Paris is Waning, and Nature must Govern

Why Natural Rights Governance Is the Only Viable Path to Protect People and Planet.

The world has been talking about the language of the Paris Agreement promises, pathways, and promises of temperature control for almost ten years now. However, the climate is still disintegrating. Storms are worse; droughts extended and displaced more permanently. Paris was a treaty of intent; missing moral architecture is Natural Rights Led Governance (NRLG). Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC 3.0) represent a new synthesis of the UNFCCC, which paints a well-recognized picture: increasing rhetoric, shallow outcomes. In the scenario of the fulfillment of all existing commitments, the number of global emissions in 2030 will be close to 51 billion tons of CO2 equivalent. To stay within 1.5 °C, the world needs a 43 percent cut. However, 2025 NDC Synthesis Report produced with new insights, that shows that collectively, the new NDCs show a reduction in projected emissions of 17 (11–24) per cent below the 2019 level.  

The report, however, only reports approximately 30% of the total global emissions in 2019. This small amount of data cannot help making `generalized global-level conclusions and inferences.

Source/Credit: UN Climate Change, November 2025 

The report congratulates progress on process, more comprehensive targets, gender integration, and “just transition” language. Yet it remains silent on the fundamentals: 

• Fossil fuel output is still projected to rise 120 percent above 1.5 °C limits by 2030. 

• Eighty-six percent of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5 °C will be exhausted by the end of this decade. 

• Finance pledges trail need by hundreds of billions, with the poorest nations waiting longest. 

The Structural Failure of Paris Agreement 

Paris manages statistics; it does not manage justice. This is not an “implementation gap.” It is an architectural flaw. The Paris Agreement was built on voluntary ambition, not enforceable duty. Nations can under-deliver without penalty; polluters can pledge neutrality while expanding fossil fuel production. Paris keeps diplomacy alive but leaves the planet dying. Broadly the reasons are as follows:  

• Voluntary, Not Obligatory: The Paris Agreement is built on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), self-declared, unenforceable targets. Nations may underperform without consequence. Compliance depends on goodwill, not governance. 

• The Carbon Mirage: Paris converted climate policy into carbon arithmetic. It measures parts per million, not human and ecological suffering. A forest cleared for 'offset credits' counts the same as a forest thriving in balance; both look neutral on paper, but one erases life. 

• Absence of Justice: The most vulnerable nations, often Least Developed Countries (LDCs), continue to bear the brunt of emissions they did not cause. The loss-and-damage debate limps through bureaucracy, while glaciers melt faster than climate funds move. 

• State-Centric Myopia: The Agreement assumes that sovereign states act rationally for collective survival. Yet politics remains short-term, and corporate captures deep. Climate diplomacy rewards rhetoric, not responsibility. Nature has no seat at the table, no signature on the treaty. However, ecosystems function according to their own natural systems, operating beyond human-defined geographic or political boundaries, revealing the fundamental flaw of any state-based agreement that seeks to govern the entire planet. 

The Paris Agreement deals with climate disasters, symptoms of the failure of nature, and ecosystem protection. Human activity has transformed over 75% of the Earth’s land surface, with agriculture alone driving around 70% of terrestrial biodiversity loss and contributing significantly to climate change through land-use change and fertilizer emissions, accounting for about 25% of global greenhouse gases.  

Moreover, the degradation of coastal ecosystems has left 100–300 million people more vulnerable to floods and hurricanes (UNEP, 2023). In total, 3.2 billion people are already affected by land degradation, endangering livelihoods, and food security. Economically, these impacts threaten over $44 trillion in global GDP dependent on nature’s services (WEF). The cascading risks include $577 billion in annual crop losses due to pollinator decline, collapsing fisheries, the spread of zoonotic diseases, and escalating coastal hazards, together illustrating how the ecological crisis is now inseparable from the global human and economic crisis. 

The NRLG Framework: A Moral Upgrade to Governance 

A decade of polite summits has proven that self-determined ambition cannot govern a planetary emergency. The transformative framework of the Natural Rights Led Governance (NRLG) offers feasible moral correction. It begins with an older truth: nature itself possesses rights. States and corporations are not owners but trustees of those living systems.  

Where Paris measures tons of carbon, NRLG measures the health of life systems, soil, water, biodiversity, and inter-generational continuity. Natural Rights Led Governance (NRLG) reframes from the climate crisis as a justice crisis. It restores balance by anchoring governance in natural law, the self-evident right of every living system to exist, regenerate, and thrive. NRLG operationalizes what Paris only implies: 

At its core lies one proposition: 'Sovereignty for Nature, Survival for All.' NRLG does not replace democracy; it deepens it. It extends sovereignty from people to the planet, establishing that the legitimacy of any government depends equally on how it serves citizens and safeguards nature. 

