On July 3, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a landmark Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency, and buried within its sweeping findings was a declaration that should reshape how legal systems around the world think about ecosystems: nature has rights.
The Court recognized that forests, rivers, and other ecosystems have the right to exist, regenerate, and maintain their life cycles, and that member states have a binding legal obligation to guarantee those rights. This is not a symbolic gesture. The Inter-American Court’s advisory opinions carry legal weight for more than 30 member countries of the Organization of American States, their judges, and their legislators.
The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) has published a clear and important analysis of this ruling by senior attorney Luisa Gómez, and we encourage everyone working in this space to read it.
What the Court Said
The Advisory Opinion places nature at the center of climate action in a way that previous rulings have not. The Court found that any response to climate change falls short if it continues to treat ecosystems as mere resources, available for exploitation and commodification at human discretion. States must not only refrain from harming ecosystems, they must actively protect, restore, and ensure the regeneration of the natural systems on which all life depends.
This builds on an earlier Inter-American Court decision that had already begun moving in this direction, noting that the protection of a healthy environment is justified not only by its usefulness to humans, but by its importance to other forms of life. The 2025 Advisory Opinion goes further, making rights of nature a central pillar of climate law rather than a philosophical footnote.
The ruling is also part of a remarkable convergence of international legal authority. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea issued its own Advisory Opinion on climate obligations in April 2024, and the International Court of Justice followed in July 2025. Together, as CIEL’s analysis notes, these three decisions form a roadmap toward ending climate impunity, affirming that states must curb greenhouse gas emissions, protect those most exposed to the climate crisis, and ensure reparations when climate-related disasters occur.
Already Changing Law on the Ground
National courts are responding. In late July 2025, a Colombian court declared the Santurbán Páramo and surrounding areas to be subjects of rights, one of the first judicial decisions to directly apply the Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion. The ruling prohibits mining in the Páramo, recognizes the ecosystem’s right to be protected for its own well-being, and does so while also affirming the rights and livelihoods of the communities living within it. The Court’s approach is notable: protecting the ecosystem and respecting human life are presented not as competing goals but as mutually reinforcing ones.
This is consistent with a broader pattern. In Ecuador, the recognition of rights for the Los Cedros cloud forest has helped block mining operations and prevent degradation of one of the hemisphere’s most biodiverse ecosystems for several years. Spain’s Parliament granted rights to the Mar Menor lagoon, a law since confirmed constitutional by Spain’s Constitutional Court. The Nez Perce Tribe recognized the Snake River as having the right to exist, flourish, and flow freely. Colombia’s Supreme Court of Justice recognized the rights of the Amazon. Community by community, court by court, the legal architecture for protecting nature on its own terms is being assembled.
Why This Matters for Rights of Nature Advocates
One of the persistent challenges in rights of nature work is that advocates seeking to protect a river or a forest have traditionally had to demonstrate how degrading it harms specific human rights — to health, to water, to a livelihood. The rights of nature framework changes this. When an ecosystem has recognized intrinsic value and legal standing, advocates can defend it directly, rather than routing every argument through its utility to people.
As CIEL’s Gómez writes, the Inter-American Court’s ruling is also a tool for environmental defenders. It provides a legal basis to protect ecosystems for what they are, not only for what they provide.
The ruling is candid about the challenges ahead. State coordination, territorial presence, monitoring, and funding all remain significant obstacles to implementation. Rights of nature rulings can be ignored, undermined, or reversed, as the story of Nederland, Colorado, and the Uncompahgre resolution showed in a very different context. But the direction of travel, at the level of international law, is now clear.
The View from Washington State
At Standing for Nature, we have been making the case for river rights in Washington State through both community-level resolution work and ballot initiative efforts that remain on appeal. The Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion matters to us not just as an international precedent but as a validation of the core argument we have been advancing locally: that existing environmental law, built on a framework that treats nature as property and rivers as water delivery systems, is structurally insufficient to meet the ecological crises we face.
When one of the world’s most authoritative regional human rights courts says that ecosystems have inherent rights and that states must guarantee them, it strengthens the legal and moral foundation for the work happening at every level, from international tribunals down to county resolutions in Colorado and ballot initiatives in Washington.
We are grateful to CIEL for their analysis and to the lawyers, scientists, Indigenous leaders, and communities worldwide whose decades of advocacy brought this moment into being. The court has spoken. Now the work of making those rights real falls to all of us.
Read CIEL’s full analysis here: Nature has rights, declares one of the world’s highest courts. It’s time to defend them.
Standing for Nature is a 501(c)(3) organization advancing the legal rights of natural entities and ecosystems. Learn more at standingfornature.org.
