanding that the two run in both directions. This is not a rival claim to human rights, it’s the thing that makes human rights durable, because it protects the systems those rights actually depend on. If a healthy environment is a precondition for human rights, then the environment needs its own legal standing.
Two Paths Already in Use
There are, broadly, two legal routes being tried right now:
The first is legal personhood: treating a river or a forest as a subject with rights of its own, including the standing to sue. A river with legal personhood is usually granted something like “the right to flow” which stops anyone from damming or diverting it without facing legal consequences. This matters for conservation, obviously, but it matters just as much for indigenous rights. A lot of indigenous philosophy, including traditions in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, never accepted a hard line between people and nature to begin with. The Innu of Ekuanitshit in Canada and the Whanganui Iwi in New Zealand treat their rivers, the Mutehekau Shipu and the Whanganui, as living ancestors, not resources. For these communities, what climate change destroys isn’t just homes and livelihoods. It’s family. That has created a real tension with how human rights language has traditionally worked. Vanessa Watts wrote about this directly in her 2020 essay Growling Ontologies: Indigeneity, Becoming Souls and Settler Colonial Inacessibility, describing an indigenous sense of “beingness” as inseparable from animality, something human-rights discourse has historically struggled to accommodate.
Legal personhood offers a way through that. New Zealand’s Te Urewera Act (2014) is probably the clearest example: it gave the Te Urewera Forest legal personhood and put it under the guardianship of the Tūhoe people. The Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 did something similar for the Whanganui River, and folded in the Whanganui people’s own framing that the river and the people are one. Laws like this do not just protect land. They give indigenous belief systems actual legal weight.
The second route is constitutional. This means writing the rights of nature directly into a country’s constitution, which is a much higher bar than ordinary legislation, but has a correspondingly larger effect. Rivers and forests are often central to how a country understands itself, and constitutional protection reflects that.
Ecuador is the clearest case, under Articles 71 to 74 of its 2008 constitution. That provision underpinned a landmark 2021 ruling by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, which found that mining in the Los Cedros forest violated the forest’s own rights. Los Cedros happens to be both an ecological treasure and a source of clean water for nearby Indigenous communities, so the court ended up recognising a violation of Indigenous rights and the right to clean water in the same breath, which is about as clean a demonstration as you will find of how these two rights frameworks reinforce each other. It’s also worth noting, as Robert Macfarlane documents in his 2025 book Is a River Alive?, that foreign mining companies operating in Ecuador have separately been accused of human rights abuses, including killing protesters. Ecuador’s constitutional protections have given it more legal ground to push back against exactly that kind of foreign incursion.
Constitutional change of this kind is rare, for obvious reasons, but its influence is spreading regardless, especially across South America. Bolivia and Panama have followed Ecuador’s lead, and Brazil attempted its own constitutional amendment in 2025. It’s a harder route than ordinary legislation, but arguably the more durable one, and its reach extends well beyond conservation, into Indigenous rights and the right to protest.
Where International Law Still Falls Short
All of this is worth celebrating, but it’s still fundamentally a patchwork of national laws. Craig Kauffman’s research shows that around 75% of rights-of-nature rulings so far have come out of South America, which tells you something about where this movement hasn’t yet reached. The absence is most glaring among the world’s biggest polluters. The US, UK, and France do have some rights-of-nature laws on the books, but only at the city or county level, nowhere near the scale of national policy. It’s genuinely hard to say how much impact this movement can have on climate change while the countries doing the most damage remain largely outside it.
That’s the case for taking this to international law directly. Right now, the closest thing we have is a non-binding text from the 2022 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, signed by 200 countries, which asks states to “recognise and consider” the rights of nature and of Mother Earth. Given everything above, that’s not enough anymore. Ecosystems don’t recognise national borders, so treating them as though they do makes little sense: granting a river legal personhood in one country does nothing to protect it once it crosses into the next.
The Brahmaputra is a good example of why this gap matters. It’s the main water source for northern India and considered sacred in Hinduism, and yet India’s access to it is now under threat from China’s Medog hydroelectric dam, built on the same river. Part of what makes that possible is a hole in international law: neither China nor India has signed the 1997 UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, and neither have Bhutan or Bangladesh. It’s a live case study in what happens both when countries refuse to acknowledge how we are all connected by nature and when there’s no shared legal framework governing a shared resource.
As competition over water intensifies globally, the international community needs to get serious about enforcement against the abuse of water systems. Granting international legal standing to water sources is one concrete way to do that, one that respects both the ecological system itself and the people who rely on it, materially and spiritually.
There is already a foundation to build on here. The International Court of Justice’s ruling that states can sue each other over climate change makes a fairly obvious point: what one country does to the environment doesn’t stay within its borders. Recognising the rights of nature is really just the logical next step from that same principle. We’re bound together by a shared environment whether the law acknowledges it or not. It’s time the law caught up, and gave nature the standing it needs so that both people and the planet actually have a future worth protecting.
