A measure of comfort may be found in the market forces underlying the energy transition, but for water, which lies at the heart of the climate crisis, the silver lining is harder to find.

Trump’s first term was marked by deregulation and underfunding of water resources and systems. His administration was quick to roll back the Obama-era Clean Water Rule, which extended federal protections to smaller bodies of water such as wetlands and streams. This reduced the government’s jurisdiction over many water bodies, leaving them vulnerable to pollution and degradation.

Concurrently, Trump’s first administration allowed water-intensive resource, manufacturing and agricultural sectors to operate with fewer restrictions on water use and pollution.

Less direct but perhaps more consequential was Trump’s stance on climate change – particularly his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. Climate change is having an outsized impact on water already, disrupting the water cycle and amplifying water-related issues and disasters such as drought, flooding and extreme weather. It’s worsening water scarcity across parched swaths of the globe, including much of the western United States, and contributing to record-breaking wildfires like those tearing through California now.

Trump’s second term will likely see continued efforts to reduce federal oversight of water resources, weakening environmental regulations and reducing funding for water infrastructure. While Trump has expressed support for large-scale infrastructure projects, such as reservoirs, pipelines and desalination plants, these types of projects come with significant environmental costs and are vulnerable to climate-related risks such as flood-related damages and changes in precipitation patterns.

A jarring transition back to Trump

Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. government prioritized the supply and quality of water, which makes the transition to a second Trump administration all the more jarring.

Through the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) committed more than $50 billion to improve drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure – the largest investment in water in U.S. history. Under the Biden administration, the EPA also implemented the first national drinking water standards for “forever chemicals” (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS), launched a plan to replace all lead service lines in the United States and prioritized environmental justice for vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by water quality issues.

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Meanwhile, Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, has drawn criticism for his frequent opposition to environmental legislation, including voting against the Inflation Reduction Act, voting to block carbon pollution limits for power plants and voting against extending the national flood insurance program. On January 29, the U.S. Senate confirmed Zeldin to head the agency, where he is expected to follow Trump’s orders to dismantle major environmental regulations.

A looming security issue for Canada

Looking north to Canada, water also faces a precarious future.

At a press conference last fall (hosted at a golf course he owns near Los Angeles), Trump angered many Canadians by promising to solve California’s water shortages by tapping into British Columbia’s water resources. “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they essentially have a very large faucet . . . You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific, and if you turned that back, all of that water would come right down here and into Los Angeles.”

That particular solution falls flat on both geography and economics. The Columbia River – and its Rocky Mountain headwaters, which Trump was referencing – flows from British Columbia to Oregon and is governed by a treaty between the two countries. A project to bring this water to Los Angeles would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

But U.S. actions on trade, climate change, environmental deregulation and resource extraction do pose very real threats to shared water bodies such as the Great Lakes, the Columbia River and the St. Lawrence River.

Canadians have long been united in their opposition to exporting water. This is codified in the Transboundary Waters Protection Act, which bans large-scale removal of water from waterways shared with the United States. While the current Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) does not apply to water in its natural state, it is possible that water may become a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations. Canadians need to be prepared for that eventuality.

If there is room for stubborn optimism, it lies in community- and Indigenous-led watershed governance initiatives. A shift in jurisdiction from federal to state and local authorities offers an opportunity to advance watershed-scale management and stewardship approaches that promote collective action across public- and private-sector actors within each watershed.

The fires currently burning in and around Los Angeles serve as a stark reminder that climate change doesn’t care what we think. The impacts of drought, flooding, fires and extreme weather events will continue to be felt across the United States and Canada. Governments can choose to embrace policies and investments that address these rising human and economic costs – or be left holding the bill and the blame.

Alan Shapiro is principal at environmental consultancy Shapiro & Company and an instructor in the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s Sustainable Business program.

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First, it was a birthday: 110 years since the first ship transited through the dredged passageway in the Central American country, changing the way marine traffic moves around the world forever. Second, after a prolonged drought that caused dramatic delays to global shipping, the Panama Canal was back to “normal” – accommodating for up to 36 transit slots per day, up from a low of 22 transits in December.

The Panama Canal traffic jam dominated the business news for months in 2023 and early 2024, shedding light on how goods move around the world and demonstrating the far-reaching effects of volatile climate patterns. At its height last summer, some 135 ships were waiting for passage through the 82-kilometre waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, 50% more than would typically be queued up. The bottleneck had huge implications for global trade, as tankers carrying poultry or grains sat idle in the sea, or companies such as Cheniere Energy, an exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), opted to use longer shipping routes.

For Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, the canal’s administrator, the lessons learned during the drought have readied the Panama Canal Authority (PCA) for more storms. Because more are coming. “PCA will be prepared for another drought that we are timing in the next four years,” he said during a virtual roundtable discussion on Monday with international journalists. “Bear in mind that we had a drought in 2016, 2019 and then 2023. So the frequency is faster now.”

October 2023 – the driest October since 1950 – saw a 41% drop in rainfall, which researchers have tied to El Niño. “We remain rainfall-dependent,” Vásquez Morales said. “So we have to be very creative in the way we use all the other elements, that we take every drop of water to the maximum utilization possible.” That means accommodating the same cargo volume with fewer transits, by using larger ships.

The Financial Times reported that food commodities and some LNG customers are not returning to the Panama Canal because of the disruptions. The canal is “playing with the idea” of auctioning off long-term slots, Vásquez Morales said, to offer customers, who have little latitude when it comes to schedules, added certainty.

Bigger picture, PCA is also considering building a contentious multipurpose US$1.6-billion reservoir, damming the nearby Indio River, to increase water storage capacity and meet the demands of human consumption and marine traffic.

