Editor’s notes: “A Washington state city has granted part of the Snohomish River watershed legal rights that can be enforced in court. In nearly all cases, state legislatures heavily lobbied by commercial industries have preempted the laws, rendering them unenforceable. But the Everett initiative could be the first to withstand such a challenge. Democrats, typically more open to stronger environmental protections than Republicans, currently control Washington’s Legislature and governorship.”
Efforts to apply the rights of nature in Ecuador have often failed. Legal challenges can become highly politicised and there is little legal infrastructure beyond general constitutional principles.
For example, in a case brought after road builders had dumped material into the Vilcabamba River, plaintiffs claimed to represent nature in court. However, they were not genuinely advocating for the river’s rights – their main concern was protecting their downstream property.
Ultimately, defending the rights of nature in court will be a struggle if the nature in question – the river, forest or lake – is not represented by someone with an ecocentric perspective. That means prioritising the intrinsic value of nature itself, rather than focusing on how it can serve human interests.
“According to the third Kawa, the people and the river are intrinsically linked, so Te Awa Tupua isn’t merely the river but also includes the surrounding communities — which challenges Western notions of property and human-made law. The relationship between the Iwi and the river goes beyond mere geographical proximity and includes spiritual and affective care for each other.”
Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing.
Many Indigenous peoples have long emphasised the intrinsic value of nature. In 1972, the late University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone proposed what then seemed like a whimsical idea: to vest legal rights in natural objects to allow a shift from an anthropocentric to an intrinsic worldview.
Here’s what you need to know about one of the fastest-growing environmental and social movements worldwide—to secure legal rights for ecosystems and other parts of the natural world.
By Katie Surma
April 2, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
“Rights of nature” is a movement aimed at advancing the understanding that ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.
Legal rights are the highest form of protection in most governance systems. In the United States, humans and non-humans have enforceable legal rights, like corporations’ right to freedom of speech.
At the same time, most legal systems treat nature as rightless property that humans can own, use and destroy. That means the law views sentient species like elephants and bald eagles, as well as life-supporting ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, no differently than objects like microwaves or cars.
For the people behind the rights of nature movement, that way of thinking is deeply flawed. It’s also scientifically inaccurate.
Humans are part of nature and depend on ecosystems for survival—from the food we eat to the water we drink and air we breathe. Evolutionary biology shows that humans share a common ancestor with all other life on Earth. Forests, rivers and other biomes provide conditions for human life to thrive. And humans have always shaped the environment and have been shaped by it.
Understanding this interconnectedness is key to understanding that human flourishing ultimately depends on a healthy Earth. Rights of nature activists say most societies have forgotten that basic truth, harming their own wellbeing—and threatening their very survival—as a result.
When did this forgetting happen? Academics have traced the notion that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature back to Renaissance-era thinkers like René Descartes, who compared animals to machines. The idea is also woven into the Bible’s book of Genesis, with God giving man “dominion” over the Earth. Others point to the advent of cities, when masses of people lost regular contact with nature.
Modern legal systems have been shaped by these developments and ideas, thus institutionalizing the belief that nature is an object, or thing, beneath humans.
“Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time,” law professor Christopher Stone wrote in the seminal 1972 law review article, “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone noted that the law has always evolved to extend rights to new groups: moving from white, property-owning men to include women, people of color and children.
In 2006, a rural, conservative Pennsylvania town plagued by industrial pollution enacted the world’s first rights of nature resolution. Since then, scores of countries—including Ecuador, Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, India, the United States and Uganda—have had court rulings or enacted laws at the national or subnational level recognizing nature’s rights.
The advocates behind these laws argue that if nature’s rights are respected, humans will benefit.
How Do Rights of Nature Laws Differ From Environmental Regulations?
In the course of human history, environmental law is a relatively young field. In the United States, it largely developed in the late 1960s in response to mass pollution wrought by industrialization. Rivers caught fire, pervasive smog blanketed cities and chemicals like DDT were sprayed indiscriminately.
Policymakers enacted legislation like the Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate human activity and limit impacts of industry on human health. Those laws did curtail pollution. But rights of nature advocates argue that those conventional laws haven’t stopped the severe environmental problems we face today, like climate change, biodiversity loss and mass pollution.
Advocates say conventional environmental laws have a central flaw: They’re designed to permit pollution. They only control how much.
Rights of nature laws start from an entirely different place. Ecosystems, wildlife and Earth itself are treated as living beings with inherent rights deserving of the highest form of legal protection. The central concern of rights of nature laws is to maintain and preserve the integrity of ecosystems, requiring governments to take a preventative, rather than a reactionary, approach.
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has said this mandates government officials to respect what is known as the “precautionary principle,” or the idea that, absent adequate scientific evidence, it is better to avoid certain risks that could lead to irreversible damage of ecosystems.
How Do These Laws Work in Practice?
The laws do not give nature’s rights absolute primacy over all other rights and interests.
No legal right is absolute. A right to free speech ends when that speech is defamatory or incites violence. Judges balance competing rights in the decisions they make every day. Nature’s rights are no different.
Rights of nature jurisprudence is still a young field. Most countries with such laws on the books haven’t had lawsuits attempting to enforce them. It’s also important to note that not all rights of nature laws are the same—there is wide variation in how the laws are written and what rights are recognized.
But Ecuador, which constitutionalized nature’s rights in 2008, has seen dozens of cases. There, Mother Earth, or Pachamama, has a right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”
The Ecuadorian Constitution also requires the government to prevent the “extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
Not all cases have been favorable for ecosystems. Ecuador’s economy is still largely dependent on oil revenues and other extractive industries.
But Ecuadorian courts have ruled in favor of mangroves, cloud forests, rivers, endangered frogs and coastal marine ecosystems, thwarting mining operations, industrial fishing and other nature-damaging activities. In some cases, courts have ordered the government to restore damaged ecosystems. Cases decided in favor of nature usually have a compelling reason for why nature’s rights ought to prevail over competing interests, like a high risk of extinction for certain species.
