How Environmental Law Spreads Across the World
By Alissa Lampert
An Introduction to the Spread of Legislation around the World
Environmental law has spread around the world into many countries’ legal systems. By studying the different policies each country has adopted to protect their lands and resources, we can see a resemblance between legal themes, the way that governments protect their nature, and where there is room to grow.
Consider the spread of environmental law through the impact-assessment laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Practically, what NEPA means is that federal agencies must consider environmental consequences in their decision-making. For example, if the Department of Transportation wished to build a new highway, they would have to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) outlining how humans might be harmed from the pollutants, as well as if any protected plant or animal species would be further put in harm’s way from the project.
Countries outside the United States, like Mexico, China, and India, along with many others, adopted environmental impact assessments in the decades following NEPA, or structured their environmental policy programs to include them. Requiring EISs has dipped to international law, too. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, included a principle stating that environmental impact assessments should be used for proposed activities that are likely to have a significant negative impact on the environment. EISs are now commonly included in multilateral environmental agreements, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity, amongst others.
Laws that protect specific parts of the environment have also spread internationally. We can look to the U.S. Clean Water Act (CWA) as an example. In practice, the CWA empowered the EPA to review individual states’ water quality targets and ensure they are sufficient to keep the water swimmable and pollutant-free. After its passage, the Hudson River went from a waterway filled with pollutants and garbage to a much cleaner river that has seen growing numbers of aquatic species over the past decades.
Many countries use similar playbooks to the CWA for regulating water pollution, such as EISs or requiring water discharge permits for polluters which prescribe the amount of pollutants that can regulate a waterway. Additionally, the United Nations Environment Programme promotes nature-based solutions for wastewater and pollutant management, with the goal of protecting overall water quality. They also administer Sustainable Development Goal target 6.3.2, which aims to help countries understand, measure, and report on water quality.
How Earth law might spread throughout the world
Earth law is an emerging field whose goal is to shift the focus of environmental law from a human, or anthropocentric, focus, to a more eco-centric focus. The task is vast but begins with the combined efforts of many dedicated stakeholders such as Earth Law Center (ELC).
The Rights of Nature movement is one of the most promising in building Earth law. It encompasses the wider goals of Earth law of integrating ecocentric laws into national and international legislation. It broadly aims to have governments and citizens consider the inherent rights of Nature to exist and thrive as its own legal entity. In the context of American and other legal frameworks, this includes granting Nature standing, which would allow it to act as a party in legal disputes and be granted legal personhood.
The movements that grant rights to Nature must be collaborative attempts, as Nature itself does not know political boundaries. As we have seen over the past couple of years, wildfires do not stop at the U.S.-Canada border just because they started in the U.S.
The Rights of Nature movement is spreading across the world. In 2017, New Zealand recognized rivers as rights-bearing entities and granted them legal personhood status. Similar actions have also been taken with the Atrato River in Colombia and the Vilcabamba River in Ecuador. A court in India held in 2018 that the animal kingdom is a legal entity with rights. A court in Colombia held in 2018 that the state must protect bees as pollinating agents.
These values pervade international legal entities. The United Nations Secretary General wrote a report emphasizing that animals have rights to live and flourish as people do.
The way these Earth laws spread shows how the world stage can inspire development and cooperation. The global and regional international organizations such as the UN, NATO, EU, Organization of American States, etc., ensure that countries will periodically convene to discuss the state of their affairs and how they wish to see things change around the world. In the context of the environment, these discussions are happening more frequently as countries continue to realize the threat of climate change and environmental degradation.
What can you do to support Earth law and Rights of Nature?
Support for Rights of Nature and Earth law has been steadily growing. More countries, spurred on by the support of their citizens, are starting to include Earth law values in their legislation. ELC has worked tirelessly to enhance these efforts across the globe by providing people and stakeholders with information and toolkits to promote Earth law in their home nations.
Earth Legislator is a work-in-progress by ELC, which aims to provide legal templates for Earth law. Earth Legislator will change the face of the Earth law movement. Like LegalZoom, in which a user can enter their information in and receive a legislative template that they can present to their local governments, ELC and the Earth Legislator project aims to make templates for Earth law widely available to the public. Then, private citizens and groups can take more active roles in the Rights of Nature movement. We hope this to be a collaborative effort so that shared resources can be widely accessible to practitioners within the Earth law field. We invite partners to get in touch with us to collaborate on this project.
To receive updates about the Earth Legislator project and steps ELC is taking to promote Earth Law, sign up for the ELC newsletter, or consider donating to ELC to ensure we can continue fighting for Nature’s rights. You can also sign up to volunteer with ELC to make an impact on your local community. If you would like to get in touch with us, email info@earthlaw.org.
Alissa Lampert is an intern at ELC and a senior at Barnard College majoring in environmental science.