The Panama Canal connects 180 maritime routes, reaching 1,920 ports in 170 countries. Some $270 billion in cargo moves through it every year, including 40% of U.S. container traffic. It uses water that accumulates in two reservoirs to usher ships through its locks-based system. In 2023 and part of 2024, those reservoirs saw water levels plunge due to the protracted drought. Panama is now in its rainy season, which is helping to fill up the man-made lakes again. By the end of November, the PCA will know where it stands going into the dry season and what it has to do to adjust.

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“From an operational standpoint, we have a better grasp and more data on how to handle water capabilities,” Vásquez Morales said.

The drought also exposed the intersection of competing interests for a resource as precious as water. The canal, which generates billions of dollars for Panama every year, has to manage its water usage against the needs of a growing local population, as well as agricultural and mining demands.

But more work needs to be done to understand and meet the needs of the local community, Vásquez Morales said. Some local farmers have expressed opposition to the reservoir expansion project over concerns it will flood their land. He said the issue is now very much at the forefront of political concerns in the country.

“We are not complacent. There have been challenges this year, and there will be new challenges next year,” he said. “But something that we have proven to the world is resilience in order to take challenges as a consequence of events we cannot control. That includes rainfall and geopolitical events.”

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Grassy Narrows First Nation, in northwestern Ontario, is an Anishinaabe community of some 1,500 people. Between 1962 and 1970, a paper mill owned by Dryden Chemicals dumped about 9,000 kilograms of mercury into the English-Wabigoon river system, contaminating the fish with levels of methylmercury up to 50 times higher than what was considered safe and poisoning the people who ate them. The community relied on fish not just for sustenance, but for their livelihood, so their local economy was also devastated.  

Today, 90% of Grassy Narrows residents are believed to suffer from symptoms of mercury poisoning, which attacks the nervous system and can result in tremors, insomnia, memory loss, neuromuscular effects, headaches, and cognitive and motor dysfunction.  

Researchers have now identified the intergenerational impact of mercury poisoning on the behaviour, emotions and suicide attempts of Grassy Narrows children.  

“In the ’70s, following the mercury discharge, youth suicide in Grassy Narrows went from zero – it had been unheard of before that time – to very high,” said Donna Mergler, the lead author of a new study published in the peer-reviewed Environmental Health Perspective journal, at a press conference this week at Ontario’s provincial legislature, where the study’s findings were unveiled. Over an 11-month period in 1977/1978, 26 young people between the ages of 11 and 19 attempted suicide.  

“That is an incredibly high rate,” said Mergler, a physiologist and professor emerita in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal.  

Those numbers remain high today, with mothers reporting that 41% of girls and almost 11% of boys between the ages of 12 and 17 have attempted suicide – figures that are three times higher than in other First Nations.  

The study uses data collected from a questionnaire conducted in 2016 and 2017 related to 80 mothers and 162 children from Grassy Narrows, along with historical data from biomonitoring programs that collected blood samples from umbilical cords and children’s hair. That allowed researchers to trace how mercury was passed to children in utero.  

Most of the women who participated in the study were born between 1962 and 1993.  

They were exposed to mercury poisoning prenatally, through their mothers’ consumption of fish, and subsequently as children, teenagers and adults. Researchers also found correlations between grandfathers who had been fishing guides, using the indicator as a proxy for mercury exposure in the family, and mental health and behavioural issues faced by their grandchildren, the children of today.  

“You can see this cascade of effects,” Mergler said. “We found that the mother’s childhood mercury exposure is associated with today’s nervous system disorders, as well as a psychological distress.” 

Researchers found that the effect of mercury exposure may have been compounded by the intergenerational trauma of the residential school system, in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities and sent to government-funded boarding schools, often administered by Christian churches, where many were abused and died.  

For Rudy Turtle, the chief of Grassy Narrows First Nation, who also spoke at the press conference, the study confirms “what we’ve been fearing all along.”  

We’re in an emergency in our home.

 

– Chrissy Isaacs, Grassy Narrows resident

“The impacts of mercury have been very devastating in terms of our economy,” he said. “Our way of life has been totally destroyed. One-hundred percent we’ve been unable to continue our traditional activity.”  

“We’re in an emergency in our home,” said Grassy Narrows resident Chrissy Isaacs, in a recording played at the press conference. “Even on social media you see people saying that they feel like they don’t want to live or they don’t know how to deal with what they’re going through.”  

Isaacs said that her niece recently died by suicide. “It’s not their fault,” she said. “It’s a part of the sickness from the dumping of mercury, and I feel like we need to make people aware of that.” 

Multiple studies have exposed the devastating toll the mercury dump has had on Grassy Narrows, a community that has fought for the government to acknowledge the devastation and deliver accountability. One study released in 2020 found that residents who died prematurely before the age of 60 had five times more mercury in their bodies than those who lived past 60. That same year, decades of lobbying by the community secured a commitment from the federal government to build a treatment centre for people suffering from the effects of mercury poisioning. But three years later, costs have ballooned, and the project has yet to break ground.  A report in 2017 suggested that the decommissioned mill was still leaking mercury. 

This week, Chief Turtle called on the government to provide “fair compensation” to his community for the devastation wreaked by the toxic dump. The researchers said they hoped the study would help restore the health and well–being of Grassy Narrows residents.  

“This study was possible only because of the leadership of the people of Grassy Narrows, who fought for decades to expose and correct the health impacts wrought by [mercury] contamination of the English-Wabigoon River system,” noted Sarah E. Rothenberg, of Oregon State University, in an a separate Environmental Health Perspectives article.  

“Because of their advocacy and bravery, the results of this study may inform interventions that could benefit millions of people living in vulnerable communities where [methylmercury] exposure is elevated.” 

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A large landfall will be a health hazard — and a deterrent for tourists and nesting sea turtles alike. It’s also expected to cost communities millions in lost revenue and cleanup.

