Why Rights of Nature? Why Now?

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution are not separate crises. They are interconnected symptoms of a legal, economic, and cultural system that has treated Nature as property, a resource, and an object to be managed primarily for human benefit. Rights of Nature frameworks are emerging around the world as a powerful response to this challenge, and a solution for a paradigm shift.

Recognizing the Rights of Nature is not a new idea. Indigenous Peoples and local communities across the world have recognized the intrinsic value of Nature for millennia. What is new is that legal systems are beginning to translate this understood law into formalized protections for Nature that recognize and respect Nature's intrinsic rights. This bridge between science, law, and global decision-making is essential: Rights of Nature laws are most effective when they're supported by clear scientific evidence, informed by Indigenous and local knowledge, and translated into practical legal, policy, and governance frameworks.

The UN's Harmony with Nature programme has worked to bring the Rights of Nature into international conversation since 2009. Over the last 15 years, the movement has grown from an idea into implementation: laws, court decisions, and public policies now recognize Nature as a subject of rights in over 40 countries and territories across the globe. Panama's 2022 national Rights of Nature law, the third national Rights of Nature legal provision in the world, helped build new momentum by demonstrating that this framework can move from principle to practice.

That's why forNature works on two fronts at once: grassroots science that builds the evidence base, and grasstops diplomacy that turns evidence into enforceable rights. Neither moves the needle alone. Evidence without a government willing to act on it stays a research paper. A government willing to act without evidence and community backing has nothing to act on. Panama proved this shift can be led by citizen engagement and advocacy from the ground up, not only by policy handed down from the top, and that's the same two-front approach now driving the push for a UN Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature.

In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights brought the countries of the world together to set a new standard for how we respect human life. It's time to make a similar declaration for the natural world. 

In the face of the triple planetary crisis, we are at a crossroads: we can either move forward united as a global society toward amending our relationship with, as part of, Nature, or we can cease to live on a planet that we recognize.