In the cloud forest case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court explained the importance of protecting a sensitive ecosystem from mining impacts, saying: “[T]he risk in this case is not necessarily related to human beings … but to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
In deciding these cases, Ecuadorian courts have depended heavily on scientific experts and evidence. Judges have also looked holistically at the health of ecosystems, rather than at piecemeal levels of pollution—a departure from the way courts tend to evaluate conventional environmental laws.
Scientists have come to the forefront of the movement in other ways. In Panama, for instance, marine biologists were instrumental in the passage of that country’s national rights of nature law.
How Are Rights of Nature Laws Enforced?
Trees and wild animals can’t walk into a courtroom and make their case. But rights of nature laws give ecosystems and species the ability to act in their own capacity under the law with help from people, similar to other non-human entities like corporations, business partnerships, ships and nonprofits.
This is done through a longstanding concept called legal personhood. That legal construct is most commonly used to allow businesses to enter into contracts, sue, be sued, own property and, in the case of corporations, limit the liability of its shareholders.
Each of those nonhuman entities is represented by a human guardian. Similar arrangements are used for minors and incapacitated people in court proceedings.
Who Is Behind This Movement?
Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the movement in several ways.
The worldviews of many Indigenous cultures—that humans are part of nature and owe responsibilities to other living beings—are foundational for the movement.
Honoring and preserving those worldviews and related knowledge for centuries has been no small thing. Indigenous communities have faced a long, dark history of colonization and other attempts aimed at eradicating their culture and separating them from their territories. Today, people in many Indigenous communities are still harassed, attacked and sometimes killed for defending water and land.
Indigenous peoples have also been behind many of the laws and court rulings advancing the movement. In New Zealand, Māori people fought for a settlement with the national government, resulting in legal personhood for a river, national park and mountains.
It was Ecuador’s strong Indigenous movements that led to the country becoming the first in the world in 2008 to constitutionally recognize Mother Earth’s rights. Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has also drawn on Indigenous knowledge in deciding rights of nature cases.
Bolivia’s Indigenous movements were behind that country’s 2010 and 2012 laws recognizing the rights of Mother Earth. Enforcement of nature’s rights in Bolivia has proved difficult, however.
Across North America, many Indigenous nations have passed rights of nature laws.
And in Peru, a coalition of Indigenous women won rights for the Marañón River ecosystem, a place the oil industry has heavily polluted for decades. The fight for the Marañón River came at great personal cost for Mariluz Canaquiri Murayari, president of Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, and other women in the organization, who were harassed and threatened for their advocacy.
What Are the Criticisms of Rights of Nature Laws?
The biggest opposition to the movement has come from industry groups—developers, the industrial agricultural sector and other polluting industries—and politicians aligned with those interests.
Those opponents argue that giving nature a higher level of protection will impede development and lead to an explosion of litigation. In practice, that hasn’t happened. Barriers to pursuing lawsuits, like the high cost of attorney fees, are substantial.
But the laws do threaten the interests of industries and businesses that have made money off extracting from and monetizing the natural world in unsustainable ways.
Some critics of the movement have questioned whether, if nature has rights, it also has duties: Can a river be sued if it floods and harms humans? Rights of nature advocates respond to this by saying that legal rights, duties and liability are always tailored to the entity they are assigned to.
Corporations, for instance, don’t have a right to family. Nature doesn’t have the capacity to act with intent and therefore should not have legal liability for harm it causes, advocates argue.
Another prevalent charge is that the rights of nature movement is an attempt to force human societies to surrender modern comforts and technology. In practice, though, advocates have sought to rebalance human interests with the health of ecosystems by placing better guardrails around human activity, ensuring the integrity and sustainability of Earth is maintained now and into the future. Advocates argue that humanity isn’t harmed by that but benefits instead.
They also say nothing so quickly forces people to surrender modern comforts as a disaster that destroys their homes and communities, and megadisasters are far more common in a warming world.
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, and papal exhortation Laudate Deum, said humans have a moral duty to protect the Earth.
“For ‘we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,’” Francis wrote in Laudate Deum.
Ecuadorian activists say the country’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights has made their country more pluralistic by incorporating the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and is changing the way everyday people think about the Earth, their home.
“We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up only knowing that nature has rights,” Ecuadorian political scientist Natalia Greene told Inside Climate News. “The law has influenced peoples’ understanding of nature and that is very powerful.”
Learn More
Follow our reporting at Inside Climate News. We’re the only newsroom we know of that has a dedicated rights of nature beat. Start here and here.
Books by Indigenous authors and ecocentric thinkers:
Our system of law and government was founded in racial-divisiveness and colonization and is dominated by corporations. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) fights to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to a local self-government system and the Rights of Nature. Fight for a more just, Earth-centered tomorrow, today.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature(GARN) is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature”
Banner: To protect it from mining and deforestation, Los Cedros cloud forest was awarded the same rights as people.
Editor’s note: “A study published in 2024 found that a change in insecticide use was a major factor in driving butterfly declines in the Midwest over 17 years. The authors, many of whom were also part of the current study, noted that the drop coincided with a shift to using seeds with prophylactic insecticides, rather than only spraying crops after an infestation.”
“Only the Pacific Northwest didn’t lose butterfly population on average. This trend was largely driven by an irruptive species, meaning one with extremely high abundance in some years – the California tortoiseshell. When this species was excluded from the analyses, trends in the Pacific Northwest were similar to other regions.”
“Imagine a world without the delicate flutter of butterfly wings or the vibrant splashes of color they bring to our gardens. Sadly, this could become a reality sooner than we think. A recent study published in the journal Science has revealed a shocking decline in butterfly populations across most regions of the United States.”
A study in the United States found a dramatic 22% decline in butterfly populations between 2000 and 2020.
Previous research has focused on a specific butterfly species or regions of the country. For this study, researchers wanted to understand overall butterfly population trends across the U.S.