Out at sea, sargassum isn’t bad: It’s a life raft and food pantry for a variety of ocean organisms. It’s also a reminder of the myriad benefits that algae can provide.

Kelp, in particular, is having a moment.

“Kelp” is a loose designation that encompasses roughly 100 species of brown seaweeds that grow in the cool waters along nearly one-third of the world’s coastlines. The thick algae form underwater forests, providing food and refuge for numerous animals, as well as numerous environmental benefits.

Kelp forests are one of the “most widespread and valuable marine ecosystems on the planet,” according to a United Nations Environment Programme report released in April.

New initiatives aim to tap these resources. But before we can reap the benefits, we need to ensure kelp forests aren’t destroyed.

The benefits

Kelp has been applied as fertilizer, eaten as food, and used medicinally by coastal peoples for thousands of years. Now researchers are beginning to tally more of its environmental benefits.

Kelp provides habitat and food for ocean dwellers like abalone, lobsters, crabs, octopuses, fish, sea otters, sea lions and whales. It also helps reduce damage from storms, stores carbon, produces oxygen and reduces nutrient pollution in the ocean.

A new study in Nature Communications found that kelp forests contribute about $500 billion globally to fisheries production, carbon capture, and nutrient-pollution reduction, which can help limit toxic algal blooms and improve water quality. When it comes to mitigating climate change, the researchers estimated that kelp forests sequester nearly 5 megatons of carbon from the atmosphere annually. That’s roughly the emissions from burning 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

This is probably news to most people.

“While kelp forests are valued to some degree by ocean users, they are not perceived to be high-value ecosystems to the public, which can limit public support for kelp conservation and restoration,” the study’s researchers wrote. “We found that kelp forests are on average over 3 times more valuable than previously acknowledged and expect these evaluations to increase as more market and non-market services are assessed.”

Tallying economic contributions, they say, isn’t meant to commodify kelp forests but to help spur conservation efforts and draw attention from policymakers who have overlooked these important ecosystems.

“To date, no global legal or policy instruments have focused explicitly on kelp,” the U.N. report found. “There are, however, many international frameworks and national laws and policies in place that could, in principle, support the conservation and effective management of kelp.”

If we are to draw on those, it will need to happen quickly.

The threats

Kelp forests across the world are in decline. Around half have been degraded in the past 50 years by a combination of local pressures and climate change. Nutrients, pollutants and sediments that wash into coastal waters from urban developments and agriculture can harm kelp forests.

Climate change also poses big challenges.

Kelp thrive in cool waters and are stressed by marine heat waves and ocean warming. More extensive losses of kelp forests are being found at the warm ends of its ranges. Climate change is also causing kelp species that like warmer water to replace those that prefer colder temperatures, causing a shift in the composition and diversity of kelp forests. In some cases, kelp forests are losing out altogether to mats of turf algae, which don’t provide the same nutrients and habitat complexity.

Warming ocean temperatures are also changing the distribution and abundance of animals that eat kelp. So has hunting or overfishing of their predators. Sea urchins, for example, have been blamed for overgrazing kelp forests in Alaskan waters after their predators — sea otters — were hunted extensively.

One imbalance in the ocean can create another.

“Destructive grazing of kelp has been recorded among many different kinds of herbivores including sea urchins, fish, crustaceans and snails,” the U.N. report found.

The opportunity

Indigenous peoples have harvested kelp for thousands of years, and many continue to do so. It’s also become the fastest-growing segment of the aquaculture industry.

That’s because a kelp extract called alginic acid, also referred to as algin or alginate, can be used as a thickening and emulsifying agent. It’s found in animal feed, pharmaceuticals, toothpastes, shampoos, salad dressings, frozen foods, dairy products, paper, charcoal and more.

But ensuring kelp forests continue to provide important environmental functions means that harvesting wild and cultivated kelp needs to be done sustainably, which isn’t always the case. The U.N. report called attention to unsustainable methods, including industrial harvesting in Norway where trawlers tear kelp from the seafloor, leaving 10-foot-wide gouges. This not only destroys kelp but can harm invertebrates and fish who depend on it, as well as the birds who eat them.

As kelp industries grow, policymakers in the United States hope to provide some ground rules. In March Rep. Jared Huffman of California and Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska introduced the Coastal Seaweed Farm Act of 2023, which calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Agriculture to “carry out a study on coastal seaweed farming, issue regulation relating to such farming, and establish an Indigenous seaweed farming fund.”

The latter would help reduce the cost barriers for Indigenous communities to participate in coastal seaweed farming and use the methods to help restore ecological functions.

“We also want to ensure equity in this field so that Indigenous people can continue benefiting from the industry — so our bill creates a grant program to reduce cost barriers for native communities, many of whom have farmed seaweed for thousands of years,” Huffman said in a statement.

Globally, other efforts are underway as well. The Kelp Forest Alliance aims to protect and restore nearly 10 million acres of kelp forests by 2040. “This is a call for governments to meet their commitments to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and act now to save these ecosystems,” Aaron Eger, lead author of the Nature Communications study and founder of the alliance, wrote in The Conversation.

Kelp needs much more.

The U.N. report provides a list of recommendations, including: taking action to address climate change; investing in mapping and long-term monitoring of kelp forests; better quantifying the ecosystem functions kelp forests provide and how they’re affected by climate change and other human pressures; incentivizing kelp protection and restoration through a monetary value on carbon; assessing practices used for harvesting and making necessary changes; using existing international frameworks to recognize kelp forest values and threats; and ensuring broad partnerships and stakeholder involvement, including with women, local communities, and Indigenous communities.

“The battle to save our kelp forests is just getting started,” wrote Eger. “And we need greater action to protect these intrinsically and economically valuable marine ecosystems.”

This story was originally published by The Revelator and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

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“Sadly, we have taken the ocean for granted, and today we face what I would call an Ocean Emergency,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the opening of the conference, which aimed to mobilize science-based solutions to the crisis. “We must turn the tide. A healthy and productive ocean is vital to our shared future.”

