July 2026
The UK Nature’s Rights Bill has its Second Reading in the House of Lords on Friday 3 July. For organisations working across wildlife, rivers, climate, farming, planning, public health and environmental law, this is more than a parliamentary milestone. It is a political opportunity.
For decades, environmental organisations have fought to strengthen protection, restore habitats, clean up rivers, defend species and hold decision-makers to account. That work remains essential. But we also need to ask a deeper question: why does ecological harm remain so routinely lawful, permitted, financed and normalised?
One answer lies in the legal architecture itself.
Modern law still largely treats Nature as property, resource or externality: something to be owned, managed, damaged, mitigated or compensated for. People and economic actors have legal standing and enforceable rights. Nature - the living foundation of human health, food, water, climate resilience and economic security - remains structurally under-represented.
The Nature’s Rights Bill seeks to correct that imbalance.
The Bill would recognise Nature as a legal subject and rights-bearing entity. It establishes substantive rights of Nature, including the rights to exist, persist and evolve within safe ecological limits; to maintain and regenerate ecological integrity; to restoration where harm has occurred; and to be free from pollution and degradation that threaten ecological health.
But the Bill goes further than recognition alone.
Its distinctive contribution is the Integrated Rights Framework: a legal and governance architecture that recognises Nature’s rights as foundational to human rights and economic activity.
In simple terms, the Framework reflects reality:
This is not anti-human or anti-economy. Clean water, healthy soils, pollinators, climate stability, biodiversity, flood protection and resilient ecosystems make human rights and long-term prosperity possible.
The Bill establishes a hierarchy of rights: Nature’s rights as the foundation; human rights protected within the ecological conditions necessary for life; and economic, corporate and property rights exercised within, and in support of, both.
For Wildlife and Countryside Link members, this matters because many issues you work on every day are symptoms of the same structural problem: rivers treated as drains, soils as inputs, ecosystems as trade-offs, planning decisions made in silos, and nature recovery forced to compete against stronger economic rights and incentives.
The Bill is designed to move conflict upstream. It embeds a duty of care towards Nature, requiring public authorities, businesses and relevant actors to protect, restore and regenerate Nature, prevent and mitigate harm, remedy ecological damage, and act consistently with the Integrated Rights Framework.
It also introduces Rights Impact Assessments for decisions, policies, plans, projects, financial decisions and regulatory measures that may materially affect Nature. These would consider impacts on Nature’s rights, human rights, public wellbeing, future generations, cumulative and systemic effects, ecological integrity, safe ecological limits and less harmful alternatives.
This matters because the Bill is not simply a downstream litigation tool. It is an upstream governance framework for better decisions before harm is authorised.
The Bill also provides implementation mechanisms including a Nature Guardianship Council, Bioregional Councils, public participation, reporting, parliamentary oversight, non-adversarial dispute resolution, a Nature’s Rights Tribunal and access to justice.
The purpose is not to replace existing environmental law. It is to strengthen its foundations. Existing protections, targets and restoration duties remain vital, but they are too often operating within a legal order that still permits Nature to be balanced away.
Second Reading creates a live opportunity for civil society to show Parliament that this proposal deserves scrutiny.
Nature’s Rights is inviting organisations to sign a Civil Society Statement of Support for the Bill campaign’s core principles. This is not a clause-by-clause endorsement. It is support for the central proposition that UK law should recognise Nature as a legal subject with rights and that Parliament should give the Bill serious consideration.
Deadline for inclusion ahead of Second Reading: Thursday 2 July, 5pm UK time.
Organisations can sign here: https://forms.gle/EMdfsSBz9JUKbaUe7
Transformational legal change rarely happens in one session. But political openings matter. They create legitimacy, language, scrutiny, alliances and momentum.
This Bill gives Parliament a chance to begin correcting the legal foundations that keep treating Nature as subordinate to the economic activity that depends on it.
Mumta Ito is a UK lawyer, mediator, Founder of Nature’s Rights, architect of the Integrated Rights Framework and author of the UK Nature’s Rights Bill.
The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors' and not necessarily those of the wider Link membership.
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