Nature’s Sovereignty Is Not a Grant
Biophysical limits of Nature, the conflict inside Rights, and the case for Natural Rights Led Governance
Nature is not sovereign because humans grant it rights, rather Earth’s biophysical laws set the non-negotiable conditions for life. Law can recognize that fact. It cannot create it, and it cannot repeal it. Natural Rights Led Governance identifies this hierarchy and draws institutional consequences.
NRLG principles have specified that nature is a rights-bearing sovereign subject, with inherent claims to exist, persist, regenerate, and flourish. Human natural rights- life, liberty, dignity, livelihood, are real, but they are dependent on rights. They can be exercised only in the conditions Nature maintains. The state is not the owner of those conditions and not the source of Nature’s standing, it is a trustee. Communities, including Indigenous and local custodians, are guardians, not consultees. That relation, Nature’s sovereignty, community stewardship, state trusteeship, is the Nature-Community-State Trusteeship, on which NRLG runs. Where the Paris Agreement stops at a temperature number, NRLG begins with the prior truth: what cannot sustain life should not be legitimized as governance.
Rights of Nature can therefore be valuable, but only if law recognizes, rather than presumes, to create Nature’s inherent ecological sovereignty. When the same human institutions or entities that extract resources, authorize projects, pollute ecosystems, and pursue profit from exploitation are also entrusted to define, represent, and enforce Nature’s rights, an inherent conflict of interest arises. The answer is not merely to give Nature rights within a human-controlled system, but to place human law, markets, technology, and investment beneath enforceable ecological limits and regenerative thresholds. Nature’s rights cannot ultimately depend on the discretion of its extractors. Human rights and development must operate within Nature’s sovereignty.
The hierarchy is measurable
The Planetary Boundaries framework, first set out in 2009, identifies nine Earth-system processes that keep the planet in the relatively stable state in which human civilizations developed. The 2025 Planetary Health Check assessed ocean acidification as breached for the first time. The 2026 update finds that seven of the nine boundaries are transgressed, and that all seven stand at their highest recorded levels of transgression which are climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, and ocean acidification. Only stratospheric ozone depletion and atmospheric aerosol loading have improved over the past decade, and even aerosol loading masks unsafe regional concentrations. Atmospheric carbon dioxide reached about 426 parts per million in 2025, against roughly 280 before industrialization and a proposed safe boundary near 350. From January 2023 to September 2025, bleaching-level heat stress hit about 84 percent of the world’s coral-reef area.
These are not policy preferences. They are control variables for the stability of the Earth system. In NRLG terms they are the content of Nature’s sovereignty, the non-negotiable conditions a trustee may not spend. Human rights to food, water, health, and livelihood are exercised inside that operating space. A development model that treats space as an inventory is what NRLG calls the Development-Destruction Trap, growth that violates natural rights and, by that route, erodes human rights as well.
The drivers are institutional
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is plain about what is pushing Nature across those lines. Its 2019 Global Assessment found that, for terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, land-use change has had the largest relative negative impact since 1970, followed by direct exploitation of organisms through harvesting, logging, hunting, and fishing. In the oceans the order reverses: direct exploitation, chiefly fishing, ranks first, then sea-use change. Climate change, pollution, and invasive species follow, with climate change increasingly amplifying the others. A later statistical synthesis reached the same ranking: land- and sea-use change first, direct exploitation second, pollution third.
These are acts of permission. A forest becomes a plantation because a title, a concession, or a subsidy says it may. A river is mined, dredged, or dammed because a license says the damage is acceptable. The dominant drivers of Nature’s decline are governance choices, law, markets, technology, and investment, operating as if ecological limits were side constraints rather than prior conditions. NRLG treats that pattern as a failure of trusteeship. A state that licenses the breach of a boundary it is bound to hold in trust is not governing. It is spending a sovereignty that is not its own. Projects that do so also weaken national ecological sovereignty: the capacity of a people to secure life and livelihood inside a living territory.
The border is not a boundary
The conflict of interest is not only domestic. A state can tighten protection inside its own territory, cleaner air, restored rivers, retired coal plants, while its firms, export-credit agencies, and investors emit, mine, and convert ecosystems in countries where enforcement is weak, then book the surplus at home or offshore. Nature does not recognize that border. A boundary transgressed in a delta or a forest frontier is transgressed for the Earth system. Rights defined by the extractor, and enforced only where the extractor lives, are not Nature’s rights.
The carbon accounts show split. Territorial inventories record what is burned inside a border. Consumption-based accounts add the emissions embodied in imports and subtract those embodied in exports. On that measure, advanced economies are net importers of embodied carbon dioxide, and emerging and developing economies are net exporters. In 2023 the United Kingdom’s consumption-based fossil emissions substantially exceeded its territorial emissions; Germany, Japan, and the United States showed the same net-import pattern, while China and India remained net exporters. Part of the apparent cleanliness of rich inventories is production moved to where the goods are made. A falling territorial total can be mitigation, or it can be the outsourcing of carbon-intensive activity to jurisdictions with weaker rules.