Why NRLG Is Feasible, Not Utopian 

Institutional Pathways Already Emerging, Ecuador, Bolivia and Bangladesh have constitutionalized the Rights of Nature. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court declared rivers as legal persons. These precedents prove NRLG’s principles are already germinating within national law. Creating Natural Rights Commissions, Eco-Justice Tribunals, and embedding Natural Net Product (NNP) accounting into budgets are achievable steps, not abstractions. 

• From Ambition to Obligation: NRLG introduces governance of the climate as a moral economy, not voluntary goals. It requires all states and financers to explain growth on one measure of question: Does this decision safeguard the integrity of life? It is that transition, away to natural justice, that the NDC 3.0 process has yet to be achieved. Paris brings nations a unity; NRLG brings human beings to unity with nature. To become successful, the new set of promises should be transformed into fewer self-reports and more self-denials, into ambitions and responsibility. Otherwise, NDC 4.0 will become another sequel to the same tragedy: promises up, coastline down. 

• Legal enforceability: Legal enforceability: The ecological rights of the constitutions and the courts. The 2024 ICJ Advisory opinion confirmed that climate action is a legal obligation and not a political act. Proclaiming international law, states are obligated to avert and correct environmental damage threatening human rights and successive eras. This decision shows the vulnerability of the voluntary nature of the Paris Agreement that does not have binding commitments. It is rather reminiscent of the vision of NRLG, in which the responsibility of protecting nature becomes a sovereign obligation and the destruction of ecology and an infringement of rights, which makes climate responsibility a mandatory rule of law, no longer a matter of diplomatic negotiations. 

• Natural Accountability: Unlike Paris, which audits data, NRLG audits damage. It holds states, corporations, and institutions morally and legally liable for violating the rights of ecosystems or future generations. It demands reparation, not reports. The governments are answerable both to citizens and to nature. Policies inconsistent with ecological survival become illegitimate. 

• Finance that Regenerates and Fiscal Realignment: The NRLG can retool economic instruments through Natural Rights Finance (NRF), valuing ecosystem services as assets, not 'externalities’, restoration as investment. Budgets become moral ledgers, rewarding restoration, and not depletion. Natural Net Product (NNP) replacing GDP as the true prosperity metric. 

• Community Stewardship: Where Paris centralizes decision-making, NRLG decentralizes it. Local communities, Indigenous peoples, and traditional custodians become co-managers of ecosystems. Governance flows from the grassroots upward, rebuilding trust where top-down diplomacy has failed. 

Paris Manages Emissions, NRLG Restores Relationships 

Under the Paris Agreement climate such as carbon transactions, voluntary pledges, focus on states and markets, compensates for loss, measures temperature. However, under the NRLG framework, climate as covenant of life, legal and moral obligations to nature, focus on ecosystems and communities, prevents and regenerates and regenerates before loss, measures of resilience, regeneration, and justice. 

The Paris Agreement tries to stabilize the atmosphere, whereas NRLG rebuilds the biosphere. It doesn’t just count emissions; it counts consequences. It doesn’t trade responsibility; it enforces stewardship. By uniting governance, ethics, and ecology, NRLG provides what Paris never could: a coherent moral compass for human civilization. 

It offers governments legitimacy beyond ballots, the legitimacy of moral alignment with nature’s law. And it offers humanity something that diplomacy alone cannot: the chance to coexist again. 

The Moral Equation of Survival 

Climate change is not a technical problem waiting for technology. It is a spiritual fracture waiting for justice. If governance remains anthropocentric, we will manage the end rather than prevent it. Natural Rights Led Governance is the first framework that holds every policy answerable to a single test: does it protect life, human and non-human, in the long run? That question, once institutionalized, can transform climate politics from performance to purpose. 

“Where Paris stops at temperature, NRLG begins with truth”, M. Zakir Hossain Khan 

Author’s Note: M. Zakir Hossain Khan is the Founder and Chief Executive of Change Initiative, and the author of 'Sovereignty for Nature, Survival for All: Natural Rights Led Governance Towards a Sustainable Future.' He is Editor-in-Chief of Nature Insights, Independent Observer of Climate Investment Fund; He advocates embedding natural rights into climate finance and global policy frameworks. He can be reached at zhkhan@changei.org.