2024 was another important year for the rights of nature.
Back in 2021, the Ecuadorian government issued a landmark ruling stating that mining in its Los Cedros cloud forest violated the rights of nature. Last year, a court in Ecuador ruled that pollution has violated the rights of a river that runs through the country’s capital, Quito - based on an article of Ecuador’s constitution that recognises the rights of natural features like the Machángara River.
Latin America has been at the forefront of the global movement to grant legal rights to nature. In 2008, Ecuador was the first country to recognize the rights of nature in its national constitution, and in 2011 Bolivia was the first to do so in national legislation. The high court of Colombia has recognized the rights of rivers, a lake, and a national park. In 2022, Panama recognised the legal rights of Nature.
Beyond Latin America, a growing number of natural features and spaces were granted legal personhood in 2024. In New Zealand, the peaks of Egmont National Park – renamed Te Papakura o Taranaki – were recognised as ancestral mountains and jointly became a legal person, known as Te Kāhui Tupua.
In Brazil, the city of Linhares granted legal rights to the waves at the mouth of the Dolce River, the first instance in which a government has conferred rights upon part of the ocean - recognising its waves as living beings, granting them the right to existence, regeneration and restoration.
Meanwhile, a new treaty formed by Pacific Indigenous leaders saw whales and dolphins officially recognised as "legal persons".
"A case filed to protect whales from cross-ocean shipping may rely on an individual claiming to be harmed because her ability to whale watch has been diminished," says Jacqueline Gallant, a lawyer working in climate change, biodiversity and rights. "If whales themselves were recognised as legal subjects, the case could more accurately focus on the harms to the whales themselves as opposed to the individual claiming an ancillary harm in order for the court to hear the claim."
Gallant, who works for the Earth Rights Research and Action programme at New York University School of Law, says they are pushing the boundaries of legal imagination.
"Legal personhood provides the understanding that nature and living non-human beings should be understood as subjects [as opposed to objects] - with intrinsic value and interests and needs of their own," she says.