Human actions have burdened the ocean and its inhabitants with serious problems, including more acidic and hotter waters from emissions and global warming, which represent existential changes for many ocean-dwelling organisms. Meanwhile overfishing, pollution and industrial activities have depleted and damaged ocean ecosystems. Through these combined threats, we’ve robbed marine communities of their resilience at the very moment they need it most.

Could granting the ocean inalienable rights help turn all of that around — and protect people who depend on the ocean in the process?

A United Ocean

Experts at the conference argued that a declaration of oceanic rights from the United Nations could recognize the ocean as a living entity that has its own inherent entitlements, such as those to life and health, along with the right to continue its vital natural cycles.

Participants included representatives of the Earth Law Center, a Colorado-based nonprofit dedicated to the growing Rights of Nature movement. The organization has spent the past five years spearheading the concept of ocean rights.

In 2017 the center secured support from more than 70 nonprofit organizations in 32 countries for its Ocean Rights Initiative. That year, at the UN’s first ocean conference, then-executive director Darlene Lee explained that the initiative recommended “the United Nations governments, organizations and stakeholders, promote and adopt holistic and rights-based governance of the ocean, including incorporating the inherent rights of the ocean into law and policy.”

There’s historic precedent for establishing far-reaching rights principles through the United Nations. In 1948 the UN passed the groundbreaking Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined certain rights and freedoms — such as liberty and equality — as basic entitlements of all people across the globe.

Although that declaration of human rights is not legally binding, Earth Law Center oceans campaign director Michelle Bender says it has served as a powerful tool for embedding human-rights principles in laws and policies, including international treaties, national constitutions, and legal codes around the world.

Similarly, this summer the General Assembly adopted a groundbreaking resolution declaring access to a clean and healthy environment as a universal human right. And in 2010 a resolution was passed on the human right to water and sanitation.

Activists hope to extend the notion to the ocean we all share.

The Shift Begins

The effort took a step forward at the UN Ocean Conference, where The Ocean Race — a round-the-world sailing contest that also advocates for a healthy ocean — organized a panel discussion where advocates could discuss ways to advance the declaration and raise awareness of its importance.

Speakers included Prime Minister Ulisses Correia de Silva of the Republic of Cabo Verde, Earth Law Center representative Callie Veelenturf, and Ocean Race chairman Richard Brisius.

Addressing a packed audience, speakers argued that establishing legal rights for the ocean could start a cascade of societal shifts in peoples’ attitudes toward, and understanding of, the ocean. They called on the public to urge their UN ambassadors to support ocean rights and get a declaration on the UN’s agenda.

Although these speeches were given in a dimly lit, hushed venue — one of two adjacent rooms where everyone had to listen through headphones so as not to disturb proceedings next door — the audience was enthusiastic. Many attendees clustered around the speakers as the event came to close, eager to hear more.

Fighting an Anthropocentric Paradigm

Experts and national leaders speaking at the panel, and those I talked to after the event, said the declaration would prioritize the ocean’s interests alongside those of people.

This is a fundamentally different approach from most of today’s ocean-related decision-making, which is typically “anthropocentric in nature,” says marine biologist Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, who attended the event. He’s not involved in the ocean rights initiative, but his research has involved scrutiny of management of the ocean. He says the current approach puts humanity at the center, valuing and protecting the marine environment based on the services it provides to people.

Crespo describes this anthropocentric paradigm as “a limited value system that psychologically removes us from nature.”

Other experts said a declaration of ocean rights could upend that value system by giving the ocean a voice. It would represent, in Bender’s words, “a fundamental shift in our relationship with the ocean.”

Granting the ocean legal rights would be a step toward “a more ecocentric value system,” Crespo says, “which is still upheld by innumerous coastal and Indigenous peoples across the ocean. These communities recognize the intrinsic right that the ocean and its many species and features have to exist and be protected.”

Sailing Toward the Declaration

The UN panel didn’t occur in a vacuum — the Ocean Race is also in the middle of a series of summits, running through 2023, examining ocean rights as a solution to restoring ocean health. The organization has held summits since 2015 to bring together country leaders, industry figures, ocean experts and others to discuss critical marine issues.

Johan Strid, director of Ocean Race Summits, says the race has a “unique and neutral platform to host a dialogue and drive this discussion in a constructive way.”

The summits  and associated workshops, events and “action labs” are components of a strategic program that the Ocean Race, the Earth Law Center, the nonprofit organization Nature’s Rights and other partners ramped up earlier this year.

One major event took place in March in the Italian coastal city of Genova. There the partners started a consultation process to create a draft resolution. The consultation will “gather stakeholders from all backgrounds, regions and expertise to gain feedback on the process, partnership in outreach and raising awareness, as well as drafting of the principles themselves,” says Bender.

Moving forward, a series of workshops will allow consultation participants to analyze the  ideas discussed in the ocean rights summits. The workshops will then feed into a working group that will finalize the resolution.

Go Big or Go Bust

The push for ocean rights resonates with other Rights of Nature efforts, but its scale is particularly ambitious.

“It would apply to the ocean as a whole, including in areas beyond national jurisdiction,” says Bender.

That’s an important distinction, as international waters — those beyond individual countries’ control — are currently “almost completely ungoverned and unprotected,” as the International Institute for Environment and Development highlighted in March. The United Nations is working to address this, with member countries negotiating a legally binding treaty on the conservation and use of the high seas under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

But conventional safeguards for the ocean often exist in silos, piecemeal and poorly enforced. Provisions such as Marine Protected Areas only shield selected parts of the ocean, while frameworks currently under discussion like the UN’s proposed plastic treaty tackle individual issues affecting the marine environment.

