The Rights of Nature | Mongabay Newscast

Planet: Critical

This week, P:C features Mongabay.

Nations across the globe are trialing “rights of nature” laws and “legal personhood” for various ecosystems and a range of reasons, from Indigenous reconciliation to biodiversity protection. While these two concepts are closely related, they have some key differences.

Viktoria Kahui discusses what distinguishes them and how they’ve been used for conservation, while stressing there’s still little evidence that legal personhood protects biodiversity. Kahui is an environmental and ecological economist at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand and joins the Mongabay Newscast to interrogate these legal frameworks.

In this conversation with co-host Rachel Donald, Kahui outlines instances where the laws have been applied and why, despite some flaws, she thinks they are worth considering and iterating upon to combat environmental degradation, despite a global debate and many critiques, based on their intent and design. Chief among these is their imposition of an anthropocentric (and primarily Western) legal viewpoint upon something as complex as nature, which transcends the confines of human liability and, therefore, cannot be subjected to it without knock-on effects that potentially harm the people these laws are intended to empower.

Kahui weighs in on this debate and where she sees such laws being applied in a promising fashion, such as in Ecuador, where courts have examined nature in the context of established constitutional law, leading to outcomes that have benefited both people and nature.

“Very slowly, as lawyers and judges are becoming more familiar with the concept, they’re able to interpret it when there is a legal case being brought, and they’re [better able to argue] the side of nature,” she says. “It’s certainly much, much more positive than what we’ve seen in the past.”

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