Nature has rights, as recognized on July 3, 2025, by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its historic Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency. With this decision, one of the world’s most important courts made it clear that ecosystems, such as forests and rivers, have the right to exist, regenerate, and maintain their life cycles. This vision proposes a change in the way we relate to ecosystems and species. They are not our property; they have their own rights, and States must guarantee them.
The Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion is part of a global wave for climate justice. It is paralleled by the April 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the July 2025 ruling of the International Court of Justice. Together, these three opinions represent a roadmap to ending impunity in climate matters. They eloquently point out that States have a duty to contain greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and regulate major polluters, as well as to protect those exposed to the worst effects of the crisis and ensure reparations in the event of climate disasters. Additionally, industries linked to the causes of the climate crisis, primarily fossil fuels and agribusiness, have independent obligations to limit their GHG emissions and repair climate damage.
The Inter-American Court’s decision stands out among other advisory opinions because, in addition to recognizing that the climate emergency is a human rights crisis, it places nature at the center of climate action. For the Court, any response to climate change would be incomplete if it continues to privilege a system that reduces ecosystems and other species to mere resources, subject to exploitation and commodification for human benefit. The appropriation of nature has been a key strategy in the fossil fuel economy model, as it has served to justify the expansion of mass production and consumption beyond planetary boundaries. This logic has led to increased GHG emissions—the main cause of climate change.
The climate emergency reminds us of our profound interdependence with nature. The alteration of any component of the ecosystem in which we live affects the health of the entire ecosystem. This is precisely what we are seeing: human disruption of the climate system is contributing to increasingly extreme and frequent weather events that destroy habitats and threaten our way of life. Based on this connection between society and nature, the Court reaffirms that ecosystems have the right to maintain their ecological processes. It means that States must refrain from causing damage to ecosystems, in addition to guaranteeing their rights to be protected, restored, and regenerated.
The Inter-American Court itself had already begun to approach this approach in past decisions, stating that the protection of the right to a healthy environment is not justified solely by its usefulness to human beings, but also by its importance to other forms of life, which also deserve protection.
Around the world, hundreds of rulings, laws, and constitutions already recognize the rights of rivers and mangroves, as well as forests, mountains, and other animal species. For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia recognized that the Amazon has the right to be protected, conserved, restored, and maintained. A couple of years later, in the United States, the Nez Perce tribe, exercising its indigenous authority, recognized that the Snake River has the right to exist, flourish, and flow freely. More recently, the Spanish Parliament recognized the rights of the Mar Menor lagoon to exist and evolve naturally, through a law that has already received approval from the Constitutional Court.
Inescapable global legal guideline
One of the aspects that makes the Inter-American Court’s decision unique is its scope. Unlike the cases mentioned above, whose application is national or local, this Advisory Opinion sets an inescapable legal guideline for more than 30 member countries of the Organization of American States, their judges, and legislators. And in less than a month, national courts have begun to respond.
At the end of July 2025, a court in Colombia declared the Santurbán Páramo and its adjacent areas to be subject to rights, in one of the first judicial decisions to directly apply the standards of the Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion and recognize its legal weight for judges and authorities. The ruling prohibits mining in the Páramo, an activity that has threatened it for years. It does so by recognizing that ecosystems must be protected for their own well-being, beyond their usefulness to people, but always in balance with human rights. Indeed, far from a conservation model that expels the communities that inhabit the Páramo, the Tribunal recognizes the coexistence of human and non-human life. And it proposes a balance: protecting the ecosystem while respecting the human rights and livelihoods of those who inhabit it, promoting sustainable employment alternatives.
The recognition of the rights of nature is also a tool for environmental defenders. Traditionally, those demanding environmental protection, for example, of a river, have had to demonstrate how failing to protect it affects their human rights to health or water. But through the lens of the rights of nature, ecosystems have an intrinsic value that deserves to be protected and defended.
Many challenges left
Of course, there are challenges. Lack of state coordination, limited territorial control, and a lack of monitoring or budgeting often undermine the implementation of decisions or regulations that recognize the rights of nature. However, there is already evidence that the rights of nature can be key to protecting essential biomes and addressing ecological crises. For example, the recognition of the rights of nature to exist and regenerate in Los Cedros in Ecuador has effectively contributed to preventing the incursion of mining activities into this highly biodiverse cloud forest and its subsequent degradation for several years.
“Traditional” protection measures, based on anthropocentric formulas, are no longer sufficient to address increasingly serious socio-environmental crises. We are facing extraordinary ecological emergencies that require extraordinary responses. Approaching the way we relate to the planet with curiosity, humility, and self-criticism is not optional; it is necessary.
