Photo by Klaus Steinberg via Unsplash
Today a new Nature’s Rights Bill was launched at the House of Lords by the Green party peer Natalie Bennett. For decades, lawyers, campaigners, and communities have worked to bring the idea of rights for Nature and legal personhood for Nature into the public imagination. To see a fully drafted Bill for the UK marks an historic shift: a signal that the Rights of Nature movement has moved from the fringes of discourse to the floor of democratic possibility. And yet, as lawyers committed to making such change real, we must also ask: how do we move from vision to viability? In this blog we ask what it would look like for Rights of Nature to take root in the soil of the UK’s legal system, one that is complex, devolved, and already dense with environmental obligations?
Today this campaign for a rights of nature bill opens a door. But the bigger task is to ensure that we can walk through that door with something the legal world can carry, enforce, and evolve. That is a living law that honours the spirit of Rights of Nature while grounding it in practice.
Across the world, the idea that Nature itself might hold legal rights is moving from the margins of activism into the centre of legal and political debate. The Rights of Nature (RON) movement in Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia and beyond calls for a deep shift in how our legal systems understand life, ownership and obligation. In the UK, the question is no longer whether the idea resonates, but how it can work in practice. The time has come to move beyond declarations of belief to build an approach that is coherent, legitimate and capable of making a tangible difference for us and Nature.
This blog explores questions of what kind of legislative approach is right for the UK, how would this function in practice and what are the conditions needed to bring about this change? We summarise how a practical and grounded UK approach might evolve, one that embeds the rights of Nature within our legal system and is tethered to the realities of the UK legislative process and our centuries old design of law.
While wholesale constitutional reform in favour of Nature might be what the world needs right now, it also must offer practical and workable legal responsibility within the boundaries of English law.
Many attempts at legislation will start by recognising “Nature” as a single legal person, capable of holding rights and with duties being owed to it. In some places and, at some levels this can work. We have seen that the constitution of Ecuador recognises Nature and it allows anyone to represent Nature in court. Yet over fifteen years later, implementation remains inconsistent. Courts have occasionally issued powerful rulings, halting mining or road projects, but enforcement is weak, and political pressures are currently very high with a possibility of gutting the Rights of Nature from the constitution. It is possible to conclude then that constitutional recognition of legal personhood alone is not enough.
In New Zealand the Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 recognised the Whanganui River as a legal person, represented by guardians from both the Crown and the Whanganui iwi. This place-based, relational model reflects Māori cosmology and centuries of advocacy. Its success lies in its specificity. The law details a defined entity, with guardianship rooted in community, and guardians who embody shared responsibility across a cultural divide. It offers a powerful template for a UK approach, it is a great example of uniting legal recognition, community guardianship and ecological management albeit for one important river.
The Colombian Constitutional Court recognised the Atrato River’s rights in 2016, mandating state protection and community participation. It shows how judicial recognition can drive administrative action, even in the absence of a stand-alone statute. The common thread in these examples is place: rights emerge from lived relationships with specific ecosystems.
Nature is not a unified entity but a web of relationships, many of which are in tension. Restoring one ecosystem may harm another. A river’s needs differ from those of the peatland it drains through.
When designing legislation it is important to recognise in granting rights to one monolithic concept of Nature, we should never overlook the relational complexity that the Rights of Nature movement itself celebrates. Place-based approaches and seeking spaces where law is already receptive to change can be far more practical and methodical. The shift needed to see parts of Nature as rights-bearing entities should not be underestimated but it is unlikely to come from a constitutional bill seeking to give rights to the whole of Nature. What English law calls for is a more coherent and relevant approach to law making, allowing law to attend to ecological particularity with bespoke and protective language that fits well to the parts of Nature facing the greatest threats. While national legislation is an attractive proposition, we cannot presume that there is the will nor the resources for both public and private organisations to accept a wholesale duty to protect and restore Nature. An approach where a blanket duty is imposed also does not acknowledge that not all of us are best placed to do all the work, all the time. It takes a huge amount of ecological knowledge to do the ‘next best thing’ and assigning responsibility to work for Nature’s best interests must be done in a multi-disciplinary way with credible data and peer reviewed plans. Otherwise the risk is we create unforeseen consequences that we spend years undoing.
For English law we believe the path forward lies in strategic evolution. We can build Rights of Nature principles into existing frameworks coherently, and in line with our constitutional structure.This is how we see it working:
English law already recognises public interest in the environment through the Environment Act 2021, the Climate Change Act 2008, and common law doctrines of nuisance and public trust. Rights of Nature principles could be inserted into these frameworks. For example, as interpretive principles guiding decision-making, or as duties on public authorities to consider ecological integrity as a primary legal interest.
Alongside declaring “Nature” as a single rights-holder in a stand alone piece of legislation, the UK could also recognise specific entities; a river, a forest, an estuary as rights bearing subjects of law. Each with its own guardianship body. These could be initiated through private Acts, local legislation, or even contractual governance models such as Nature on the Board, where natural entities have representation within company or trust structures. We need a national conversation about how to do this, so that the work is not being continually repeated in silos.
The success of New Zealand’s model lies in guardianship, not in creating new administrative tiers. Guardians who are drawn from local communities, Indigenous or traditional stewards, scientists, and legal experts could represent the interests of ecosystems within existing institutions such as the Environment Agency, Natural England, or local authorities.
Pilot projects are essential, especially where they are place based and community informed. This could be a piece of legislation ushering in Rights of the River Roding, or the Dart, or the Ouse or a national park. We should be gathering together to observe, iterate and then refine. The aim would be to allow cases and experience to shape broader statutory development.
Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each have distinctive environmental powers and community relationships. We should recognise that there are mutual and similar challenges but that those places do face different scenarios. One obvious one from recent years is Lough Neagh, which is held in private hands but supplies drinking water to 40% of Northern Ireland’s population. How we work with Nature as a stakeholder to govern this area is not the same as how we might work with a chalk stream in the Chilterns.
Legislation alone will never be enough. The deeper task is cultural: to re-imagine law itself as a living system in relationship with the Earth. Rights of Nature thinking invites lawyers, judges, and policymakers to move from ownership to relational responsibility, from extraction to care and from control to stewardship and for this alone the movement should be applauded.
Our legal culture, built on private property and linear causation, must evolve toward relational accountability and ecological reciprocity. The Rights of Nature movement is not only about adding a new chapter to the statute book, it is about rewriting the story of culture, responsibility, ethics and then finally law itself.
The Rights of Nature movement challenges us to remember that the law is not separate from the living world, it is one of its expressions. Like an ecosystem, it must adapt, evolve, and root itself in place.The task before us is a slow patient one: to sow seeds across our legal landscape and tend them with care.
If we do this well, the law of this land might once again reflect the life of this land, not as its owner, but as its kin.
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