Nature’s Rights Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Friday 3rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin by quoting the Government’s own words from a biodiversity strategy published jointly with the devolved Governments in February 2025:

“Biodiversity is key to all the processes that support life on Earth. We rely on it for our essential needs, like food, shelter, energy and medicine, as well as for the ecosystem services it provides, such as climate regulation, flood management, water purification, disease and pest control, and pollination. Additionally, more than half of the world’s gross domestic product … is highly or moderately dependent on nature”.


You would therefore think that the Government, and Governments around the world, would have established legal systems and forms to effectively protect and enhance nature, but that is not what is happening—particularly in the UK, one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth, as the State of Nature report of 2023 concluded. That report was arguably very soon after the 2021 Environment Act, which set the very modest target of halting the decline in species abundance by 2030.

But half a decade after the Act, there are still scant signs of progress. For evidence, I go to a peer-reviewed study by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, out this year, which found little sign of an end to the spiralling decline. Its lead author pointed to the grave risk of loss of the merlin, the mountain ringlet, large heath butterflies and plants such as burnt orchid, grass-of-parnassus and alpine gentian, and many other species. The lead author said:

“This will negatively affect local habitats and a range of ecological functions, from soil health and nutrient cycling to pollination and food production, with knock-on effects for wildlife and people”.


That reflects what is happening around the world. The UN Environment Programme found in 2019 that 150 countries have enshrined environmental protection or the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions, 176 countries have environmental framework laws and 164 countries have created cabinet-level bodies for environmental protection.

However, the laws for environmental protection have not worked. That is not surprising, for as Mari Margil from the US Centre for Democratic and Environmental Rights explains,

“environmental laws are put in place to determine how much we can harm or exploit nature”.

Environmental laws and regulations have not fundamentally changed the rate of environmental destruction, despite 60 years or more of awareness of environmental issues and half a century of environmental law. Short-term economic interests, particularly of powerful companies—now with resources and power rivalling those of all but the largest states—and nations’ determination to exploit and extract from states unable or unwilling to resist them, through mining, logging and polluting, have overwhelmed what are essentially ineffective legal provisions.

That has potentially existential consequences for humans and for our nation. The long-delayed and still not fully released joint intelligence chiefs’ report that finally emerged in January identified six ecosystem regions that it called

“critical for UK national security”

and which it said were, on a reasonable worst-case scenario, on the “pathway to collapse”.

The search has therefore begun for an alternative approach to secure the future of our biosphere and all our futures. The approach that many have settled on, and which the Bill brings in, is that of rights to nature.

I thank the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology for setting out a clear briefing about the ethical framework of rights to nature. It notes that there are “competing views” on this, and I expect we will hear some of those today, but it is worth going back through the origins of this issue.

The origins of this alternative approach are often traced back to Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing?, published in 1972, who noted that, for many centuries, women and slaves were not fully recognised as legal subjects, and described how there had been a progressive widening of the law’s circle of concern. Stone proposed that

“we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole”—

which is what the Bill does.

The “rights to nature” approach offers a reset in our relationship and the ending of the disastrous 17th-century paradigm: a mechanistic worldview that falsely separates people, nature and the economy as though they can operate independently. Global application of that paradigm has led to this disaster, as the Stockholm Resilience Centre charts—literally, in the case of one diagram showing the current state of human impacts on nine planetary boundaries; seven of them have not just been exceeded but smashed. As the European Economic and Social Committee spokesman said:

“It’s irrational to have societal systems that undermine Nature”.


As one of the many who have mustered on Instagram to support the Bill put it beautifully, we need a green Magna Carta—and that is what the Bill I present before your Lordships today is.

The Bill was written by lawyer Mumta Ito of the Nature’s Rights charity, drawing on experience working with the UN Harmony With Nature programme—for more of its foundations your Lordships can go to a study conducted for the European Economic and Social Committee, Towards an EU Fundamental Charter for the Rights of Nature. What I present here today is a new legal framework that recognises nature’s rights as the foundation of human rights and social and economic activity. It aligns law with modern scientific understanding.

This is a long Bill, particularly for a Private Member’s Bill, at 57 pages, and it not only sets down a major change in legal principle but would: establish a legal duty of care for public bodies, business and individuals; establish an integrated rights framework; introduce mechanisms for dispute resolution and legal enforcement; establish a nature guardianship council, bioregional councils and a nature’s rights tribunal; and create a governance structure for implementation and integration. As usual, our excellent Library briefing sets out the impact of the Bill clause by clause, and the Bill itself is written in clear and accessible language, with a particular focus on ensuring that democracy and local democratic voices are at the heart of decision-making across its proposals. If we are going to “Change Everything”—yes, I have a book out with that title—we have to set out a plan, as well as a paradigm shift.

