Published December 3, 2025
By Luisa Gómez, CIEL Senior Attorney at the Climate and Energy Program.
This piece was originally published as an opinion by El Observador.
Nature has rights. This was recognized by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on July 3, 2025, in its historic Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency. With this decision, one of the most important courts in the world made clear that ecosystems—such as forests and rivers—have the right to exist, regenerate, and maintain their life cycles. This perspective implies a fundamental change in how we relate to Nature. It is not our property; it has its own rights, and States must guarantee them.
The Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court is part of a global wave for climate justice. Alongside the April 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the July 2025 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, these three decisions offer a roadmap to end climate impunity. They eloquently affirm that States have a duty to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and regulate major polluters, as well as to protect those most exposed to the worst effects of the crisis and ensure reparations in the event of climate-related disasters. Additionally, the industries contributing to the causes of the climate crisis—mainly the fossil fuel and agribusiness sectors—have standalone obligations to limit their GHG emissions and redress climate harm.
The Inter-American Court 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-based economic model, as it has facilitated the expansion of production and mass consumption beyond planetary limits. This logic has led to the increase in GHG emissions—the main cause of climate change.
The climate emergency reminds us of our deep interdependence with Nature. The alteration of any component of the ecosystem in which we live affects the health of the entire system. This is precisely what we are witnessing: human disruption of the climate system is contributing to increasingly frequent and extreme 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. This means that States must refrain from causing harm to ecosystems and must guarantee their rights to be protected, restored, and regenerated.
The Inter-American Court had already begun to approach this perspective in previous decisions, noting that the protection of the right to a healthy environment is not justified solely by its usefulness to human beings, but by its importance for other forms of life, which also deserve protection.
Around the world, hundreds of court rulings, laws, and constitutions already recognize the rights of rivers, mangroves, forests, mountains, and other animal species. For example, the Supreme Court of Justice in 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 exercised its Indigenous authority and 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 to evolve naturally, through a law confirmed as constitutional by the Constitutional Court.
The Inter-American Court’s decision is unique in its scope. Unlike the cases mentioned above, which have national or local applications, this Advisory Opinion articulates a binding legal guideline for more than 30 member countries of the Organization of American States, their judges, and legislators. And national courts have already begun to respond.
In late July 2025, a court in Colombia declared the Santurbán Páramo and its surrounding areas to be subjects of rights. This is one of the first judicial decisions to directly apply the standards articulated in 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 acknowledging that ecosystems must be protected for their own well-being, beyond their usefulness to humans, but in alignment with human rights. In fact, far from a conservation model that displaces the communities living in the Páramo, the Court recognizes the coexistence of human and non-human life. It proposes a balance: protecting the ecosystem while respecting the human rights and livelihoods of those who inhabit it, through the promotion of sustainable employment alternatives.
The recognition of the rights of Nature is also a tool for environmental defenders. Traditionally, those who demand environmental protection—for example, the protection of a river—have had to demonstrate how failing to protect it affects their human rights to health or water. But under the framework of the rights of Nature, ecosystems possess an intrinsic value that deserves to be protected and defended.
Of course, there are challenges. The lack of state coordination and presence in the territory, as well as the absence of monitoring and funding, often undermines the implementation of decisions and regulations that recognize the rights of Nature. However, evidence already exists that the rights of Nature can play a key role in protecting biomes that are essential in confronting ecological crises. For example, the recognition of the rights to exist and regenerate of Los Cedros in Ecuador has effectively helped prevent the incursion of mining activities into this highly biodiverse cloud forest—and its consequent degradation—for several years.
“Traditional” protection measures, based on anthropocentric frameworks, are no longer sufficient to confront increasingly severe socio-environmental crises. We face extraordinary ecological emergencies that demand extraordinary responses. Approaching our relationship with the planet with curiosity, humility, and self-criticism is not optional—it is necessary.
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