Materials move the same way, and the ecological damage stays behind. From 1990 to 2020, high-income countries net-appropriated from the rest of the world on the order of 7 billion tons of embodied raw materials, more than 100 exajoules of embodied energy, and several hundred million hectares of embodied land each year. A 2015 snapshot put the net flow from South to North at about 12 billion tons of embodied materials and more than 800 million hectares of embodied land, with the value of appropriated resources far exceeding aid. Most of the North’s material use above a sustainable per-capita level was sustained by that net appropriation. The additional resources support consumption in the importing countries. The land-use change, water stress, and biodiversity loss are borne in the exporting ones.
Public finance has underwritten the same geography. Export credit agencies are a leading source of public support for corporate projects in Global South. For years they imposed coal, oil, and gas abroad on a scale larger than many development banks. OECD members agreed in 2021 to end official export-credit support for unabated coal-fired power, which closed one door; oil, gas, mining, and private balance sheets were not closed with it, and plants already financed keep burning. The host country’s weak permit system is not an accident in this arrangement. It is an advantage. A concession, a coal plant, or a dredged estuary that would fail a home-country test proceeds because the trustee on the spot cannot, or will not, refuse it.
The accounting closes the circuit. Ore, power, and timber are extracted under the host’s damaged ecosystems. Profits are often assigned, through subsidiaries, transfer pricing, and low-tax jurisdictions, to entities whose legal home is elsewhere. The host keeps the pit, the ash, the salinity, and a royalty. The importer keeps the goods. The surplus appears in the national income of the OECD economy, or in an offshore affiliate, as value added. GDP then records the gain and does not record the boundary transgression. Rights of Nature written only into the home statute never see the transaction. The extractor has defined the right as a domestic rule and the harm as foreign.
This is the beyond-boundary failure in institutional form. Planetary boundaries are not national quotes that a rich country can meet by moving the load. The IPBES drivers, land- and sea-use change, direct exploitation, operate along supply chains, not inside the protected landscape of the final consumer. A river declared a legal person in a delta has no standing against the parent company, the export-credit agency, or the secrecy jurisdiction that holds the profit. Guardianship stops at the customs post. Trusteeship is claimed at home and waived abroad.
NRLG cannot stop at the border either, or they reproduce the duality. Ecological sovereignty of the host territory is part of Nature’s sovereignty, not a residual left to poor governance. Home states remain trustees of their firms, a parent company and its public financiers are within the reach of the jurisdiction that charters them, insures them, and counts their profits. Host communities remain guardians of the ecosystem actually harmed, withstanding that travels with the damage rather than with the letterhead. Finance booked offshore does not extinguish the restoration debt. A coal plant, a concession, or an embodied flow that would breach a threshold at home breaches it everywhere.
The conflict inside Rights of Nature
Rights of Nature can be valuable. Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution recognizes Nature, Pacha Mama, as a subject of rights, including integral respect for life cycles and a separate right to restoration. Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth enumerates rights to life, diversity, water, clean air, balance, restoration, and freedom from pollution. In 2019 the High Court Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh declared the Turag, and by extension all rivers of the country, legal persons and living entities, and appointed the National River Conservation Commission as guardian.
The difficulty is structural, and it is exactly the difficulty Net Capital Sustainability Test (NCST) is built to prevent. In most of these systems, the same institutions that extract, authorize, pollute, and profit are also entrusted to define, represent, and enforce Nature’s rights. Sovereignty, guardianship, and trusteeship collapsed into one office. That office then faces an inherent conflict of interest.
In Bangladesh, legal personhood has not stopped the harm. Weak enforcement, fragmented mandates, and political interference have left the guardian commission without enforcement power, inter-ministerial authority, or local presence. After spending heavily identifying encroachers, it compiled a list of more than 37,000 illegal riverbank structures on 48 rivers and then declined to publish the names. The Payra and Pashur rivers continue to be dredged year-round for seaports and the coal plants. River guardians often double as violators, brick kilns, sand mining, land grabs, shielded by patronage. Under NCST this is a mis appointment. The commission is asked to be guardian while remaining inside the permitting state, and the communities that live by the river are left as petitioners rather than stewards. A living entity whose legal guardian cannot name its injurers, and sometimes is its injurer, has a title without a remedy. Personhood without separated trusteeship is the Development-Destruction Trap (DDT) written into a judgment.
Bolivia’s statute called for a public office to defend Mother Earth. That office has never been established, while lithium extraction and roadbuilding in sensitive ecosystems have continued as national development priorities. Ecuador’s constitution is the strongest national text, and it has produced real judgments, the Vilcabamba River case in 2011, and the Constitutional Court’s 2021 decision annulling mining permits in the Los Cedros Protected Forest, after which mining there stopped. Even there, illegal mining and deforestation persisted for years between enactment and enforcement, and concessions elsewhere continue to collide with the constitutional text. India’s Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and Yamuna legal persons in 2017 and appointed state officials as guardians; the Supreme Court stayed the order the same year. Personhood lasted as long as a higher court allowed it.
