A Court Says Coastal Marine Ecosystems Have Intrinsic Value—and Legal Rights

The Constitutional Court of Ecuador ruled that coastal marine ecosystems have legal rights that must be protected, potentially requiring stricter limits on human activities like industrial fishing.

Those ecosystems, the court said, have a right to maintain their natural “life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes” and the Ecuadorian government must adopt sufficient protective measures to ensure those “vital processes” persist. 

Marine coastal ecosystems have “intrinsic value,” the court added, and Ecuador made a commitment in its constitution to “build a new form of citizen coexistence, in diversity and harmony with nature.” 

Ecuador, in 2008, became the first country in the world to recognize in a national constitution that nature, similar to humans and corporations, has legal rights. More than a dozen other countries have through legislation or court rulings recognized that ecosystems or individual species have rights, including to live, persist and regenerate. 

Until now, all of Ecuador’s Constitutional Court rulings regarding nature’s rights have involved ecosystems on land, mangroves and wild animals. Lawyers familiar with rights of nature jurisprudence say the coastal marine ecosystem case, released late last year, is a landmark decision that extends heightened protections to the country’s vast aquatic ecosystems. 

Ecuador, which includes the Galapagos Islands, is home to hundreds of fish species, whales, sea turtles, dolphins, sharks, manta rays and corals. 

“The decision opens the door to a new perspective, a blue perspective, on the rights of nature,” said Hugo Echeverria, an Ecuadorian lawyer who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of nature in the case.

In its ruling, the court noted that nature is made up of “interrelated, interdependent and indivisible” components, including the “human species.”  

“When an element of nature is affected, the functioning of the system as a whole is altered,” the opinion says. 

Tens of thousands of people living in Ecuador’s coastal regions rely on marine ecosystems for food and livelihoods, for example. 

Ecuador has two dozen different types of coastal marine ecosystems, according to the opinion. They include beaches, bays, estuaries and coastal lagoons. 

The case had an unusual origin.

Industrial fishers initiated the lawsuit in 2020 against various national government authorities, arguing that a legal restriction on industrial fishing within an 8-nautical mile zone is unconstitutional. Small-scale, “artisanal” fishing is allowed inside the zone.

The industrial fisher plaintiffs argued that the restriction violated their rights to engage in economic activities and threatened food sovereignty. They also argued, ironically, that the law was incompatible with the rights of nature: They claimed that the zoning law could inadvertently lead to overfishing by artisanal fishers and thus lead to a violation of nature’s rights. The government therefore ought to abolish or reduce the 8-nautical mile zone, they argued. 

The court disagreed. In their decision, the judges cited scientific evidence indicating that the 8-mile zone was necessary to protect fish populations, maintain the health of marine ecosystems and ensure long-term viability of the fishing industry. Following implementation of the zoning law, fish populations increased, according to one governmental study. 

The court ruled that the zoning law was not incompatible with coastal marine ecosystems’ rights and would stay in place. 

Echeverria said the ruling will likely be used as a precedent to challenge an increasing array of human activities affecting Ecuador’s marine life, like aquaculture and oil and gas operations. 

Aquatic species and ecosystems have come under increasing pressure from a range of human activities like industrial, artisanal and illegal fishing. A painful and leading cause of whale and dolphin deaths worldwide, for example, is from entanglement in fishing gear.

The Ecuadorian court’s decision affirming that marine ecosystems have constitutional rights imposes a stricter obligation on the government to safeguard them. This means that traditional environmental regulations, such as fishing limits and pollution controls, must be robust enough to protect the essential functions of marine ecosystems. Additionally, the rights of other entities, including humans and corporations, may be restricted to prevent species extinction and preserve delicate ecosystems.

In essence, Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights shifts the balance, ensuring that human interests no longer automatically take precedence over ecological concerns in most situations. However, like the rights of humans and corporations, nature’s rights are not absolute and can be limited based on specific circumstances.

So far, Ecuadorian courts have afforded fragile and threatened ecosystems greater protections. A Constitutional Court ruling in 2021 enforcing the rights of mangroves, for instance, found that those ecosystems deserved special protection because mangroves fight climate change by acting as carbon sinks. Mangroves also guard coastal areas from storm surges, the court noted. Another ruling from the same court that year prohibited mining activity in a cloud forest that is home to scores of endangered species. 

In the case of coastal marine ecosystems, the court said that such systems are “fragile and threatened” and that the Ecuadorian government must put in place sufficiently stringent laws—and enforce those laws—to ensure that coastal marine ecosystems’ vital processes can persist. That means living parts of the ecosystem like fish and mammals must be able to reproduce and maintain their populations and that other parts of the ecosystem, such as ocean temperature and salinity, are able to maintain their natural states. 

That could have big impacts for the climate, though the decision is only applicable within Ecuador. There is scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions harm oceans. Earth’s oceans have absorbed the vast majority of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. 

That absorption of emissions has, in turn, warmed ocean waters—over the past decade, these temperatures have been the warmest since at least the 1800s. Hotter seas are causing more intense storms, sea level rise from the expansion of warming water and acidification that kills off aquatic life. 

Beyond climate change and fishing, the coastal region has been impacted by aquaculture, drug trafficking activity, shipping traffic, oil spills, fossil fuel operations and plastic pollution.