When the contracting states of the Convention on Biological Diversity meet in Montreal at the end of the year to adopt a post-2020 framework for biological diversity, they will have one last chance to jointly counteract the dramatic extinction of species on earth.

For this to succeed, the rights of nature should be recognized as a building block of a successful strategy for species protection.

While the current draft of the framework does not explicitly mention the rights of nature, a first draft from 2020 intended as a framework “to take into account and, where appropriate, recognize the rights of nature”.

In numerous countries of the Global South, natural rights have already been recognized in constitutions, laws or court decisions over the past 15 years, such as in Ecuador, India or Uganda.

The Global North, on the other hand, has so far been largely unresponsive to the idea of ​​giving rights to nature.

Despite the serious environmental crises of the Anthropocene, which have their origins in the liberal West's destructive treatment of nature since the Industrial Revolution and today affect the entire world, Western societies and their legal systems find it difficult to break away from their strictly anthropocentric orientation.

Since the 1970s, when the idea of ​​natural rights was first discussed in the US and Europe, it has been commonly argued that

that these are incompatible with liberal constitutional orders, since they endanger human freedom, which is at the heart of these orders.

However, the rights of nature can be conceived and designed liberally and as such can make a contribution to solving pressing ecological problems.

A look at the Global South

The mere fact that the rights of nature have so far been recognized in countries in the Global South does not speak against the feasibility of the concept in the North as well.

Admittedly, the recognition of the rights of nature often ties in with indigenous holistic cosmovisions to which the human-nature dualism of the liberal West is alien, as in Ecuador, Bolivia or New Zealand.

However, indigenous worldviews are neither the only reason for the recognition of nature's rights in the Global South, where nature's own rights serve primarily as a means to more effective environmental protection, nor are they a necessary condition for the recognition of nature's rights.

Natural rights have been recognized around the world in different ways and in diverse political, cultural and legal contexts over the past 15 years.

The liberal West is therefore also free to formulate the rights of nature in its own way.

For example, he could shape the rights of nature as rights of individual living beings as well as species and ecosystems.

Such an ecocentrically expanded biocentrism, with its science-based focus on individual life, seamlessly ties in with the values ​​and legal systems of Western liberal societies.

The rights of nature do not call into question human dignity, nor do they lead to a systematic suppression of human concerns.