Bender commends all these efforts as “great steps forward,” but contends that we also need a whole-ocean approach.

This is essential, she argues, because every impact in the ocean is interconnected: Pollution that originates on land enters the ocean and affects the entire planet. A declaration of ocean rights would provide an opportunity to encompass all ocean governance issues and align related frameworks under one overarching umbrella.

Ocean rights would be based on principles that reconnect humans “to the systems that sustain us,” she says. The application of these principles could help to put the brakes on activities like deep-sea mining, and potentially have ramifications for related issues like CO₂ emissions. Meanwhile, the standards it upholds could be systems-based. For example, recognizing humans as predators could result in efforts to guide fisheries management.

Err on the Side of Nature

As discussions continue, organizers aim to have a draft resolution ready to present to the United Nations in September 2023.

Bender says deliberations so far have addressed principles such as intergenerational equity, connectivity and reciprocal responsibility.

Another principle in discussion boils down to “when in doubt, favor the ocean.”

This is similar to the in dubio pro natura standard adopted in Panama and elsewhere, which translates to “when in doubt, err on the side of nature.”

Strid says the resolution would be the starting point for a process within the United Nations itself, assuming the international body agrees on the concept in the first place. Even if that happens, he says, getting “all states in the world to agree on a matter takes time.” They hope that can be accomplished by 2030.

Strid accepts that the timeline is “highly ambitious,” but history shows it’s not impossible. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights took around two years from initial introduction to adoption.

The endeavor has some wind in its sails already, with committed support from the nations of Cabo Verde, the Seychelles and Panama, along with the city of Genova.

In the panel discussion, former Seychelles’ president Danny Faure argued that the support of nations like theirs — known as Big Ocean or Small Island Developing States — is important if ocean rights are to be achieved.

Strid agrees. “Small island states are significantly impacted by the issues concerning the ocean,” he says. Their participation, he adds, can raise awareness of these devastating effects.

Public support will also prove essential. The Ocean Race has launched a campaign called One Blue Voice through which people around the world can sign on to a petition that organizers will present to the United Nations.

Gathering Momentum

Strid stresses that “we are in the early stages of the work.” As the process of shaping the resolution develops, they will focus efforts on gathering formal support from relevant organizations and policymakers.

Despite the immensity of the challenge ahead, both Bender and Strid say they remain hopeful.

“The nature of our sport is to overcome the impossible,” Strid says.

Bender, meanwhile, finds optimism in the successes of the rights of nature movement and the fact that ocean rights have been featured for the first time this year at the Blue Climate Summit and other events. She sees all this as essential momentum that will eventually achieve planetary support for nature and the people who rely on it.

“Humankind is a part of nature, and we cannot realize human rights without a healthy environment to support them,” she says.

This story was produced as part of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference Fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch). This story also originally appeared in The Revelator and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

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Epic flooding has killed hundreds of people across Pakistan, India, South Africa, Germany, New York, Kentucky and British Columbia, Canada, in the last year. Intense droughts are parching landscapes and wilting crops across Texas, the U.S. West and the Horn of Africa. As these water extremes hit more and more people where they live, there’s a growing awareness that climate change is water change.

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“You meet nobody; you’re in total wilderness, surrounded by boreal forest,” says Pier-Olivier Boudreault, a conservation director for the Société pour la nature et les parcs (SNAP), the Quebec arm of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS).

These pristine waters, also known by the Indigenous name Muteshekau-shipu, came under threat several years ago when Hydro-Québec included the river in a strategic plan for a hydroelectric dam project. Alarmed conservationists, whitewater rafters, a Côte-Nord municipality and a First Nation band formed the Muteshekau-shipu Alliance in 2018 to oppose the project. The coalition included the Indigenous Ekuanitshit Innu Council, the Minganie regional county municipality, Association Eaux-Vives Minganie and SNAP. “We had a common goal of protecting the river,” says Boudreault.

Initially, the Muteshekau-shipu Alliance tried to create a protected area under provincial law, an initiative strongly opposed by the provincial government and Hydro-Québec. Inspired by an international Indigenous-led movement that supports the rights of nature, the alliance instead sought “personhood” for the Magpie. Montreal-based International Observatory on the Rights of Nature (IORN) drafted nine rights for the river, including the right to flow and be safe from pollution. In what was a first for Canada, early this year the Ekuanitshit Innu Council and the Minganie regional county municipality granted personhood to the river, which joined a small but growing list of rivers and wild spaces globally that have been granted the same fundamental right to exist that a human has. This time, there was no opposition from the province or Hydro-Québec.

Under common law, which is practised in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, personhood means that an entity has rights ascribed to it. Corporations and churches have personhood. Everything else – animals and ecosystems – are considered “things” that, similar to property, can be owned and exploited. “The rights-of-nature movement is a paradigm shift,” says Boudreault. “Nature has a reason to live.”

Along with personhood comes the granting of legal guardians who uphold the rights of the river and can sue for damages on its behalf, should the need arise. This is crucial, says Boudreault, as Hydro-Québec may want to revisit its original plan to dam the river.

Bolstered by the Magpie achievement, environmental advocates have turned their sights on a much larger waterway, the 1,200-kilometre-long St. Lawrence River.

[Securing personhood rights for rivers] is the best way to ensure a healthy environment for present and future generations.
—Yenny Vega Cárdenas, IORN president and lawyer

The river flows from Lake Ontario to the Atlantic, crossing two provincial, as well as the Canada-U.S., borders. Two years ago, IORN helped create the Saint Lawrence River alliance, which includes conservation groups, some Quebec municipalities and more than 10 Indigenous groups whose traditional territories touch upon the vast waterway. Attaining personhood will be more complex for the St. Lawrence than the Magpie; the river is highly industrialized and comes under provincial and federal jurisdiction. Undeterred, the alliance will table the motion with Quebec’s provincial legislative body in 2022. Advocates plan to support their claim by including legal precedents from jurisdictions around the globe like Ecuador, Colombia and New Zealand. (See sidebar on pages 30/31.) The pursuit of the St. Lawrence’s personhood received the backing of the federal New Democratic Party during the federal election campaign in September.

