Earth Law Center at COP16: An Interview with Grant Wilson
The following interview was conducted by Earth Law Center (ELC) intern San Kwon with ELC Executive Director Grant Wilson, who attended the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, from October 21 to November 1, 2024.
COP16 was the sixteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was drafted in 1992 and is currently guided by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Could you start by introducing yourself?
My name is Grant Wilson, and I’m the Executive Director at Earth Law Center (ELC), also a lawyer for the Earth – what we call an “Earth lawyer.”
What were Earth Law Center's main objectives in attending COP16?
One main objective was to promote the contents of our report called “Ecocentrism in the Global Biodiversity Framework,” and that report had two main components.
One was asking all state parties to the biodiversity treaty to incorporate ecocentric law principles into their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), which outline how countries will meet the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) within their own nation. We want countries to include Rights of Nature or the intrinsic value of Nature, or the crime of ecocide, or other innovative Earth-centered approaches to protecting Nature in their plans.
ELC’s Grant Wilson (Executive Director, right) and F. Javier Ruiz (Expert in Environmental Policy and Climate Change) at COP16 in Cali, Colombia.
Less than 50 out of the 196 member countries have submitted their plans so far. While it’s too bad that they’re a little slow, especially since they’ve had a couple years to work on them, it represents an ongoing opportunity to advise countries on including ecocentric law principles in their plans.
Several countries have already done so. For instance, Aotearoa, New Zealand included some support for the Rights of Nature as part of their plan. Slovenia included support for ecocentric principles in their plan, and there are other examples as well. So, we want to work with countries who can use us as advisors on this possibility.
The report’s second main component focuses on educating readers that in the GBF, there's a section on finance. It's Target 19f, and in it, there's a commitment to create a $200 billion per year fund by the year 2030 that would support implementing these national plans, especially in developing countries. And it makes specific reference to “Mother Earth centric actions” as a focal point of this funding. And Mother Earth centric actions clearly include Earth law, what we mean by terms like “Earth-centered laws” or “ecocentric law.” So, in the GBF, there's a commitment to huge amounts of money for ecocentric law and actions as a focal point. We are hoping to help countries access some of that money for things like Rights of Nature projects.
We don't have any formal kind of arrangement to work with a specific country yet, but we are working with some of our partners and co-authors on the report, such as Lawyers for Nature and Rights of Mother Earth, amongst others, on the implementation step.
Did you attend previous UN biodiversity conferences? And if so, what stood out to you about COP16?
ELC sent a big team to COP15 in Montreal two years ago. I wasn't there, but our team reported back to me that it was an inspiring meeting that set the stage for ecocentrism in the biodiversity treaty. I would say this one, though, is different in a couple ways.
One is that it was in Latin America. Cali, Colombia is a place of great biodiversity, where there's actually Rights of Nature established in nearby jurisdictions. In fact, there is a river with rights only 40 minutes from the city center! It's called the Pance River, and it became the subject of rights through a court decision from about three years ago, building from the famous rights of the Atrato River case in Colombia in 2016.
Grant Wilson (third from right), members of the ELC team, and friends stand as Earth lawyers and advocates in the Pance River, Colombia.
We organized a field trip to go see the river and meet the river. People were so excited about it that there ended up being 45 people who came on the field trip! A lot of the Earth lawyers and law students even did a little photo shoot where we put on suits and stood with the river up to our knees. We were trying to portray the river as our client, to send the message that, “Hey, we're lawyers representing rivers with rights in negotiations and in courts.” And so we had a fun moment dressing up in our courtroom attire, and standing in the river.
Another thing that stood out to me about COP16 was the very strong Indigenous presence. There were a lot of opportunities for Indigenous Peoples to hold the floor, host side events, and have their voices heard.
And there was also a very strong presence for the Rights of Nature. It seemed that every day there were multiple side events pertaining to the Rights of Nature, hosted by many groups. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) hosted a lot of events on this topic. ELC hosted events on ecocentrism and the biodiversity treaty, and also on the rights of the Marañon River and a project that we're partnering on to protect Amazonian stingless bees. All sorts of other groups were there too. I would guess, off the top of my head, that there were at least 15 events pertaining to the Rights of Nature in some way, which was really amazing.
We even had a booth right in the middle of the negotiating zone (the Green Zone) called the “Laws for the Earth” booth, and we shared it amongst ELC, GARN, and Stop Ecocide International. We all have our own angle as to how we work to transform the law to protect Nature, but we combined our efforts under this common banner of “Laws for the Earth.” We got to talk to thousands of individuals who were just walking past our booth throughout the conference.