They gathered records of 12.6 million individual butterflies across 554 species, from more than 76,000 surveys, many conducted by citizen science groups in nearly 2,500 locations.
The researchers found that total butterfly numbers were down by 22% over the first two decades of this century. It’s a concerning trend, said Collin Edwards, lead author of the study and an ecological modeler with the state of Washington Fish and Wildlife Department.
To put it in context, “for someone who was born in 2000, one out of every five butterflies had disappeared by the time they became an adult,” Edwards told Mongabay by phone.
The 22% decline is an average. Of the 554 species examined, 107 declined by at least 50% and 22 species declined by more than 90%.
At the same time, nine species saw population increases. The eastern population of the monarch (Danaus plexippus) doubled in 2025, though its overall population is still down roughly 80%, prompting the iconic butterfly to be proposed for the U.S. endangered species list.
Several of the nine species that increased in population are predominantly found in Mexico; the U.S. is the northern edge of their range. Edwards said with a warming climate, many butterfly species are shifting their habitats north.
“If the southern edge of their limit is just barely cold enough for them, as the climate warms, that’ll get worse. But the northern edge where it used to be a little bit too cold will start to get warm enough,” Edwards said.
This study adds to a growing body of research showing a global decline in insect populations, raising concerns about a depleting food source for many animals including birds and frogs, which are facing population crashes in their own right.
Furthermore, while bees get most of the glory, butterflies are also critical pollinators. A 2021 study in Texas found butterflies provide about $120 million per year in pollination services for cotton.
Tierra Curry, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, told Mongabay by email that “this is a landmark study” that “shows that we need to take urgent action to safeguard butterflies. Every action we take to help pollinators also helps us because our fate is directly tied to their health.” Curry wasn’t involved with this research.
Edwards said this study focused on butterflies because that’s the order of insects they had data for, but he added there’s “every reason to think that if butterflies are declining there are probably similar declines in other groups of insects,” especially since the drivers of decline — habitat loss, climate change and pesticides — affect most insects.
Editor’s note: “A new study in Science indicates that reforestation projects, which restore degraded or destroyed forests, are the most effective land-based method for carbon removal and biodiversity protection. Meanwhile, the authors found that afforestation, in which trees are added where they didn’t exist before, and bioenergy cropping, in which carbon-removing crops are planted to make biofuels, can have negative effects on wildlife, outweighing the benefits of carbon removal. The research highlights the importance of identifying the best places for reforestation projects, but the authors emphasize that reforestation is not a replacement for fossil-fuel reduction.”
Evidence suggests that allowing forests to regenerate of their own accord – a process known as “proforestation” – is a more effective, and perhaps more importantly, a more immediate way of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere than planting new forests. Coined by scientists William Moomaw and Susan Masino, the term basically means, in Moomaw’s words, “allow[ing] trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their full ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services.”
KARÈ, Togo — Under the hot sun of an April afternoon in northern Togo, we made our way by motorcycle across the impoverished prefecture of Kozah. It wasn’t a long journey, about 30 minutes, but threading between trucks and cars on National Highway No. 1, it was a treacherous one. When we arrived, we were greeted with a smile by “Dadja” Pékémassim Ali, the 57-year-old chief of the canton of Kouméa, where the village of Karè is located.
“We’re glad you’ve come to talk about this forest, whose restoration we’re delighted to see,” he told us. “Out of ignorance, and in a desire to satisfy our needs, our people set fire to the forest and cut down all the trees. And for years, we suffered from scarce rainfall, no timber, and even hotter temperatures. Our children no longer knew of the area’s birds and other animal species.”
Ali gave us his approval to climb Karè’s mountain and visit the sacred forest known as Titiyo forest. As we entered the forest, we were greeted by a cool breeze and the sound of birdsong.
Koudjabalo Ayouguele, the Kara regional representative for the NGO AJEDI, holds a sign pointing to the sacred forest of Titiyo in northern Togo. Image by Charles Kolou for Mongabay.
Since the 1800s, the sacred forest of Titiyo has been the site of annual rituals that involve traditional dances and the celebration of various deities. People come from throughout the canton of Kouméa and the entire Kozah prefecture.
It’s also an area of biodiversity conservation. This ecosystem, vital for the Karè village community, has suffered severe degradation since 1992, in the wake of a political crisis in Togo. Pressure from a growing population led to its rapid destruction as trees were felled for charcoal, firewood and timber, reducing the forest to almost nothing.
“Ever since we destroyed this forest by cutting down the trees, and with bushfires, mainly for hunting, the rain stopped,” said Kossi Karani, a Karè villager. “And we suffer from that because it affects our agricultural yields. The animals had disappeared, as well as the birds. There was no more life in the forest.”
But today, this sacred forest persists and has even begun to recover, thanks to the determination of a son of Karè: Sylvain Tchoou Akati.
Akati said he remembers watching helplessly as Titiyo’s destruction began, when he was just 12 years old. The tragedy left such an indelible impression that it prompted him to start fighting to restore Togo’s forests.
“The destruction of our sacred forest of Titiyo is recent, it happened before my very eyes,” he told Mongabay. “It all started with a need for wood to put a roof on the village elementary school. The forest was gradually destroyed until 2005.”
Today, Akati is the executive director of an NGO based in the capital, Lomé, known as AJEDI, or Youth Action for Integral Development. Its mission is to support and coach local communities in sustainable development. Akati’s motivation for restoring his own village’s forest comes not just from his love of nature, but also from encouragement by his uncle, Anam, well known in Karè for his love of planting trees, notably teak and mango.
Although he left Karè in 1997 to pursue his secondary and university studies in Lomé, Akati never abandoned his love for Titiyo. He became an activist for the preservation of forest ecosystems and sustainable development, and founded AJEDI in 2008. A few years later, in 2015, he set about restoring his native village’s forest.
“I cannot allow Titiyo, this sacred forest, to disappear without me doing something about it, especially given climate change. So in 2015, I visited my father, who was still alive, to tell him of my intention to restore the forest that our grandfather was responsible for preserving,” he said.