However, in this introductory speech I will concentrate chiefly on the major change in legal principle and approach—nature’s rights—because making the case is the first step to delivering it. I will focus on making the case for rights of nature as the foundation of a healthy society—and for all our futures—to genuinely, at scale, not just protect the fragments of poisoned, degraded, limited nature that we have left but regenerate it.

To do that, I will briefly outline the international picture. For, while the Bill is, I believe, the most comprehensive to be considered by any global legislature, the concept of rights of nature, and its application, has been spreading like a rich and diverse mycorrhizal fungal network, nourishing a flourishing tree of legal change.

To quote the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics, published in 2021, rights of nature has gone from being a radical idea espoused by only a handful of marginalised actors to a legal strategy seriously considered in a wide variety of domestic and international policy areas. Its authors count 185 legal provisions recognising rights of nature in 17 countries across five continents, with 50 more pending in 2021 across a dozen other countries. Rights of nature are also now recognised in many international policy documents.

Two exemplars are to be found in New Zealand—centred on the Whanganui River, a famous example—and Ecuador. Both cases are inspired, as is the whole nature’s rights movement, by indigenous thinking: the foundations of cultures that have existed for many thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of years, which have allowed human societies to live and flourish without trashing their local environments or the planet. Perhaps the most globally comprehensive is Article 71 of the Ecuadorian constitution, written in 2008:

“Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”.


It is important to say that the Bill does not represent an alternative to very strong local action, such as by the Friends of the Thames and the Western Sussex Rivers Trust, working on rights of rivers, and declarations of the rights of rivers—on which the House of Commons Library recently wrote an excellent report—but, rather, it is complementary to those efforts. Defending the rights of one river can have only a limited impact on the microplastic and nano plastic pollution that now covers the planet, the explosion of novel entity pollution that has far exceeded the planet’s limits, and of course the climate emergency, with every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted having global impacts and every tonne prevented being emitted being a global positive. All that demands far broader action than just a focus on one river, as important as that is.

It is also entirely complementary with the campaign, of which I declare I am a member, to create an international offence of ecocide, and calls—on which I am also working—to strengthen the rights of Antarctica to continue to exist as a healthy part of the cryosphere. It also fits very well with the One Health approach that acknowledges that human, animal and environmental health are all interdependent.

I very much look forward to our debate today, and I thank the wide range of Peers who have signed up to participate. I particularly look forward to the Minister’s response, for the world is watching—I can say that from the social media interest that this debate has already generated.

The UK Government currently have no stance on the rights of nature on the formal record that the House of Lords Library could find. Two years ago, at the United Nations, the Tory Government caused international upset at the United Nations by vehemently opposing a Motion from Bolivia on

“living well in balance and harmony with Mother Earth and Mother Earth-centric actions”.

That included a passage on the rights of nature.

However, we now have a Labour Government, and I trust that we will hear for the first time whether they have moved on from that disastrous anthropocentric perspective of 2024. Labour’s 2024 manifesto acknowledged that we are in a “nature emergency” and said it would tackle

“the unforgivable pollution of our rivers and seas … promote biodiversity, and protect our landscapes and wildlife”.

In the nature’s rights debate, the Government have a chance to acknowledge demands acknowledging a place for nature, not as a source for extraction but as a place for the human and the more than human to flourish.

To conclude, any noble Lords participating today might like to check out Instagram, to see a positive use of social media offering broad support for the Bill from around the UK and beyond. I will finish with the words of one of those posts, from 12 year-old artist and naturalist Benjamin Fallow, who made a video supporting the Bill. He said:

“Listen to the children … we need nature and wildlife to survive”.


I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I echo that. I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. It has been a fine debate, and I thank everyone who has contributed.

Picking up the Minister’s comments to start with, I am taking encouragement from a part near the end where she said that the Government might be open in principle to considering the rights of nature in an international context. I will have to study the fine detail of her comments, but I am taking that as a positive step forward. I also acknowledge that she recognises the legitimacy of concerns about the state of nature, which are widespread.

Picking up what the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said about this being a transformative, even revolutionary Bill—step forward, rights of nature—I agree. The Minister talked about changing the UK’s constitutional and legal framework. Of course, that is a broader question we have before us today. We are going to have to see major changes to them to create a modern, functional, democratic constitution, and the rights of nature could be part of that transformation. The Minister also talked about a fundamental reworking of principles. As some of the early proponents of the rights of nature said, that is also what happened when we created rights for enslaved people and women. We have seen significant changes in the past.