IORN president and lawyer Yenny Vega Cárdenas says a key objective of the personhood initiative is “starting a conversation” with industry and agriculture. Agriculture and corporate activities have devastated parts of the St. Lawrence, home to beluga whales, otters, multitudes of fish species, and migratory birds like snow geese. The river is afflicted by suffocating algae blooms linked to agricultural runoff and high levels of restricted pesticides such as neonicotinoids. Chemical pollutants from oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracking that occur close to the river also affect water quality and are toxic to wildlife. Personhood would give the river fundamental rights, pressure industry and agriculture to stop polluting, and compel municipalities to improve water treatment facilities, Cárdenas says. “It’s the best way to ensure a healthy environment for present and future generations.”

Constitutional change needed

Mumta Ito is one of the EU’s leading advocates for codifying nature’s rights into law. Ito, a Scotland-based lawyer who founded the charity Nature’s Rights, warns that the Magpie River’s personhood status doesn’t protect it from a legal court challenge down the road by powerful economic or political forces. Ito emphasizes that, in order for nature to be considered equal to humans and corporations in the courts, rights must be embedded at the highest level, such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Other countries, such as Ecuador and Bolivia, prioritized the rights of nature over economic development in their constitutions in 2008 and 2009 respectively. In 2019, Bangladesh’s highest court granted every river in the country legal personhood, so that anyone damaging a waterway can be tried as if they have harmed a living entity.

The Bangladesh NGO Human Rights and Peace was consequently appointed guardian of all national rivers. The effect of the legislation has been imperfect, with politicians and businesses reportedly flouting riverside eviction notices. However, there have been successes, with the court ordering the closure of 231 unauthorized factories on the Buriganga River last year, according to the Rights of Rivers, a global survey of the rapidly developing Rights of Nature jurisprudence pertaining to rivers.

Currently, environmental law doesn’t challenge “the way our societal systems operate,” says Ito, who co-authored a 2020 study, Towards an EU Charter of the Fundamental Charter for the Rights of Nature, commissioned by the EU’s European Economic and Social Committee. The study proposes a restructuring of law to enshrine nature as a rights-bearing subject equal to humans and corporations – which is, on paper at least, a guiding principle for EU nations, none of whom, to date, have granted personhood to rivers. (An initiative is underway to grant personhood to Spain’s Mar Menor, one of Europe’s largest seawater lagoons, which was devastated in 2016 by agricultural discharge that sparked an algae bloom and killed off tens of thousands of fish.)

A judicial shift would have significant implications for corporations. Companies, such as those peddling tobacco and opioids, have already been found legally responsible for the harm their products cause. Globally, the Stop Ecocide Foundation is seeking to protect nature’s rights even further by pushing the International Criminal Court in The Hague to adopt “ecocide” – an act causing severe or long-term damage to the environment – as a prosecutable crime on par with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression. Corporations would be found legally responsible for such things as deforestation and oil spills.

It’s seeing things that are not human as [having] equal stature from a moral perspective.
—Ian Moore, Mack Law Corp.

If rivers have rights, what are the potential ramifications for industry and infrastructure projects that interfere with waterways? Governments see hydroelectric dams as a way to generate clean renewable energy. But environmental advocates and First Nations communities don’t necessarily agree. For example, British Columbia’s Peace River is the contentious site of the Site C Dam, the $16-billion hydroelectric megaproject set for completion in 2025. Federal and provincial scientists report that the dam, spearheaded by BC Hydro, a Crown corporation, will destroy the habitat of dozens of species of insects, mammals and plants, many on the brink of extinction. Colorado-based environmental lawyer Grant Wilson, founder of the Earth Law Center, says Site C is a “clear violation of the rights of the Peace River, in addition to many Indigenous rights violations.”

Wilson’s Earth Law Center advises groups around the world that seek to establish legal rights for waterways. This year, the non-profit co-developed the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Rivers. Signed by nearly 200 organizations to date, the declaration serves as a legal template for anyone wanting to adopt the rights of rivers, Wilson says. The centre is poised to release a legal toolkit customized for B.C. that Wilson hopes will be helpful to those groups fighting the ongoing construction of the Site C dam. The toolkit incorporates a largely untested but powerful legal document: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was enshrined into B.C. law in 2019.

Vancouver lawyer Ian Moore, an associate counsel at Mack Law Corp., an Indigenous-owned firm that works primarily with First Nations but represents Inuit and Métis groups as well, contributed to the B.C. toolkit. Moore says that a number of B.C. First Nations will be using the toolkit as they seek to emulate the Magpie River’s designation of personhood.

One B.C. First Nation has formally aligned itself with the concept of personhood for rivers. In 2020, Tilhqot’in First Nation released a document establishing Sturgeon River Law. (The Fraser River, also known as the Sturgeon River, supports trout, salmon, whitefish and sturgeon.) The Tilhqot’in refer to water as tu, declaring that it is “a life form, it has its own spirit with human qualities.” The document also sets out the responsibilities of the Tilhqot’in regarding tu, stating that the community is a steward for future generations and must ensure the river is kept clean. If it is degraded, they must take corrective steps to restore ecosystem health. “These relationships define us as a Nation and highlight our protection and stewardship responsibilities that are grounded in our inherent and self-government rights,” the document states.