Raising public awareness
But Akati said he knew he couldn’t do it alone. Through his NGO, he began rallying the members of his community.
“We organized a meeting in the public square, which was attended by people from the surrounding villages. I explained to them the environmental, cultural, economic and social importance of restoring our forest, which is part of our shared heritage,” Akati said.
“During the training, we were made aware of how restoring the forest can contribute to good rainfall and improve agricultural production,” Tchilalo Pitekelabou, a member of the project’s monitoring committee, told Mongabay. She was one of six people appointed to the committee by the community’s members after the meeting. “We were also made aware of how forest resources can make our lives easier. That’s why we became involved, both men and women, in the restoration of Titiyo.”
The awareness-raising campaign prompted the Karè villagers, especially its women, to commit to the restoration of the forest. “In the early years, we sometimes watered the seedlings in the dry season to ensure their growth,” Pitekelabou said.
People who owned land within the forest’s perimeter agreed to give up their plots for reforestation.
A helping hand from the government
In 2019, Akati presented his project to Togo’s Ministry of Environment and Forest Resources, receiving positive feedback.
“The forest had become highly degraded and consisted of just a few trees,” said Yawo Kansiwoe, the Kozah prefectural official responsible for water, forests and the environment. “The local population and authorities were desperate to find ways of restoring it. This is what caught the attention of the NGO, which held discussions with local officials to jointly determine how the forest could be restored. Sylvain Akati’s determination encouraged us to give our full support to the NGO in all its awareness-raising and reforestation activities.”
In 2019, the first year of reforestation, the environment ministry provided technical and financial support worth $5,702 to support the reforestation of around 3 hectares (7 acres), allowing the planting of 3,500 seedlings, including Khaya senegalensis, earleaf acacia (Acacia auriculiformis), melina (Gmelina arborea), African locust bean (Parkia biglobosa), baobab (Adansonia digitata), kapok (Ceiba pentandra) and neem (Azadirachta indica) trees.
“We chose these species because they are sacred. The baobab, kapok and African locust bean are sacred in this forest,” said Koudjabalo Ayouguele, AJEDI’s local representative for the Kara region, where Kozah prefecture is located. “But beyond that, we have also planted trees such as Khaya senegalensis, which will enable us to restore the forest quickly.”
After this first year, the rest of the reforestation work fell to Akati. But he was able to draw on the commitment of local authorities eager to see Titiyo restored.
Red-throated bee-eaters (Merops bulocki), like these ones pictured in neighboring Benin, are among the species found in this part of Togo, thriving in forest patches like Titiyo. Image by Yves Bas via iNaturalist (CC BY 4.0).
New life makes the birds sing
“We are grateful to our son Tchoou, who had the idea of enlisting us to help restore this forest,” said Ali, the Kouméa canton chief who also serves as the primary guardian of the area’s traditions and customs. “In the beginning, there were a lot of us, but along the way some became demotivated because there was no money to be made straight away. But others like us, who understood the wider importance, remained determined. And we’ll never give up.
“Before, children didn’t know about the birds in this area, but with the restoration of the forest, we can show them all the types of birds here,” he added. “And we ourselves are happy, because the birds are singing in our ears again, something we haven’t experienced here for years with the disappearance of the forest.”
As well as birds, other animals have also found refuge in the Titiyo forest. “Thanks to this forest, a fresh breeze now blows through the village of Karè,” Akati said. “It’s like a microclimate. And there are monkeys, cane rats [Thryonomys swinderianus], reptiles like the boa [sic, boa constrictors are not native to Africa], the eastern green mamba [Dendroaspis angusticeps], vipers and snakes that have returned to the forest.”
On top of this, from a cultural perspective, the local people can now once more perform traditional rites with joy.
Kansiwoe, the prefectural official, said seeing the forest’s recovery is a source of great satisfaction: “We are delighted with the encouraging results of the restoration and recovery of this forest, which at its core is a sacred place, and preserves this sacred forest tradition.”
Now that the forest has begun to be restored, it’s time to consider how to maintain it.
“Protecting this forest remains a major challenge, and it is something we are working on,” Akati said. “For the time being, the watch committee is carrying out its mission well, which consists of monitoring the forest, making fire patrols, and continuing to raise awareness so we avoid bush fires and tree cutting. So far, thanks to their work, no bush fires have been recorded. We hope, thanks to their commitment and that of the population, to continue in this way.”
Beyond that, he pointed out a practice carried out by his grandparents, which could be a crucial asset.
“What we also want to do to help preserve the forest is to reinstate an old practice or law, which prohibited entering the forest in the rainy season and which everyone respected without question. This rule also prohibited entry into the sacred forest without authorization,” he said.
In search of support
To safeguard the Titiyo community forest, Akati also needs financial and technical support. He said establishing some income-generating activities linked to the forest should increase the chances of its preservation.
“Now, we need to find ways to preserve what we’ve achieved. We’re thinking of promoting beekeeping and market gardening, and building a multipurpose facility with a solar energy system. In the long term, in addition to beekeeping, we’re also thinking of developing nontimber forest products, given the species planted in the forest.”
With his commitment to restoring forest ecosystems, Akati is also looking for support to enable him to restore other sacred forests across Kozah prefecture. Now in his 40s, he’s already hard at work restoring the sacred forest of Landa, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Titiyo.
“It’s not just Titiyo that was threatened with extinction,” he said. “Our experience here can now help us restore all of Kozah’s sacred forests.”
Banner image: Red-throated bee-eaters (Merops bulocki), Pehonko, Benin. Image by Yves Bas via iNaturalist(CC BY 4.0).
Water seems deceptively simple and is easy to take for granted. It has no color, taste or smell and is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth. Recycled endlessly through the biosphere in its various forms, it is fundamental to keeping our planet’s operating system intact, and has done so for millions of years.
Water is life. Earth’s oceans are where life likely originated, and freshwater is essential for plants and animals to persist and thrive. It is basic to all human development. But as our 21st-century world gallops ahead, we are vastly manipulating the water cycle at an unprecedented rate and scale to meet the ever-growing needs of an exploding population.
