When the environment sues for sustainability

12 March 2024, by Prof. Dr. Frank Adloff

Photo: a.luciano-unsplash

Giving rights to nature: the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain, shown here, was the first ecosystem in Europe to be recognized as a legal entity.

Everybody’s talking about it, many are promising to deliver it, and a few are making serious efforts to do so: sustainability. It’s a term that people around the world use for orientation, but which often serves as nothing more than a mantra. After all, being sustainable ultimately means maintaining equilibrium between the consumption and regeneration of natural resources – which doesn’t leave future generations with fewer opportunities and ensures the preservation of ecosystems. But if we take a look at our resource consumption and the climate changes on the horizon, we see just how far we are from that goal.

As a member of the Board of Directors at Universität Hamburg’s Center for Earth System Research and – you guessed it – Sustainability, or CEN, I’m especially interested in how societies are responding to climate change and biodiversity loss. As my research shows, in practice there are three main paths for pursuing sustainability.

On the one hand, there are measures that fall into the category of “modernization.” Many favor this path. Governments, NGOs and the industrial sector support the vision of simply continuing to manufacture and grow as usual, but in a modern, “green economy” without harmful side-effects. In this approach, the plan is for a combination of innovations and CO2 pricing to stop climate change and preserve our livelihoods. But the bottom line is sobering: biodiversity continues to decline, the mountains of garbage continue to grow, and our planet is becoming warmer and warmer.

Post-sustainability: doing everything in our power to keep burdens from getting worse

Consequently, others call for a radical change: transformation. The growth-based logic at the core of capitalism has to be abandoned. Since our planet doesn’t have limitless resources, constant growth has to end at some point. Radically rethinking our economies could pave the way for more sustainable growth. Yet our analyses indicate that we’re still a far cry from achieving this.

The third path involves a somewhat grimmer scenario, one based on authoritarian policies and control. Conceivably, individual countries or firms could independently implement geoengineering measures, the EU’s borders could be fortified, or the elite could seclude themselves in safety zones. Since the current crises could lead to an ecological state of emergency, we actually expect to see control imposed more often in the future. Democratic processes could be suspended, allowing states to directly intervene. From a geopolitical standpoint, a number of factors currently point in this direction.

Giving rights to nature

But we won’t achieve true sustainability in time with any of the three options above: from plastic litter and nuclear waste to the warming atmosphere and oceans, humanity has set off fundamental changes that will create tremendous burdens for the generations that follow us. In fact, we’re already living in the age of post-sustainability. Accordingly, we should do everything in our power to keep these burdens from getting even worse.

One ray of hope – an approach from the field of law. Though it comes from modernization, it can also be transformative: in 2008, Ecuador added certain rights for the environment in its federal constitution. Ever since, individuals and groups have had the right to file claims on behalf of ecosystems whenever the latter’s rights are infringed upon, e.g. through pollution or damage. In 2017, a river in New Zealand was declared a legal entity; in 2022, the lagoon Mar Menor became the first ecosystem in Europe to follow suit. In the future, the resulting court rulings could set new global precedents.