Congested, constricted and polluted waterways also impact the rights of other wildlife. Industry, dams and urbanization along the lower Fraser River floodplains – critical to Pacific coho and Chinook salmon – have resulted in the loss of 85% of spawning grounds, a recent report by University of British Columbia researchers and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation revealed. Such spawning-grounds loss has a deleterious effect on wildlife higher up the food chain, including the endangered Southern Resident orca population. A coalition formed by Earth Law Center is working to advance a proposed bill before the Washington State Legislature to recognize the rights of the Southern Resident orcas and the ecosystems upon which they depend, including the Salish Sea ecosystem, which spans the shores of Washington through to B.C.

The right to sue

Given the calamities that industrialization and corporations have inflicted upon the environment, how important is a river’s right to sue, should it attain personhood? Moore emphasizes that the primary value in recognizing legal personhood isn’t the ability of non-humans to sue but rather the opportunity to restructure our relationships with nature. “It’s seeing things that are not human as [having] equal stature from a moral perspective. It’s about relationship-shifting,” he says.

Precedence exists, however, with Ecuador’s Vilcabamba River, which, acting as a plaintiff alongside two property owners, stopped a damaging road construction project in 2011 by filing a constitutional injunction. The Rights of Rivers notes that, despite a raft of remedial and rehabilitation orders, the polluter ignored the directive.

Wilson hopes that establishing parameters and standards of operation will allow businesses to become partners in protecting the planet. “Companies like predictability,” he notes. The ultimate aim: a revolution that sees corporations, the public and Indigenous groups collaborating and working toward a common goal of respecting nature. Within this new zeitgeist, much ground needs to be made up. Wilson is optimistic, noting that even a river that is completely dead – as many are throughout the world – can be revitalized.

“Nature has an amazing capacity to restore itself to health when given the opportunity.”

Court Victories From Around the Globe

Ecuador & Bolivia
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to create a constitution that recognizes the right of nature to exist and regenerate. Bolivia followed in 2010 with a Rights of Mother Earth Law.

United States
Last year, Orange County, Florida, granted legal rights to all waterways, including two rivers. It is but one of several American jurisdictions to enact rights-of-nature laws, beginning in 2006 with the borough of Tamaqua in Pennsylvania, which declared toxic sewage dumping to be a violation of the rights of nature.

New Zealand
In 2017, a treaty agreement between New Zealand’s parliament and a Maori tribe declared the Whanganui River a “legal entity,” along with a former national park, Te Urewera, and Mount Taranaki. That same year, India’s Ganges and Yamuna rivers were declared legal persons, a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court, as it was declared unsustainable at law.

Colombia
In 2018, 25 plaintiffs aged seven to 26 successfully sued the Colombian government in that country’s highest court for failing to protect the Amazon, claiming that deforestation violated their constitutional right to life and a healthy environment. As a result, the court granted the Amazon River ecosystem the same legal rights as a human being.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor, writer and documentary filmmaker.

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It seems Canada is responding to that call. Steven Guilbeault, the newly minted minister of environment and climate change, is in Glasgow and knows a thing or two about climate leadership. This is not Minister Guilbeault’s first rodeo; he has been to 19 UN climate summits. 

Canada has committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, and our government has pledged to decarbonize the economy by 2050. It also recently committed to achieving a 100% net-zero-emissions electricity sector by 2035. And waterpower will be central to delivering the goods on this agenda. 

We have a strong base to build on, but getting to that zero-carbon grid will require a great deal of collaboration and negotiation between different industries, utilities and governments. That’s why, two weeks ago, my organization, WaterPower Canada, joined up with five other associations to form Electricity Alliance Canada. The coalition represents the leading suppliers of electricity to consumers and markets in Canada. All of us will work together to promote the power of electrification.

Hydro is already the backbone of Canada’s enviably clean electricity grid. Water flowing through turbines produces close to 90% of Canada’s renewable electricity, and 60% of the country’s electric needs are powered by water. 

Nonetheless, despite having a grid that is 80% non-emitting, Canada’s decarbonization strategy hinges on electrification – the repowering of almost everything in our society that today burns fossil fuels to instead run on zero-emissions electricity. This will mean cars, buildings, factories and more. Efficiency will play an important role in meeting this demand surge, of course. With only 20% of our energy end-use currently electrified, transitioning everything at scale will require us to generate a great deal more new zero-emissions electricity. According to the federal government, Canada may need to double or even triple its capacity.

Some Canadian provinces, such as Saskatchewan, Alberta and Nova Scotia, generate electricity from fossil fuels, and those jurisdictions will soon want to clean up their grids and transition fossil fuels to, ideally, renewables such as wind and water. In those places and elsewhere, Canada’s waterpower fleet stands ready to not only deliver new capacity, but also help smooth and balance the load for variable renewables such as wind and solar.

Domestic electrification will drive demand for new zero-carbon electricity, but so will global markets. As policy-makers increasingly forge ahead with carbon pricing, markets will look to produce goods and services with very low-carbon electricity. Canada’s extensive waterpower fleet will make Canada an attractive destination for investment as these electrons remain the most affordable, flexible and dispatchable form of electricity. We are already seeing this with the growing number of data centres setting up operations in provinces like Quebec. Thanks in large part to this nation’s abundant, cost-competitive, low-emissions waterpower, a 2020 IT industry index, compiled by the New Statesman Media Group, recently ranked Canada the top destination for such facilities.

There is plenty of momentum to build on. We can see it in developments ranging from rapidly growing electric vehicle adoption, to cutting-edge efforts to electrify high-intensity industrial processes such as steel manufacturing and investments in green hydrogen. Whatever new commitments our government brings back from Glasgow, Canada’s waterpower industry is prepared to make them happen.

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin is the president & CEO of WaterPower Canada.

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Water cuts across many of Canada’s major emitting sectors, from oil and gas to agriculture. Canada’s biggest GHG-emitting industries are also some of the country’s largest water users – and the emissions hiding in that water usage are largely untracked. 