By 2030, we will have built enough dams to alter 93% of the world’s rivers. Estimates vary, but we already use around 90% of the planet’s freshwater to grow our food. More than half of us now live in cities, but by 2050 a projected 68% of the world’s nearly 8 billion people will reside in urban areas. That metropolitan lifestyle will require astronomical amounts of water — extracted, treated, and piped over large distances. Humanity also prevents much rainwater from easily infiltrating underground, reducing aquifers, as we pave over immense areas with impermeable concrete and asphalt.
But these easily visible changes are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Researchers are shining new light on sweeping human alterations to Earth’s water cycle, many playing out in processes largely unseen. In the Anthropocene — the unofficial name for the current human-influenced unit of geologic time — we are already pushing one of Earth’s most fundamental and foundational systems, the hydrological cycle, toward the breaking point.
Trouble is, we don’t yet know when this threshold may be reached, or what the precise consequences will be. Scientists are resolutely seeking answers.
Water flows past Copenhagen in Denmark. As Earth’s urban areas expand, so do population pressures on the freshwater supply and the water cycle. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Water cycle basics
The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and flows through eternal inhalations and exhalations of water in different states, as it is exchanged between the atmosphere and the planet. Liquid water from oceans, lakes and rivers rises via evaporation into the sky, to form water vapor, an important greenhouse gas that, like carbon dioxide, helps insulate the planet to maintain that “just right” temperature to maintain life as we know it.
Atmospheric water vapor then changes to liquid, falling to earth as precipitation. It then flows as runoff again across the landscape, and what doesn’t go back into waterbodies, settles into soils, to be taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward. A large amount of freshwater is also locked in glaciers and icecaps.
Within this cycle, there are constant complex interactions between what scientists call blue and green water. Blue water includes rivers, lakes, reservoirs and renewable groundwater stores. Green water is defined as terrestrial precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture.
Partitioning of rainwater into green and blue water flows. Image by Geertsma et al. (2009)/Baseline Review for the Pilot Programme in Kenya. Green Water Credits Report 8, ISRIC–World Soil Information, Wageningen.
A fully functioning hydrological cycle, with balanced supplies and flows of blue and green water, is essential to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, human food availability and production, and our energy security.
It also regulates Earth’s weather and influences climate. Atmospheric temperature, for example, is dependent on evaporation and condensation. That’s because as water evaporates, it absorbs energy and cools the local environment, and as it condenses, it releases energy and warms the world. Throughout the Holocene geological epoch, a relatively stable water cycle helped maintain balanced temperatures and conditions able to support civilization.
However, in the Anthropocene, human activity has impacted the water cycle, the climate and ecosystems. For one, as more human-produced CO2 and methane build up in the atmosphere, more solar energy is held by the planet, causing global warming. And the hotter the air, the greater the quantity of water vapor the atmosphere can hold. That’s bad news because water vapor is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, greatly increasing the warming.
As our anthropogenic manipulation of the water cycle escalates on a global scale, we urgently need a holistic way to monitor these modifications and understand their impacts. Yet, the topic has not received the urgent scientific attention it requires. “To the best of our knowledge, there is no study comprehensively investigating whether human modifications of the water cycle have led, could be leading, or will lead to planetary‐scale regime shifts in the Earth system,” researchers noted in a 2020 paper on the role of the water cycle in maintaining fundamental Earth functioning.
One key concern of scientists: If severe hydrological shifts occur in too many regions, or in key regions that greatly influence the water cycle or water availability (such as the Amazon), then that could provoke shifts in other regions, in a global chain reaction, says study co-author Dieter Gerten, working group leader and Earth modeling coordinator at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“Conceptually we know that there must be a limit for how much we can disturb the [hydrological] system before we start feeling serious impacts on the Earth system and then, by extension, to humanity,” says one of the paper’s other co-authors, Miina Porkka, a postdoctoral researcher at the Water and Development Group at Aalto University in Finland.
International researchers under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Centre have been hammering away at answering these questions. They had to start with the basics. One big problem to date has been scientists’ lack of a metric for quantifying serious water cycle alterations. How do we even measure changes to the water cycle?
“It gets complicated,” says Gerten, who has been involved in the research to bring a global perspective to local water management since 2009, as conducted under the Planetary Boundaries Framework; Gerten is also a professor of global change climatology and hydrology at Humboldt University of Berlin.
The Toktogul reservoir in Kyrgyzstan. The Anthropocene is producing wholesale manipulations to Earth’s water cycle. For example, by 2030, more than 90% of the world’s rivers will likely be altered by dams. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Measuring change: Blue water
The Planetary Boundaries Framework defines a safe operating space for humanity as represented by nine natural global processes that, if severely destabilized, could disrupt Earth’s operating system and threaten life and civilization. The freshwater planetary boundary presents one such threshold, and scientists are working to define a global limit to anthropogenic water cycle modifications.
Initially, in 2009, river flow was used to try and measure the boundary threshold, Gerten explains, because blue water in all its forms was seen to integrate the three largest anthropogenic manipulations of the water cycle: human impacts on precipitation patterns, modifications of soil moisture by land use and land cover; and water withdrawals for human use.
This research used a simple calculation of the global sum of the average annual surface water flow in rivers, with an assumed 30% of that accessible water needing to be protected. This “freshwater use” boundary was set at 4,000 cubic kilometers (960 cubic miles) per year of blue water consumption. This is at the lower limit of a 4,000-6,000 km3 (960-1,440 mi3) annual range designated as a danger zone that takes us “too close to the risk of blue and green water-induced thresholds that could have deleterious or even catastrophic impacts on the Earth System,” researchers wrote in a 2020 paper that evaluated the water planetary boundary.
The Padysha-Ata River in Kyrgyzstan. Blue water includes rivers as well as lakes, reservoirs, and renewable groundwater stores. Image by Petro Kotzé.
