AN ACT RECOGNIZING AND PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF NATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES
AN ACT RECOGNIZING AND PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF NATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES
EXPLANATORY NOTE
The Earth's average temperature has risen about zero point nine degrees Celsius since the late nineteenth century, largely driven by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While climate change has occurred throughout, and even prior to, recorded history, this was mostly due to variations in the amount of solar energy received by the planet. However, with respect to recent global warming trends, the scientific consensus is that it has been caused by human activity.
This global warming has caused sea levels to rise eight inches in the last century, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to decrease in mass, the retreat of glaciers around the world, an increase in the number of record-high temperatures, and the acidification of surface ocean waters.
Humans have also converted around half of the world's habitable land to agriculture. This massive conversion of forests, wetlands, grasslands, and other terrestrial ecosystems has produced an alarming decline in the planet's biodiversity. In twenty nineteen, a report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services noted that up to one million plant and animal species are facing extinction due to human activity.
Habitat loss is also being accelerated by massive fires - largely set by humans - that have engulfed forests from the Amazon to central Africa. According to Global Forest Watch, the tropics overall lost some eight point nine million acres of primary rain forest last year, an area equal to the size of Belgium.
The Institute for Economics and Peace has also reported that nine hundred seventy-one million people live in areas with high or very high exposure to hazards such as cyclones, floods,
bushfires, and rising sea levels. A substantial number of those at-risk individuals are from the Asia-Pacific region. Thus, it is not surprising that the top nine countries facing the highest risk from climate change are all from Asia.
Among these countries, the Philippines is at the greatest risk of experiencing multiple climate hazards out of any other country on Earth. Moreover, these hazards affect not only the environment but also the peace and order situation within a country. Not only are conflict-prone countries more vulnerable to natural disasters, those disasters themselves can also trigger further internal unrest.
Today, environmental laws regulate the use and exploitation of nature by humans. They legalize fracking, drilling, and open-pit mining. The consequences have proven catastrophic. Perhaps a new way of looking at the relationship between humanity and the natural world offers a way to avert disaster.
In nineteen seventy-two, law professor Christopher Stone published a seminal article "Should Trees Have Standing?" that explored the possibility of recognizing natural ecosystems and processes as legal entities. He described how women and slaves had long been treated as rightless in law and suggested that, just as they had eventually attained rights, so should trees and other nonhuman living things.
Existing legal systems force us to think of nature anthropocentrically: in terms of human concerns rather than what concerns nature. In the midst of a climate and biodiversity crisis, there is a growing consensus that it is time to secure the highest form of legal protection for nature by recognizing that natural ecosystems and processes possess certain inherent and inalienable rights. Worldwide, legislation and jurisprudence have begun to accumulate in this new area of law.
In two thousand six, the first law recognizing the legal rights of nature was enacted in the borough of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. The community sought to prevent dredging sludge laden with polychlorinated biphenyl being dumped in an abandoned coalmine. Communities across more than ten US states have now followed suit, including New Hampshire, Colorado and Pittsburgh.
In two thousand eight, Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature - or Pachamama or Mother Earth - in its constitution, the first country to do so. Since then, Bolivia has enacted a law defining the earth as "a collective subject of public interest," and declaring both the planet and the life-systems inhabiting it as titleholders of inherent rights specified in the law.
Nepalese environmental advocates are developing a constitutional amendment that would, if adopted, recognize the right of the Himalayas to be free from pollution. In Mexico, Pakistan, Australia and other countries, frameworks for extending legal rights to natural systems are being proposed and legislated.
Courts have also ruled that ecosystems are capable of possessing rights under law. Colombia's Supreme Court was recently asked to consider the impact of deforestation in a lawsuit that led to a groundbreaking ruling declaring the Amazon an entity "subject to rights," and entitled to conservation, maintenance, and restoration. In two thousand seventeen, the state high court in Uttarakhand, India, ruled that in order to protect the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, they should be considered legal persons with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities.
As the planet teeters on the edge of an irreversible catastrophe, it is time to make a fundamental shift in humanity's relationship with nature before it is too late. Environmental survival is human survival.
Thus, the proposed bill seeks to recognize natural ecosystems, populations, and processes as legal entities sui generis entitled to certain inherent and inalienable rights, such as those related to their existence, regeneration and restoration. Furthermore, as nature cannot do so directly, the bill also vests environmental advocates with the standing necessary to petition our courts on its behalf. However, in all such proceedings, nature shall be considered the real party-in-interest and all damages and monetary claims awarded by the court shall be held in trust by a conservation committee and used for its restoration and renewal.
Hence, the immediate passage of this measure is earnestly sought.
AN ACT RECOGNIZING AND PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF NATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES
AN ACT RECOGNIZING AND PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF NATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES
Be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Philippines in Congress assembled:
Section one. Short Title. This Act shall be known as the "Rights of Nature Act."
Section two. Declaration of Policy. It is hereby declared the policy of the State to recognize and protect natural ecosystems and processes, or distinct and identifiable portions thereof, as legal entities possessing certain fundamental and inalienable rights. The State shall provide simple, effective and expeditious mechanisms for the protection and enforcement of these rights. Such rights shall be founded on the following:
a. Interconnectedness of all creation bound by a common living source and all activities in the ecosystem-land, air, water, and sea live and function according to their respective roles to create and sustain the web life shall at all times be respected.
b. Harmony. All human activities, within the framework of plurality and diversity, should achieve a dynamic balance with the cycles and processes inherent in Nature.
c. Collective good. The interests of society shall be fulfilled consistent with the rights of Nature and shall involve all human activities.
d. Guarantee of the regeneration of Nature. The State, at its various levels, and society, in harmony with the common interest, must ensure the necessary conditions in order that Nature may regenerate, recognizing that ecosystems are limited in their ability to regenerate, and that humans are limited in their ability to undo their actions.
e. Multiculturalism. The exercise of the rights of Nature requires the recognition, recovery, respect, protection, and dialogue of the diversity of feelings, values, knowledge, skills, practices, skills, transcendence, transformation, science, technology and standards, of all the cultures of the world who seek to live in harmony with nature.
f. Co-existence of Human Rights and Rights of Nature. All rights guaranteed under the Constitution and international human rights treaties and laws, shall be exercised in harmony and consistent with the Rights of Nature.
g. Promotion of ecologically-sound innovation. The promotion of ecologically sound innovation shall be in line with the rights of Nature and shall be actively pursued by the State.
h. Indispensable role of the IPs/ICCs. The State recognizes the indispensable role of the indigenous peoples/indigenous cultural communities in the protection and promotion of the rights of nature.