Years after landmark court rulings in Colombia and Bangladesh recognized rivers as legal persons, the waterways remain polluted and under threat—an outcome a new study attributes in part to a systemic issue: Legal systems are still overwhelmingly designed to treat nature as an object for humans to use and profit from.
The report, released Monday by the nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, focused on how rights of river laws are being implemented and found that legal recognition is not, by itself, enough to stop toxic contamination and the destruction of ecosystems.
Instead, researchers concluded that it is only a first step. Whether it leads to healthier rivers depends on what follows: who is empowered to act on the river’s behalf, whether Indigenous and local communities have meaningful decision-making power, whether governments make systemic policy shifts away from treating nature as a bundle of extractable resources and whether officials have the political will to enforce the law.
“There are so many wider structural issues that need to change in order for rights of nature to be successfully enacted,” said Alison Dyke, a political ecologist with the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the report.