With only an estimated 2,600 km3 (624 mi3) of water withdrawn annually at the time of the study, scientists concluded we were still in the safe zone. However, “That [conclusion] was immediately criticized,” Gerten says, in part because scientists were already seeing ample regional water-related problems. Another criticism argued that the measure of blue water alone did not reflect all types of human interference with the water cycle and Earth system.
Gerten later led work that proposed quantifying the boundary by assessing the amount of streamflow needed to maintain environmental flow requirements in all river basins on Earth. This approach had the advantage of recognizing regionally transgressed limits and thereby deduced a global value.
According to this newer calculation, the freshwater use planetary boundary should be set much lower, at about 2,800 km3 (672 mi3), Gerten says, which means humanity is already much closer to the danger zone than previously thought. “Water is more limited on Planet Earth than we think,” Gerten cautions.
The nine planetary boundaries, counterclockwise from top: climate change, biosphere integrity (functional and genetic), land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, and release of novel chemicals. In 2022, scientists announced the transgression of both the freshwater and novel entities boundaries. Image courtesy of J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Steffen et al. (2015) via Stockholm Resilience Centre.
Redefining the freshwater boundary: Green water
Over time, a consortium of researchers was formed to deeply scrutinize the freshwater boundary. This resulted in follow-up work in 2019 and 2020 proposing that the freshwater boundary be divided into sub-boundaries related to major stores of freshwater: namely atmospheric water, frozen water, groundwater, soil moisture, and surface water.
Since then, scientists simplified their approach further. “Even though we are talking about very complex matters,” Porkka says, the boundary definition, to be useful as a metric, needed to stay “relatively simple.”
The most recent and sweeping reassessment of the freshwater planetary boundary was published in 2022. “Our suggestion is to … change the name from ‘freshwater use planetary boundary’ to ‘freshwater change planetary boundary,’” says study lead author Lan Wang-Erlandsson from the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “Then, to have two components,” she adds, “One for green water, and one for blue water.”
“Water has so many functions in the Earth system, and many of them happen invisibly via green water,” Gerten explains. “We don’t see it and we don’t feel it. That’s why [green water] has been neglected over decades. The focus has been on river flows and groundwater because we can see it, feel it, use it, and touch it. But [as a result] a big share of the water cycle has been overlooked.”
The Tsitsikamma forests in South Africa’s Garden Route region. The water taken up by plants and released via transpiration as vapor skyward is an integral part of the water cycle. Image by Petro Kotzé.
The newly accepted metric for tracking green water: The soil moisture in the root zone of plants, or more technically: “the percentage of ice-free land area on which root-zone soil moisture anomalies exit the local bounds of baseline variability in any month of the year.”
This new proxy is appealing because it is directly influenced by human pressures with change over time measurable. In turn, soil moisture directly impacts a range of large-scale ecological, climatic, biogeochemical and hydrological dynamics.
Using this novel green water boundary transgression criteria, scientists detected a major hydrological departure from the baseline set during the Holocene. And the evidence for such a departure is overwhelming: Researchers found “unprecedented areas [of Earth] with root-zone soil moisture anomalies,” indicating an exit from the so-called “safe zone.”
A second criteria, Earth Systems Resilience, was also instituted. Researchers evaluated the state of regional climate systems (ranging from monsoons to land carbon sinks and large biomes) to see which have seen enhanced changes in their process rates, resulting in ripple effects that could destabilize the Earth system, Wang-Erlandsson explains.
Lake Sary-Chelek, part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, in Kyrgyzstan. The hydrological cycle represents an eternal exchange of water in different states between the atmosphere and the planet’s surface, and it maintains the biosphere as we know it. Within this cycle, there is constant interaction between blue and green water. Image by Petro Kotzé.
A transgressed freshwater change boundary
Unfortunately, examples of compromised Earth System Resilience transgressions are rife across the planet.
Take the Amazon Rainforest, for instance. It is now understood that carbon uptake likely peaked there in the 1990s, with a sequestration decline since then driven by escalating climate change and fires, along with global demand for agricultural commodities, which spurred extensive Amazon forest clearing, bringing major land-use change. More recently, African tropical forests have passed their carbon uptake peak.
When these vast biomes and natural systems are put under extreme multiple stressors, the effects can self-amplify and lead to greater, more rapid, rates of change, Wang-Erlandsson says: In South America, this combination of stressors, particularly deforestation and climate change, is inducing intensifying drought, which is now leading to cascading perturbations in living systems. Scientists now think the rainforest biome, stable for thousands of years, is reaching a tipping point, and could quickly transition to seasonal forest, or even a degraded savanna. This shift could lead to the transformation of the South American monsoon system, and a permanent state of reduced rainfall and impoverished biodiversity.
But what starts in the Amazon won’t likely stay there: The rainforest’s destruction will release massive amounts of carbon, intensifying climate change, potentially leading to climate and ecological tipping points in other biomes.
Agricultural development in Uzbekistan. Global land-use change, including large-scale deforestation and irrigation, is contributing to major alterations in the water cycle, leading to a destabilized climate and major global environmental and sociopolitical disruptions. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Another concerning example (although debated) of an Earth system shift is the suggestion of a weakening carbon fertilization process, in which higher atmospheric carbon concentrations result in speeded-up photosynthesis as plants try to improve water efficiency in the face of drought. It is thought that this effect is happening already, brought on by limitations in nutrient and soil moisture availability.
In drylands, climate change and ecosystem degradation are triggering vicious cycles of infiltration capacity loss — a decrease in soil moisture and moisture recycling, resulting in increasing desertification and biodiversity loss. In polar permafrost regions, soil moisture saturation could accelerate thawing, generating dangerous methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide.
Alarmed by the water cycle’s departure from the Holocene baseline, and noting “worrying” signs of low Earth System Resilience, researchers early in 2022 declared the green water boundary to be “considerably transgressed.” The situation, they said, will likely worsen before any reversals in the trend will be observed. “Green water modifications are now causing rising Earth system risks at a scale that modern civilizations might not have ever faced,” the study states.