Left to right: Monti Aguirre (International Rivers Latin America Project Coordinator), Constanza Prieto Figelist (ELC Latin American Legal Director), Maritza Quispe (Instituto Defensa Legal; Plantiff Lawyer, Marañón River case), Mari Luz Canaquiri (Kukama Indigenous Women’s Federation President; Plaintiff, Marañón River case), Javier Ruiz (ELC Expert in Environmental Policy and Climate Change).
You already mentioned Target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal conference. The other major goal that was agreed upon at COP15 was the “30 by 30 goal,” which states that each country should set aside 30% of their land and sea territories for conservation by 2030. Do you think that satisfactory progress has been made so far? And what efforts were made at COP16 to ensure that this goal is met by 2030?
Grant: 2030 is in six years, but it’ll be here before we know it, and we’re not on track at this point. As you said, 30 x 30 was agreed to as the standard. Some people thought 50 x 30 was actually what was needed scientifically, to allow Nature to regenerate itself to health. But as I understand it, the amount of land currently protected is under 20%, and the amount of oceans protected is under 10%.
One of the biggest issues is funding. We urgently need billions and billions of dollars from wealthy nations to implement some of these plans in developing countries. The vast amount of biodiversity is held, one, by Indigenous protectors of land and sovereign Indigenous Peoples, and two, in developing countries. And so, understanding that there's this global interest to protect biodiversity for the whole planet's sake, in the Global Biodiversity Framework, there's an agreed upon flow of money to ensure this happens. A lot of the talk at COP16 was about ensuring financial resources in order to make that a reality.
But there’s also the issue of “paper parks,” where areas are protected on paper but not in practice. This is an issue common to the protection of big areas under mainstream environmental laws as well as the Rights of Nature movement, where sometimes Nature’s rights are recognized, but the implementation is really lacking. And so I think on all sides, there's a desire for more money to flow to create big protected areas, and then also for more enforceable, measurable conservation protection on the ground.
Additionally, I heard a lot of people say that with such a flow of money, there was concern that it will go to governments or very large institutions disconnected from communities on the ground, especially Indigenous Peoples. And so as you create these big protected areas, if you want something like 30 x 30 to be effective, you need to be empowering communities along the way as well, to serve as the beneficiaries and recipients of some of this funding, and to have major leadership roles in protected areas, as opposed to imposing top-down structures.
Some interesting initiatives have been made at COP16, including the recent “Declaration of the World Coalition for Peace with Nature” and the proposed “debt for Nature” conversion solutions. Could you speak more on such things, specifically from an ecocentric perspective?
It was interesting that the COP16 was held in Cali, where there's been historical violence between people and also against Nature. And in Colombia, with the rights of the Atrato River case, as with other rivers in the region, the river itself was declared to be a victim of conflict between people, which stems from an ecocentric idea that Nature can be a victim.
When you think of peace, oftentimes you'll think of peace between people or nations. But Nature has a voice and agency. Nature has an essence, and it has a soul or spirit. It's not just a thing or a piece of property. And so this idea of peace with Nature really has an ecocentric flavor to it, which also ties into some of these Rights of Nature cases, as I mentioned, where rivers can be treated and understood to be victims alongside humans in these armed conflicts.
Going back specifically to the Atrato River, there's both legal and illegal gold mining going on, poisoning the river with arsenic and mercury, with ties to the drug trade in the region. Once again, in the notion of “Peace with Nature,” there are these common themes of uplifting Indigenous voices and frontline defenders, and challenging some of these status quo of extractivism in a big way. So the theme was really powerful there.
The “debt for Nature” swaps are a little bit confusing from an ecocentric law perspective. If a developing nation owes a bunch of money, they have debt to a wealthier nation. “Debt for Nature” swaps would allow them to forgive the debt in exchange for protecting certain areas of land or the ocean. So it kind of gets towards some of those protection or conservation goals in the Global Biodiversity Framework.
From a Rights of Nature perspective, however, the idea of “debt for Nature” needs to be scrutinized closely. A Rights of Nature framework aims to move away from the idea that Nature is valuable because it can be commodified economically and towards the idea that Nature has intrinsic value by its mere existence, just as humans have intrinsic value by our mere existence. And so this concept of putting a price on Nature and making complex political deals based on that price is a little bit far removed from the core essence of the Rights of Nature.
