In the last few years a significant focus of my work has been on the rights of nature. I work on the emerging field of the rights of nature, asking how law can move beyond its dominant anthropocentric frame to recognise nature as a subject with its own inherent rights. Drawing on my background in human rights, Indigenous peoples’ land rights, and strategic litigation, I explore how these traditions can both challenge and support this shift toward ecological justice.
A central strand of my work examines the relationship between human rights and the rights of nature. Under the title “Human Rights & the Rights of Nature: Friends or Foes?”, I have been investigating whether these frameworks are destined to collide or can, in fact, reinforce one another. In this research, I look closely at the tensions between individual human entitlements and the claims of ecosystems, while also identifying important complementarities—for example, where rights to life, culture, land, and a healthy environment can be mobilised in support of ecological claims.
This inquiry led me to coordinate an interdisciplinary project on “The Future of the Rights of Nature”, which asks what it would mean to take rights of nature seriously in legal and policy practice, particularly in European contexts. Working with colleagues from law, philosophy, and environmental science, I have been mapping the kinds of research, collaboration, and institutional experimentation needed if rights of nature are to move from inspiring rhetoric to lived legal realities. Most of this work is captured and listed on the website of the Interdisciplinary Network on the Study of the Rights of Nature (INSRoN) which I created with a few colleagues from philosophy, ecology, anthropology, politics and law.
More recently, I have been developing this work in a broader study of the “nexus” between human rights and the rights of nature. This was work was conducted in collaboration with the French Agency for Development. Here I seek to systematise the debates, clarify points of friction, and propose concrete ways in which these frameworks might be articulated together in law and policy. My aim is to show that, while rights of nature rightly call for a profound rethinking of legal orders, they can also draw on the normative strength, institutional footholds and advocacy tools provided by human rights.
Across these projects, my work is guided by a commitment to social and ecological justice. I see the rights of nature not as an abstract legal innovation, but as part of a wider movement to rethink our relationships with land, water, and ecosystems—building on the lived experiences and struggles of Indigenous peoples and other communities on the front lines of ecological harm.
Jérémie Gilbert 