I thank, in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, for her strong support for the Bill. She summed up in one question why we need this Bill: is the status quo delivering for the protection of nature and the rights of future generations? No, the current framework is not. She also said that the rights of nature are not in competition with human rights or economic prosperity and explained, as did the Minister, how this fits within the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. As the Minister acknowledged, this Bill acknowledges the competencies of the devolved Administrations. That has been carefully written into the Bill.

I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, who said we have looked at how we derive benefit from nature rather than seeing that we owe it a duty of care. I wish her Bill all fair winds behind it and thank her for starting my morning, as we had a pre-debate discussion, with a lovely picture of a leveret. That really cheered up my morning. I can recommend that any morning you need to be cheered up.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for stressing the need for urgency and action. I am going to look up the work of his grandfather. I will be very interested to find out about that. I also thank him for his focus on the need to support indigenous communities. I have recently come back from the High North. Indigenous communities in the High North and Europe have a lot to teach us but are also under significant threat and need protection.

I thank the noble Baroness beside me for highlighting the work of Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? It is a great book and anyone who has not read it should.

I engage now with the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey. I sincerely thank them for seriously engaging with this debate and this Bill. I appreciate that. I am a little surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, regarded as an argument against it that it would be a complete upending of our current arrangements. Coming from one of the chief proponents of Brexit, it seems a little curious that that would be an argument against the Bill—but I will park that there. However, I also note that the noble Lord said we should have more philosophical debates in our Chamber, and I agree. We have philosophies that have led us to a very bad place in the world at this moment. Debating philosophies and thinking about the foundations of our thought is something we need to do a great deal more of.

One of the points the noble Lord, Lord Frost, made was that there is a problem in how you balance various types of nature, organisms and ecosystems. A number of other noble Lords also said this. The noble Lord described this as an “incommensurable variable”. We have had about 4 billion years of life on this planet. It has always been a balance. It has very often been co-operation between organisms, co-operation between species, working out. That is what we would have to continue with as part of that nature.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, asked about the definition of “Nature”. I point her to Clause 42; page 37 sets out that definition on the basis of the Bill. I really appreciate her careful engagement and her questions about negative and affirmative procedures, which I will very much look at.

The noble Baroness asked how this might work with the EU reset. I point out that a parallel effort is happening within the EU at this moment. The Rights for Nature: Empower Citizens to Represent and Protect Ecosystems initiative has been accepted under the European citizens’ initiative regulation and is being taken forward within Europe. Of course, should we return to being part of Europe, in the future, it would not be a problem at all any more.

I will pick up just a couple of the points from the noble Earl, Lord Effingham. I am aware of time. He said that national security is

“the first duty of any government”.

I point to the Joint Intelligence Committee’s report highlighting how biodiversity is essential to our security and how food security is a pressing problem because of those risks. These are not two things to set against each other.

The noble Earl seemed to find problems with a legal duty of care for companies and organisations with overseas activities. Again, I cross-reference the JIC report: those overseas activities are not faraway things with no impact on us; they have very close impacts on our “everyday economic realities”, in the noble Earl’s words.

The noble Lord, Lord Winston, said that this might give too much power to lawyers. Noble Lords will see that there is so much detail in the Bill because of its stress on democracy, particularly local democracy—to pick up the points of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. That is where the power lies, rather than with the lawyers.

The noble Lord raised a fairly obvious point about bacteria. That is where we have to acknowledge that we are holobionts; we consist of some 50,000 species. We tend to think of bacteria as being that thing out there that we want to kill, but protecting the bacteria of our own microbiome is a crucial step to protecting our own health.

Finally, I will pick up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, and wish the Friends of the Dart and all other similar groups around these islands the absolute best. The noble Baroness said that we need to address the failure of enforcement and regulation. Yes, we do, but we have been trying to do that for decades under our current model and it is not working.

The noble Baroness pointed to the limitations in the way that rights of nature have been working for Ecuador. I am not going to claim that any single Bill or action is a silver bullet to fix all our problems. If anyone tells you, “I have this one thing that is going to fix everything”, I would immediately tell you to disregard it. This is an essential foundation for our future. It does not solve all our problems or deliver everything that we need; it is a foundation to build on that acknowledges that our life is dependent on all other life. The noble Baroness mentioned agro-ecological farming and a new way of thinking and working. That is what we need: a new way of thinking and working. I commend the Bill to the House.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.