Eco-democracy does not solve this. Wider consultation, disclosure, and access to justice improve the procedure of the permitting state. They still leave Nature an object of policy and leave the final word with the authority that benefits from the project. NRLG asks a prior set of questions, for instances, does the river, forest, wetland, soil, and dependent community have an enforceable right to flow, regenerate, and sustain life; who is the steward; who is accountable for the harm; can future generations challenge the decision; does the project weaken ecological sovereignty? Participation without stewardship cannot protect a system when politics is captured by short-term growth.
The partial exception is instructive. New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act 2017 recognizes the Whanganui River as an indivisible legal person and appoints two guardians, one from the Crown and one from the Whanganui iwi, with a duty to act in the river’s interests. Guardianship is not left to the licensing ministry alone. That is closer to NCST than to a grant of personality: an existing custodial authority is recognized, and the state is placed beside it rather than above it. It still sits inside a state that permits catchment pressures. Design of the guardian matters. It does not by itself place the river above the permitting system.
The boundary that recovered
One boundary shows what subordination to a biophysical limit looks like. Stratospheric ozone is the clearest improvement in the framework, and it improved because states accepted a hard chemical threshold and phased out the substances that breached it. The Montreal Protocol did not ask industry to represent the ozone layer’s interests. It restricted production and trade, with timetables and trade measures, against manufacturers who had treated the chemicals as ordinary commodities. Ozone recovery is not a story about granting the atmosphere rights. It is a story about trusteeship: markets and technology placed beneath a non-negotiable condition for life.
That is the distinction the current Rights of Nature wave often blurs. A right that can be defined, stayed, underfunded, or ignored by the authority that profits from the breach is a right in form and a license in fact. Nature’s rights cannot ultimately depend on the discretion of its extractors.
What NRLG and NCST require
If sovereignty means anything operational, human law, markets, technology, and investment run beneath enforceable ecological limits and regenerative thresholds. NRLG turns that proposition into an operating system. NCST is the allocation of roles inside it.
First, limits before permits. National and basin budgets for land conversion, water withdrawal, nutrient loading, extraction, and pollution should be set from ecological thresholds, safe boundaries, environmental flows, regenerative capacity, and approval should be unlawful once the budget is spent. A holistic impact assessment that treats a breached boundary as a mitigable residual misdescribes science. For a delta state, this is also a claim of national ecological sovereignty, upstream diversion, salinity, and conversion are not externalities if they spend the conditions of life downstream. The same rule binds the home state of the investor. A threshold is not met by moving the load across a border.
Second, guardians who do not issue the licenses. This is the core of NCST. Representation of an ecosystem cannot sit inside the ministry, corporation, or commission whose budget depends on authorizing its use. The state remains trustee, it holds the duty to keep thresholds, to refuse the unlawful permit, and to answer for breach, including breach by firms it charters and finances abroad. Guardianship belongs to communities with a living relation to the system, insulated from the licensing interest, with standing, a protected budget, and the power to halt works. Future generations hold a claim against both. Direct finance to custodians, owed as obligation rather than offered as charity, is what keeps that guardianship from becoming symbolic. Standing must travel with the harm, so a delta community can reach the parent company and the export-credit agency, not only the local contractor.
Third, restoration as a debt, not a discretion. Where a boundary or a local threshold is already transgressed, the default is recovery, not offsetting. Offsets that trade a living system for a promise of future habitat have repeatedly functioned as permission to continue the drivers IPBES identifies. Profit booked offshore does not cancel the debt.
Fourth, markets that cannot price beyond regeneration. Subsidies, concessions, and credit that reward land conversion, overfishing, and nutrient overload are failures of trusteeship. They can be withdrawn. The ozone precedence shows that trade rules and finance can be aligned with a threshold once governments treat the threshold as binding. Success is then measured by socio-ecological prosperity, secure life, livelihood, and regeneration, not by a growth figure that conceals the drawdown, and not by a GDP that counts extracted value while the boundary breach stays in another country’s territory.
None of this abolishes human rights or development. It locates them. The right to food is not secured by converting the last intact forest; it is undermined by it, because soil, rainfall, pollinators, and genetic diversity are conditions of future harvests. The right to energy is not secured by treating a living river as cooling water and spoiling ground. Development that spends down the operating space is borrowing against conditions a trustee cannot restore on a political timetable.
Rights of Nature remain worth having, as standing, as a duty of restoration, as a reason a court may void a permit. They fail when they are asked to do the work of sovereignty from inside the institutions that profit from ignoring it, and they fail again when they are enforced only on the territory of the consumer. NRLG refuses that collapse. Nature’s sovereignty is prior and does not stop at a customs post. Community stewardship is the human office that represents it, including against foreign firms. State trusteeship is the office that must not license its breach, at home or through companies and credits sent abroad. Seven boundaries are transgressed and worsening; the main drivers are the uses humans authorize, often far from the place where the profit is booked. The remaining task is to stop treating Earth’s non-negotiable conditions as a grant that extractors may define, represent, and enforce at their discretion. Human rights and development must operate within Nature’s sovereignty.
Architect and proponent of Natural Rights Led Governance; Editor-in-Chief, Nature Insights; Co-Founder and Chief Executive, Change Initiative, a global think and do tank; Email: zhkhan@changei.earth
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