Written contribution to the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels taking place in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April 2026, by members of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE) and of the DEFEND-BIO legal clinic
Claudia Ituarte-Lima, Stella Terjung, Maria Andrea Nardi, Clara Barbosa, Ji Yeon Kang
Art from the Caring Pavillion – which took place parallel to the Climate Summit (COP30) in Belem, Brazil (Photo: Claudia Ituarte-Lima)
Introduction
This contribution to the conference on Transitioning away from Fossil Fuels focuses on thematic pillar 3 which addresses the advancement of international cooperation and climate diplomacy. The Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative represents an opportunity to align climate ambition with human rights and biodiversity stewardship. We consider this stage of the process a crucial waypoint for responding in a systematic way to the root causes of climate change, biodiversity loss and the pollution crisis. Drawing on experience from previous negotiations, we argue that a successful integration of relevant elements in a new treatydepends on their explicit inclusion at the negotiating table early on. While time is of the essence, accelerating the process towards a just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels risks overlooking important considerations. In this submission, we therefore call for the explicit and systematic inclusion of the following elements in the ongoing dialogues: 1) Environmental Human Rights Defenders (EHRDs)[1], 2) Biodiversity and 3) the Right to a Healthy Environment.
Two challenges tend to arise from Multilateral Environmental Agreements (hereafter MEAs): first, their fragmentation into separate silos; climate, biodiversity, energy, water and pollution and second, a weak integration of human rights. We support the critical and timely work advanced by the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative but argue that the above-mentioned aspects of EHRD, biodiversity and the Right to a Healthy Environment need to be strengthened. As of now, the initiative provides only limited recognition and protection of EHRDs’ rights and insufficient consideration to biodiversity as in the multiplicity of life on Earth. This stands in stark contrast to a reality in which people, communities and EHRDs are experiencing the combined consequences of climate change, environmental degradation or industrial pollution (IPBES, 2019). It is important to note that climate change mitigation goes beyond mere fossil emissions. The drivers of the climate crisis are multiple and cannot be addressed in isolation. Fossil fuel extraction, deforestation, large-scale renewable energy projects and critical mineral mining disrupt ecosystems and generate cumulative socio-ecological impacts (Fletcher et al, 2024).
Why EHRDs, Biodiversity and the Right to a Healthy Environment in the emerging Transition Away from Fossil Fuels Treaty?
EHRDs’ Rights in Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels
Environmental Human Rights Defenders (EHRDs) are individuals and groups in diverse settings around the globe, including rural as well as urban areas, mobilizing to tackle climate, biodiversity, pollution and water crises, along with those defending their lands and territories when their ways of life and livelihoods are threatened by destruction of ecosystems or injustice. People who support individuals and collectives with their professional capacities (e.g. lawyers, journalists and scientists) to advance the realisation of environmental rights at various geographical scales are also EHRDs, often conducting their work at high personal risk (Ituarte-Lima et al, 2025).
EHRDs are key agents in catalysing the realisation of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment (hereafter, right to a healthy environment) as they are in the frontline of protecting the multiplicity of life on Earth. However, in the current conditions, EHRDs face vulnerabilities and persecution and their traditional or scientific knowledge is often left aside in decision-making processes (Global Witness, 2025).With the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (short FFNPT Initiative) potentially having wide impacts beyond solely climate policy, it is necessary to address the role of EHRD and their rights in the just transition as well as to guarantee that their voices are heard, acknowledging that traditional and scientific knowledge can significantly contribute to the efforts of protecting ecosystems and the diversity of life on Earth.
The Principles Report from a global consultation in May 2024 highlights calls for the inclusion of defenders and biodiversity – we support these calls and urge for these results to be included throughout ongoing and future dialogues. While wedo note ambitions to include Indigenous Peoples, labour, gender, youth, faith and human-rights networks to safeguard rights, justice and the public good (Nasrallah & Hällström 2025), we however identify a lack of inclusion of EHRDs systematically throughout the treaty dialogues. This stands at odds with their essential role in protecting nature, catalysing climate action and therefore promoting and protecting the right to a healthy environment. In order to ensure that no community is left behind, we thus advocate that EHRDs must leave their mark on the process ofthe Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative.
This matters because the transition away from fossil fuels is already placing growing pressure on communities and biodiversity worldwide – from the Atacama Salt Flat in Chile (Rumbo Colectivo, 2025) to reindeer herding pathways in Sápmi (Gouffin, 2025) – and these pressures are expected to intensify, particularly for local communities and environmental defenders (Svampa, 2019; EJ Atlas, 2026). In this vein, we propose provisions to fully integrate the rights of EHRDs as actors of change in the dialogues around any Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty with the aim to keep up a pace that is required to uphold climate justice for the most affected peoples and territories. A FFNPT should consider the central role they have in protecting life on Earth, safeguarding the climate and environment, thriving biodiversity and leading pathways to sustainability (Ituarte-Lima et al, 2023). Recognising the need to protect and sustainably use biodiversity and safeguard EHRDs’ rights not only enables holistic governance and rights-aligned approaches but is an obligation within existing Multilateral Environmental Agreements and international human rights law.
Biodiversity on the Road towards Exiting a Fossil Fuel Economy
Because of their mutual reinforcement, the safeguarding of EHRDs’ rights goes hand in hand with the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity (Ituarte-Lima et al, 2023). The Convention on Biological Diversity from 1992 defined biological diversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources including terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and ecological complexes of which they are a part: this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems”.