We don’t yet know what the planetary-scale impacts will ultimately be, but, Porkka says, we have an idea of how impacts could be felt in different parts of the world.
An irrigation canal runs past apricot orchards in the Batken region of Kyrgyzstan. We have vastly manipulated Earth’s water cycle to suit humanity’s needs. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Disastrous extreme weather events
Regional extreme events, including floods and mega droughts, are already occurring, Porkka notes. Examples are to be found on every continent.
On Africa’s southeast coast, as just one example: the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network of scientists has found that human-induced climate change has increased the likelihood and intensity of heavy rainfall associated with tropical cyclones. The group based their findings on an analysis of tropical storms Ana and Batisrai, which battered parts of Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in early 2022. Both cyclonic systems brought devastating floods that caused severe humanitarian impacts, including many deaths and injuries and large-scale damage to infrastructure. These sorts of extreme weather events put great pressure on socioeconomic and political institutions, and could easily destabilize struggling developing nations.
Of the top 10 climate disasters, those causing the largest human losses during that period were droughts (650,000 deaths), storms (577,232), floods (58,700), and extreme temperature (55,736 deaths). In economic terms, the top 10 events included storms (costing $521 billion) and floods ($115 billion).
Clouds above a dusty road in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The hydrological cycle is powered by the sun and is an eternal exchange of water between the atmosphere and the planet. As climate change escalates, so do extreme weather events such as droughts and intense storms. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Porkka points out, however, that freshwater system destabilization impacts can be more subtle than extreme events. Widespread irrigation of croplands, for example, can increase evaporation to such a high degree that even distant precipitation patterns are altered. Part of the problem is that we do not know if consequences like these are negative or positive.
“[W]e know that we’re changing the [hydrological] system in fundamental ways and, once we do, we don’t really know how the impacts accumulate,” says Porkka.
While many riddles remain, scientists now feel they have a reliable metric for accurately tracking transgressions of the freshwater change boundary. “The prime question was what the key variables are, and I think that is relatively solid now with soil moisture [green water] and river flows [blue water],” Gerten says. “The next questions are, where exactly to put the boundaries, and what happens if they are transgressed?”
Based on these findings, researchers are calling for urgent action: “The current global trends and trajectories of increasing water use, deforestation, land degradation, soil erosion, atmospheric pollution, and climate change need to be promptly halted and reversed to increase the chances of remaining in [Earth’s] safe operating space.”
That’s a tall order, and no matter humanity’s actions, we don’t know how things will play out. “Water is so fundamental and elemental, and at the same time, so varied,” Gerten says, and there is no silver bullet for solving our hydrological problems.
South Africa’s Orange River tumbles over Augrabies Falls. Water is one of the most plentiful chemical compounds on Earth and is recycled endlessly through the biosphere in different forms. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Banner image: Farmers tending to their agricultural land in Uzbekistan. Image by Petro Kotzé.
Citations:
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Gleeson, T., Wang‐Erlandsson, L., Porkka, M., Zipper, S. C., Jaramillo, F., Gerten, D., … Famiglietti, J. S. (2020). Illuminating water cycle modifications and earth system resilience in the Anthropocene. Water Resources Research, 56(4). doi:10.1029/2019wr024957
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Wang, S., Zhang, Y., Ju, W., Chen, J. M., Ciais, P., Cescatti, A., … Peñuelas, J. (2020). Recent global decline of CO2 fertilization effects on vegetation photosynthesis. Science, 370(6522), 1295-1300. doi:10.1126/science.abb7772
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Editor’s note: “Birds and Offshore Wind: Developing the Offshore Wind that Birds Need”. – 2025 National Audubon Society
With up to a million birds currently being killed each year directly(which does not include indirect causes from mining and manufacturing) by wind turbines in the US, why would an organization dedicated to protecting birds say such a thing? Add on the fact that Wind facilities also require relatively large areas of land and sea. Facility development fragments and otherwise alters habitat in ways that make it unsuitable for species that have historically been present.
Report: “Conflicts of Interest” – Environmental Organizations(Audubon among them) Take Offshore Wind Industry Money
“These offshore projects, which could decimate hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, will be built by some of the largest international oil and gas companies in the world,” the group said. “Our findings take on suspended belief when one considers Ørsted’s involvement with the New Jersey Audubon Society.” The Danish company is the official sponsor of the New Jersey Audubon Society’s fundraiser, the World Series of Birding where funds are raised to support bird conservation.
Sixteen shorebird species have been reclassified to higher threat categories as the global population of migratory shorebirds across the world saw a substantial decline, according to the latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Conservation partnership BirdLife International, which helps examine the status of the world’s birds for the IUCN Red List, reassessed around half of the 254 species of shorebirds the organization currently monitors, for 2024, according to Ian Burfield, BirdLife International’s global science coordinator.
The reassessment was prompted by a study published last year that showed steep declines in many shorebird species in North America, Burfield told Mongabay via email.
“[B]ut as it only covered part of their global populations, we had to source equivalent data from elsewhere … to produce a global picture, before applying the IUCN Red List criteria to reassess their status,” Burfield said. “Most species did not need recategorizing, but of those that did, virtually all have deteriorated.”
After the latest reassessment, seven of the 16 shorebird species were categorized as “near threatened” and nine are now “vulnerable” to extinction as they experienced global population declines of 20-40% over three generations.
BirdLife International said in a statement that migratory birds are especially at risk as they follow specific migration flyways or routes and stop along the way to rest and feed at certain sites that now face threats like habitat loss and climate change impacts.
“While many of these shorebirds remain numerous and are still commonly encountered along their flyways, new analyses of data from long-term monitoring schemes reveal that the global populations of some species have declined by more than a third in recent decades,” Burfield said in the statement.
Among those that have now been moved into a higher “threatened” category of vulnerable are the gray plover(Pluvialis squatarola)and the curlew sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea), both of which breed in various parts of the Arctic and migrate globally during their nonbreeding seasons. They both face threats from habitat loss and degradation, hunting, and climate change impacts.
