Environmental Rights
Access to a clean, healthy, safe environment, including potable water and fresh air, is a human right. Safeguarding these substantive rights for all communities – from Indigenous Peoples living in Latin America’s rainforests to poor families who call Southeast Asia’s megacities home – benefits the planet and moves us toward a more just future. For example, our research shows that deforestation rates in the Amazon are two to three times lower on tenure-secure, collectively held indigenous and community lands than in similar forests without tenure security.
Ensuring that everyone, everywhere, has the voice, power and information to steer environmental decision-making – known as procedural rights – is also critical to advancing sustainable, equitable development. Evidence shows that, when local communities can effectively monitor industries’ compliance with clean water regulations, everyday citizens can expose illegal discharges – information that may help households avoid exposure to harmful contaminants, empower citizens to hold powerful polluters to account and inform political reforms.
Yet, despite near universal recognition of both substantive and procedural environmental rights across international agreements and national laws, progress following through on these commitments has fallen short. In some countries, governments are failing to release water pollution information that they are legally required to disclose, placing many of their poorest communities at risk. Other nations with legal commitments to indigenous and community land rights have, in practice, have established an unequal playing field between communities and companies vying for land — communities often sacrifice decades navigating complex, expensive legal processes that can force them to give up territories and rights, while companies can quickly secure the same land for mining, logging or agribusiness. Likewise, although countries around the world publicly pledged to develop national climate plans through inclusive, participatory decision-making processes, many governments failed to meaningfully engage their most vulnerable and marginalized communities.
WRI partners with indigenous and local communities, civil society organizations, development institutions and governments to strengthen both substantive and procedural environmental rights around the world. We start by identifying the obstacles that prevent poor, vulnerable communities from realizing these rights as well as the many benefits – to both people and the planet – generated when these injustices are addressed. Our Land and Resource Rights Initiative analyzes and, in some instances, quantifies that environmental and socioeconomic gains that secure, collective land rights bring to indigenous and local communities, such as sequestering carbon or conserving forests. Building on this work, WRI’s Women’s Land Rights Initiative pinpoints steps communities can take to help strengthen women’s land rights, while also recommending policies that governments can adopt to transform gender equity commitments into action. And both our Strengthening the Right to Information for People and the Environment (STRIPE) Initiative and work on air quality identify roadblocks that prevent local communities from participating in decision-making about the water they drink and the air they breathe. These initiatives outline steps that governments, civil society organizations and the public can take to clean up pollution around the world.
Next, we help people, communities and countries everywhere achieve ambitious commitments to environmental rights. Open, accessible data platforms and toolkits created in partnership with WRI provide critical information needed to design and implement effective policies – LandMark: The Global Platform of Indigenous and Community Land, for example, maps collectively held land around the world, visualizes threats to these territories and highlights the environmental benefits that come with tenure security. And civil society networks that we help organize, including The Access Initiative and the Defending Earth Defenders Initiative, build vulnerable communities’ capacity to use their rights and resources effectively, navigate complex legal landscapes to access information and advocate for stronger environmental rights. These coalitions mobilize civil society organizations around the world for change, amplify the voices of the world’s poorest, most marginalized communities and advance national legislation and international treaties that safeguard substantive and procedural rights, like the historic Escazú Agreement. They also play an active, collaborative role in helping governments make it easier for people around the world to access information, justice and participate in environmental decision-making.
To learn more about our work on environmental rights, please reach out to Carole Excell and Peter Veit. Want to stay updated on the latest research, analysis and commentary? Subscribe to our newsletter Greening Governance and follow us on Twitter @WRIGovernance.
Featured Expert
Peter Veit
New in Environmental Rights
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Environmental Rights Projects
Environmental Rights Projects
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Land and Resource Rights
WRI’s Land and Resource Rights project aims to ensure that rural people and the urban poor have secure rights over their land and natural resources.
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Defending Earth’s Defenders Initiative
Safeguarding the lives, livelihoods and rights of environmental defenders who act peacefully to protect the planet.
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Advancing Community-Driven Solutions for Clean Air and Water
Ensuring that poor, vulnerable communities everywhere have the voice, power and information to protect their right to a safe, clean and healthy environment
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The Access Initiative (TAI)
Ensuring that citizens have the right and ability to influence decisions about their natural resources.
Experts
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Peter Veit
Director, Land and Resource Rights Initiative -
Carole Excell
Director, Environmental Democracy Practice -
Natalie Elwell
Senior Gender Advisor -
Elizabeth Moses
Environmental Rights and Justice Associate II, Environmental Democracy Practice -
Katie Reytar
Senior Research Associate, Forests Program -
Celine Salcedo-La Viña
Research Associate II -
Ayushi Trivedi
Research Analyst II, Gender and Social Equity -
Jessica Webb
Senior Manager for Global Engagement, Global Forest Watch -
Jesse Worker
Senior Associate, Climate Governance and Rights; Project Lead, The Access Initiative