That being said, there has been some interest from countries that want to protect certain areas through ending these large debt burdens that they have with developed countries. I know there have been some deals done already. I'm not an expert on this field, but I feel a sense of caution in relation to postcolonial aspects of this type of deal. We should consider with nuance to what extent colonial legal structures from the past are responsible for these debt burdens in the first place.
You already commented on the location ofCOP 16, but could you say more? What does it mean for Cali, Colombia to host COP16, especially as a country with rich biodiversity and that's been a champion of Rights for Nature on the global stage?
The famous Rights of the Atrato River court decision from 2016 was one of the first big Rights of Rivers cases. That case kicked off a process through which more than 20 rivers in Colombia now have rights.
The Colombian legal context is really important. The Atrato River decision was based on something called bio-cultural rights. Bio-cultural rights are rights of people, but based on the understanding that their culture and their way of life is inseparable from the landscapes in which they live. To recognize bio-cultural rights is to understand that people have rights to live in relationship with the ecosystems that form the very basis of their identities and cultures. Perhaps the simplest way to say this is that humans are part of Nature, and we have a right to be in relationship with Nature. The courts inferred from this something like, Well, if humans have environmental rights and they also have bio-cultural rights, Nature has its own rights as well.
Reflecting back on the themes of what we have discussed so far, Colombia has been on the very forefront of ecocentric law movements, and continues to be so. One of my goals at ELC is to elevate these innovative campaigns to an international level, and to get countries like the United States to learn from what countries like Colombia are doing and to import some of those models.
There was a time when the US was really on the forefront of environmental law. We were the first to pass at least our version of the Endangered Species Act, and we passed the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. All these environmental laws in the late 1960s and early ‘70s were imported by different countries, and they became models for governments around the world to create baseline protections and regulatory systems for Nature.
Now we're realizing that those baseline protections are not enough. This suite of “emergency room laws,” where the laws don't really provide protection until an ecosystem is already at risk or on the verge of collapse, is not good enough. We're realizing that we need to evolve that approach to an ecocentric approach, recognizing Nature’s rights and creating entire legal structures based on such understanding.
And so I'm hoping that rather than the U.S. calling the shots, the U.S. can listen and learn from what other countries, including Colombia, are doing. COP16 was an opportunity to highlight what Colombia is doing and what other countries in Latin America are doing to protect communities, rivers, AND ecosystems from this new ecocentric perspective.
In the opening of COP16, UN Secretary General António Guterres highlighted the importance of Indigenous Peoples as “guardians of Nature” and their crucial role in conservation efforts. You have already mentioned the strong Indigenous presence at COP16. In what ways did you see such centering of Indigenous Peoples play out in the conference, and what were some challenges?
I think we've all heard the statistic that Indigenous peoples have 25% of the land and hold 80% of the biodiversity. So they're incredibly strong stewards of crucial biodiversity hotspots around the world, and I was gladdened to see their strong presence at COP16.
There remain a lot of issues to work through, however, regarding Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity. There are the long, ongoing debates about genetic resources and companies exploiting Indigenous knowledge to make products that they profit from immensely without any compensation or prior informed consent from Indigenous Peoples.
There's also the problem that, throughout the Global Biodiversity Framework, Indigenous Peoples and local communities are often grouped together, even turned into the acronym “IPLCs.” And that's challenging, because Indigenous Peoples are sovereign peoples, and to always group them with local communities, which happens frequently in the biodiversity context, takes a limiting perspective of their sovereignty. Why are we treating sovereign Indigenous Peoples the same as local governments, or grouping them together, when they have a much higher level of authority and self-determination?
There is a lot of hope that funding from the Global Biodiversity Fund can flow to Indigenous Nations and Peoples directly. There's some concern, however, that it will flow through intermediaries who will take a large percentage of the funding before it actually reaches them. And so there's more conversation needed to work that out.
But overall I think, especially considering the location, this biodiversity conference featured strong Indigenous voices and presences, and also a general understanding that Indigenous wisdom, leadership and sovereignty are going to be essential pieces of solving the biodiversity crisis. And so I'm encouraged that, despite some of these hurdles, the conversation is moving in the right direction.
Is there anything else that you would like to touch on?
If you're a state party to the biodiversity treaty, we encourage you to reach out to our team – check out our webpage on the Convention on Biological Diversity, and you can contact me directly at gwilson@earthlaw.org. We're offering consulting services on implementing ecocentrism into NBSAPs. And if you're interested in getting involved, read our report, “Ecocentrism in the Global Biodiversity Framework.”