The Hudsonian godwit (Limosa haemastica), a large shorebird that breeds in northern Canada and Alaska and migrates to South America during its nonbreeding months, is also now considered vulnerable. The IUCN notes in its assessment of the species that the bird’s population is seeing a “significant decline … most severely noted in numbers recorded at migratory sites in North America.”
BirdLife International said in its statement that protecting shorebirds is also important for the coastal communities that depend on the same habitats as the birds.
‘The perilous declines of migratory birds are a sign that the integrity of flyways is deteriorating,” Burfield said. “Losing the network of habitats that migratory birds depend on to rest and feed during their long journeys could have severe consequences for the millions of people that rely on these sites, as well as the birds.’’
Kristine Sabillo is a wire reporter for Mongabay. She has been a multimedia journalist for more than a decade and has produced political, science and environment content for the online, print, television and radio newsrooms of leading media organizations in the Philippines. Feedback: Use this form to send a message to this author. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the article page.
Editor’s note: The team used an excavator to cut a trench through the center of the termite mounds, then carefully took soil samples every 10 cm down and 50 centimeters across. Another example of the hubris of human supremacy.
Inhabited termite mounds along the Buffels River in Namaqualand, South Africa, are an astounding 34,000 years old, according to a new study.
Termites are a diverse group of insects that play a vital ecological role by breaking down organic matter. They live in complex social groups, and some species create large underground nests. These can include extensive tunnels and chambers where the termites live and store plant material. Some termite mounds can be very old; in 2018, researchers discovered termite mounds in Brazil that were 4,000 years old.
But a recent Science of The Total Environment study has discovered that termite mounds inhabited by southern harvester termites (Microhodotermes viator) in Namaqualand are far, far older. Using radiocarbon dating, the researchers found that the mounds have been used by termites for 34,000 years, since before the last Ice Age. During this period, humans were busy making cave art while a few Neanderthals were still hanging on in southern Europe. The world was still full of megafauna like woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and giant sloths.
The study also gives an unparalleled view of the past climate cycles in the region, and points to a previously unexplored role of termites in storing carbon, says Michele Francis, a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University and the study’s lead author.
“Our gut told us [the mounds] were special, and when we dug through and saw these old nests and termites, we thought ‘wow,’” Francis says. “It’s like watching a video of the past.”
Namaqualand is a semiarid region in western South Africa, known for abundant spring wildflowers. The land along the Buffels River is dotted with low mounds called heuweltjies, which are about 40 meters (130 feet) in diameter, where the southern harvester termites live in underground nests. A hard calcite layer on top of the mounds protects the termites from aardvarks (Orycteropus afer) and other insectivores.
To sample the mounds, the researchers first used an excavator to dig a trench 60 m (197 ft) wide by 3 m (10 ft) deep through the center. Then, in what Francis describes as hot, dusty work, they took samples across the entire cross section, using small metal spatulas to scrape soil into plastic bags. Sometimes the termites would come out and frantically try to repair their nests, using balls of soil to plug the holes the researchers had made.
Francis says she already suspected the mounds were quite old — but was still surprised when radiocarbon dating analysis revealed that the carbonate was up to 34,000 years old. Organic material, which degrades much faster, was also remarkably well preserved, and was up to 19,000 years old. The younger organic material was found lower down, demonstrating how the termites bury carbon deep in the mound.
The analysis provided an unparalleled view into the past, and indicates that these termites may play a previously unappreciated role in storing carbon, Francis says.
To sample the mounds, the researchers first used an excavator to dig a trench 60 m (197 ft) wide by 3 m (10 ft) deep through the center. Then, in what Francis describes as hot, dusty work, they took samples across the entire cross section, using small metal spatulas to scrape soil into plastic bags. Sometimes the termites would come out and frantically try to repair their nests, using balls of soil to plug the holes the researchers had made.
Francis says she already suspected the mounds were quite old — but was still surprised when radiocarbon dating analysis revealed that the carbonate was up to 34,000 years old. Organic material, which degrades much faster, was also remarkably well preserved, and was up to 19,000 years old. The younger organic material was found lower down, demonstrating how the termites bury carbon deep in the mound.
The analysis provided an unparalleled view into the past, and indicates that these termites may play a previously unappreciated role in storing carbon, Francis says.
This can happen in two ways. First, the termites gather small sticks or other carbon-rich plant material at the surface and carry them more than a meter (3 ft) underground, where they’re less likely to release carbon into the atmosphere as they decompose. Second, tunnels created by the termites allow rainwater to move through the mound. This rainwater can carry minerals and dissolved inorganic carbon deeper through the soil profile and into the groundwater.
It’s already established that termites contribute to the global carbon cycle, because many termite species use methane-producing microbes to digest their food. But so far their role in carbon storage and sequestration hasn’t really been explored, Francis says.
Francis, along with researchers from the U.S. and elsewhere, now plans to look at exactly how the carbon in the heuweltjies is being stored. She says she suspects that microbes are converting the organic carbon into a mineral form, which would explain why the mounds are so carbon dense. She says she hopes the new research will help put a value on the carbon storage potential of these, and other similar, mounds. As the heuweltjies cover a fifth of Namaqualand, the benefits of conserving the mounds, as opposed to using the land for agriculture, could be substantial.
“We can only do that if we know how much carbon is in there and how fast it’s being accumulated,” Francis says. “So what we’re trying to do is get people to study what was previously boring, so that we can really understand what’s happening under our feet.”
Ruth Kamnitzer is a BC-based freelance writer, focusing on biodiversity, climate, food security and creative non-fiction. She has an MSc in Biodiversity Conservation from the University of London and a certificate in Multimedia Journalism from the University of Toronto, and has worked in environmental education and ecological field research in Oman, Mongolia, Botswana and Canada. Her work has appeared in Sierra, Maisonneuve, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine and other publications.
