The future of the Rights of Nature: an interdisciplinary scoping analysis

Description

The recognition of the Rights of Nature (RoN) is gaining momentum worldwide and represents a significant paradigm shift, from nature seen as a resource or object of protection to a subject of rights on its own. RoN is increasingly lauded as the legal transformation needed to address the pressing social-environmental crises of our time, including climate change, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss.

Our scoping project explores the potential for future research on the rights of nature from an interdisciplinary perspective. This research project explores the potential of the rights of nature, considering it from an interdisciplinary perspective, where people from various disciplines share their knowledge to help facilitate a more balanced relationship between humans and nature to address the ecological crisis.

Layman's description

Led by Professor Jeremie Gilbert at Roehampton University, this project reviews the current application of the rights of nature, the movement to grant rights to Nature often grounded in indigenous peoples’ cosmologies and culture, across disciplines.

Watch our short animated video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5O-Awcx3Ic

Key findings

Our scoping study highlights that despite its promising role to offer a truly transformative approach to our relationship with our environment, research projects are still anecdotal despite the tasks of exploring the truly transformative nature of this new approach to our environment.

Our project highlights, the potentially transformative impact of the rights of nature on social and ecological systems warrants urgent interdisciplinary research. However, the grand challenges that RoN are being proposed to address require substantive involvement from researchers across disciplines and with support from funders, governments, and organisations.

Our scoping study also highlight that although new research projects have begun to explore the anthropological, legal and political aspects of RoN focusing on specific case studies outside of Europe, further transdisciplinary research integrating environmental and social sciences is needed to understand how RoN could be operationalised in the European context.

Status	Finished
Effective start/end date	11/12/20 → 31/01/22
Links	https://www.ukri.org/news/ahrc-funds-projects-addressing-major-contemporary-challenges/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5O-Awcx3Ic https://natureandrights.org/