Diverse values for nature & courts - Editorial by Dr Jacob Phelps

Nature is valued by communities in diverse ways around the globe. Photo: Diego Perez/USDA Forest Service.

People around the world value nature for a wide range of reasons – extending far beyond the merely economic values of what we can extract from it. We are all familiar with the importance that nature holds for us across our everyday lives: spending time outdoors enhances our wellbeing, and the cultural, livelihood, nutritional and spiritual connections that we feel to places and other species are often intrinsic parts of our lived experiences and identities.

“Our Conservation-Litigation.org network is exploring how these diverse values can be better reflected in our legal cases. ”

This is important because these various “interdependent relationships among humans and nature often go overlooked, delaying better environmental, social and public health outcomes”.  Many intrinsic and relational values are often absent from policy and management decisions, which are more commonly informed by the near-term economic benefits of exploitation.

Writing in the journal Nature, colleagues from the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently highlighted the challenges of integrating nature into policy and decision-making processes in a way that better reflects the values we have for it.  They argue that tackling this oversight is essential to guiding humanity towards more sustainable pathways. 

The IPBES team consider a number of ways in which values can better inform our policies, choices and behaviours. For example, scenario planning can help evaluate different policy choices to identify those that best meet different stakeholders’ needs, accounting for the values they hold important.  Values can inform agenda-setting, highlighting the importance of certain choices and establishing the metrics by which different policy choices are evaluated.  They can help with advocating for and justifying decisions, such as the location, scale or design of a project so that it reduces harm to biodiversity. 

Importantly, court cases and verdicts are also a way in which diverse values can help inform policy and management.

Court verdicts provide legal recognition for certain types of rights and values, lending weight and increasing public visibility. Indeed, courts and judges hold unique, privileged positions in most societies, reflecting but also publicly shaping rights and values. Court decisions can further instruct government agencies to consider certain types of rights in their policies and work.

“Courts in many countries can not only order offenders to pay compensation, but also to undertake or fund certain remedial actions, including apologies, public service, habitat and species restoration, and investment into cultural and educational funds.”

Although the reflection of relational values for nature in court verdicts differs across countries and is still novel, there are a growing number of promising cases. For example, a 2021 wildlife case in China, brought by the Shandong Province Qingdao People's Prosecutor's Office against a catering company that was selling wild meat derived from protected species, was ordered to compensate the government for the loss of wildlife and related loss to ecosystem function, with the compensation totalling approximately $143,190. Importantly, the offending company was also ordered to issue a public apology in the national media – a recognition that harming nature caused a broader range of societal harms, beyond those that can be captured through a monetary payment.

In another case, Cameroon’s Ministry of Environment sued a group of illegal wildlife traders found guilty of trading 630kg of scales from the Critically Endangered Giant Pangolin, representing approximately 210 individual animals. In the 2018 verdict, the court ordered the defendants to compensate the government for the value of the harm they had caused–including to the socio-cultural values that people have for pangolins.

Close-up of seized pangolin scales in Cameroon. The pangolin is the world's only scaled mammal and in some communities is believed to be a symbol of hope or good luck.  Photo: Kenneth Cameron/USFWS

However, there are challenges to reflecting diverse values in court orders. As in other mainstream contexts associated with formal State institutions, courts have historically focused narrowly on mainstream economic values. And in their verdicts, judges often rely on ordering offenders to pay compensation for a narrow set of values. 

Better recognising the diverse values that humans hold for nature requires a more diverse set of remedies. 

We are currently exploring this topic to develop approaches and cases that push boundaries of what courts have historically recognised.  

Amidst growing recognition of the importance of recognising diverse values for nature, we need to also consider the role of courts. Our legal analyses explore if and how existing legislation allows for these broader claims across countries , and lawyers across our network are developing new and creative ways to build them into their cases.