A recent analysis from Global Water Intelligence estimates that water and wastewater utilities may account for nearly 4% of global energy consumption. In Canada, studies have found that water and wastewater systems are municipal governments’ largest energy uses, accounting on average for 38% of energy consumption. By extension, these systems contribute 32% of reported municipal emissions, nearly half of that coming from sewage treatment. This figure also doesn’t include the release of nitrous oxide and methane – both potent GHGs – during wastewater treatment.

The emissions trend for water utilities poses an even greater concern. In regions such as California, drought and a growing population are increasing demand for energy-intensive water supply projects, such as desalination and water recycling. And even in regions not yet facing water stress, higher water treatment demands (needed to filter out emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and microplastics) require increased energy use. 

And that’s just municipal utilities. When you consider the water-related emissions from industrial sectors, such as oil and gas and mining, the significance of water in Canada’s GHG emissions landscape continues to grow. 

But surprisingly (or maybe unsurprisingly), we have very little data on water-related emissions, or for that matter, most forms of water use in Canada. That knowledge gap poses significant challenges for defining sector-specific baselines and targets. Mapping these emissions across major sectors – including utilities, oil and gas, mining, agriculture and others – is a critical step toward understanding how to reduce them. And, at least so far, the federal government hasn’t included any mention of water in its plans to reach net-zero by 2050, lagging behind many other jurisdictions. 

Across the Atlantic, the U.K. has been leading the charge around water and net-zero. In 2020, water utilities in the U.K. made the first sector-wide commitment to deliver a net-zero water supply for customers by 2030. The sector plans to do this through a range of strategies, from efficiency interventions to renewable energy generation, estimating that it will save 10 million tonnes of GHG emissions by reaching net-zero 20 years earlier than the British government’s current 2050 target.

In Canada, new infrastructure projects are beginning to recognize the renewable-energy-generation potential of wastewater systems. Earlier this year, Noventa Energy Partners announced the world’s largest raw wastewater energy-transfer project, at Toronto Western Hospital. The $38-million project will generate thermal energy using raw municipal wastewater, supplying 90% of the hospital’s heating and cooling requirements, and reducing its carbon emissions by 250,000 tonnes. 

Other sectors have also invested heavily in reducing water-related emissions. In the oil and gas sector, B.C.’s Saltworks Technologies has developed a way to harness waste heat from oil sands operations to treat industrial wastewater, minimizing freshwater withdrawal and reducing carbon emissions compared to conventional treatment technologies. Meanwhile, in the agricultural sector, Alberta’s Livestock Water Recycling is using water treatment technology to remove clean water from manure. This allows farmers to reclaim water, produce more effective fertilizers, and reduce their methane emissions by up to 82%.

While the connection between water and energy is clearly visible, it’s worth noting another relationship that is no less important: that between water and carbon. Numerous studies, including at the IISD (International Institute for Sustainable Development) Experimental Lakes Area in Manitoba, are mapping relationships between carbon and freshwater systems such as lakes. As we explore options to capture and store atmospheric carbon, it will be important to understand how freshwater systems operate as sources and sinks in a changing climate. Investing in these systems through ecosystem restoration and natural infrastructure projects offers additional tools for Canada’s net-zero toolbox. 

Canada has a long way to go to reach net-zero in 2050, and water will be a key part of achieving that goal. Understanding and addressing these emissions will be critical as we navigate the uncharted waters ahead.

Alan Shapiro is the director of Foresight Canada’s waterNEXT network and principal at water and sustainability consultancy Shapiro & Company. 

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In response, on the 25^th anniversary of the UN’s World Water Day March 22, the Prince of Wales launched a sustainable finance accelerator aimed at fast-tracking investments in climate-resilient water programs for up to 50 million people in water-stressed areas by 2030.

The kickoff of Resilient Water Accelerator follows a pledge to boost water financing made at the Prince’s Sustainable Markets Initiative [SMI] Roundtable on Water in London last year.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced the need to ensure access to clean water services around the world,” said Prince Charles in a statement. “Since the first meeting in March of last year, the [SMI] Water and Climate Finance Initiative Task Force has worked steadfastly towards achieving this, by boosting climate funding for comprehensive scalable resilient water programmes.”

A report released by WaterAid in October found that despite the climate crisis triggering a rise in natural disasters, only 5% of global climate finance is currently allocated for adapting to climate change – roughly US$30 billion per year. The main recipients of any adaptation-related finance to date have been middle-earning countries. “The result is that not only is not enough being invested, but even that investment is not going to vulnerable countries,” concluded WaterAid.

Last month, the UN warned that over a third of the world – 2.2 billion people ­– still lack access to clean drinking water. The Resilient Water Accelerator will support locations six Africa and South East Asia, where WaterAid says “a new approach can be tested, to address holistic threats on the ground, from pollution of water sources, rising levels of water-stress, exacerbated by dwindling ground-water supplies.”

The Accelerator is being led by international development organization WaterAid and will bring together key governments (including the UK, Bangladesh, Burkina-Faso and Nigeria), private sector leaders and development banks.

“As we head into the crucial climate negotiations at COP in Glasgow later this year, this work will show that practical solutions to the water and climate crisis exist,” said WaterAid’s chief executive Tim Wainwright.

The Prince isn’t the only celebrity getting in on water financing. Actor Matt Damon, who co-founded the nonprofit Water.org in 2009, has teamed up with SMI. “We are proud to be part of the Resilient Water Accelerator,” tweeted the organization Monday. Damon is calling on a wave of private sector investors to open their wallets and scale up micro-finance solutions to the water crisis. Since 2009, Water.org reports that it has doled out US$2.6 billion via 7.2 million loans, improving water access for 33 million people.

“All we’re trying to do is get the attention of the heavy hitters to come into this space,” said Damon. “There is so much low-hanging fruit here — and this model really, really works.”

Related read: The man who would be ‘climate king’

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