In order to make possible the vision of thriving ecosystems as put forward by the FFNPT Initiative, we propose to strengthen the inclusion of biodiversity into the values and ideals of the initiative. Acknowledging the importance of a fossil fuel phase-out for the protection of nature, it is important to recognise in the same breath that some proposed solutions risk creating new extractive sites, which may in turn become targets of contestation and expose EHRDs to harm as well as put biodiversity under threat. Thus, we urge for an added focus on biodiversity on the pathway to an energy transition along the lines of the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) stating that:
“Biodiversity is fundamental to human well-being, a healthy planet, and economic prosperity for all people, including for living well in balance and in harmony with Mother Earth. We depend on it for food, medicine, energy, clean air and water, security from natural disasters as well as recreation and cultural inspiration, and it supports all systems of life on Earth.” (Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity 2022, Decision 15/4, para 1)
It is therefore vital for thriving ecosystems in a post fossil fuel era to integrate biodiversity and ecosystem protection into renewable energy and critical mineral laws and policies. Preventing new extractivist harms and ensuring a just, ecologically responsible transition, requires environmental and social impact assessments that consider systemic risks, cumulative impacts and Indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ knowledge and self-driven initiatives for sustainable pathways.
The Right to a Healthy Environment: Interplay between Substantive and Procedural Elements in Just Transition Pathways
Noting that the 2024 Principles Report highlights, among others, the Right to a Healthy Environment as well as the importance of biodiversity, we suggest including these dimensions holistically and systematically throughout the dialogues and roundtables for a fossil fuel exit. The seven substantive elements of the right to a healthy environment specify the interconnections between climate, biodiversity and the environment and their relevance for humans: safe climate, clean air, healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, non-toxic environment, safe and sufficient water and healthy and sustainable food. There are multiple roles that EHRDs play in protecting and promoting these substantive elements of their right to a healthy environment through their ancestral, traditional and scientific knowledge, their climate activism, their local-based economies, their low-impact consumption lifestyles and others. The procedural elements of the right to a healthy environment, including access to information, public participation in environmental decision-making and effective justice incorporating remedy are also central for fulfilling the seven substantive elements of the right to a healthy environment. EHRDs have already shown their key role in advancing sustainability pathways and there are already existing provisions within MEAs which are relevant for implementing these elements. Lessons from existing instruments show that explicit provisions require sustained advocacy and careful legal design for contributing to just transition pathways.
How to advance EHRDs Rights and Biodiversity Stewardship in the Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels
Grounded in this rationale, we propose leveraging existing international conventions and advisory opinions as authoritative guidance for an understanding that incorporating EHRDs rights and biodiversity is not optional but a duty under existing international law. These are not proposals in the abstract. They build on prior lawmaking concerning access to information, public participation, access to justice, biodiversity mainstreaming, protection of defenders’ rights, environmental impact assessments and the evolving content of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. They are also consistent with the clinic’s amicus brief, which emphasizes that EHRDs should be understood not only as a marginalised group in need of protection, but also as agents of change actively contributing to biodiversity, climate action and sustainability pathways (Ituarte-Lima et al, 2026).
Incorporating EHRD Rights
Moving beyond consultation to establish a legally guaranteed and informed participatory role for EHRDs should be understood as a natural extension of existing treaty practice and language rather than as a novel legal practice. This recommendation is anchored in Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration and in the Preamble and operative architecture of the Escazú Agreement, whose structure links access to information, public participation and access to justice, and in Article 9 imposes a duty to guarantee a safe and enabling environment for defenders in environmental matters. At the same time, this should not be framed as a contribution limited to Latin America and the Caribbean.
The same logic is supported more broadly by the Aarhus Convention – with Parties from Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Africa, along with the European Union. Aarhus Convention Article 3(8) protects persons from penalisation, persecution or harassment for exercising environmental participation rights. Both systems have also moved beyond principle to institutional practice: under Decision VII/9, the Aarhus Convention established a rapid-response mechanism through a Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, while the Escazú Parties adopted an Action Plan to advance implementation of Article 9 in 2024. States should develop proactive measures to enable EHRDs to participate in an effective, meaningful, open and inclusive way throughout environmental decision-making from the local to the international level.
Inter-American case law reinforces the urgency of moving from principles to the realisation of EHRDs’ rights. In Kawas-Fernández v Honduras, the Court addressed the killing of an environmental defender and the State’s failure to investigate effectively (Kawas Fernández v Honduras, 2009). In Escaleras Mejía et al. v Honduras, it dealt with the killing of environmentalist Carlos Escaleras Mejía and the lack of an effective judicial response (Escaleras Mejía et al v Honduras, 2018). These cases show that the absence of explicit protection for defenders is not only a normative gap but one that has produced concrete failures of prevention, protection and accountability. This is consistent with the clinic brief’semphasis on States’ positive duties to protect and prevent violations against EHRDs, including where private actors are involved (Ituarte-Lima et al, 2026).
Specifically, we urge to explicitly refer to State’s obligations on conducting timely access to information, meaningful public participation across all decision-making processes related to fossil fuel non-proliferation, phase-out planning and the implementation of just transition mechanisms. The GBF strengthens this through Target 22, which links biodiversity governance to participation, access to justice, and the protection of environmental human rights defenders. The Cartagena Protocol, while more specific, also offers a useful governance model built around precaution, risk assessment, risk management, information-sharing, and public awareness and participation.
This matters because climate change mitigation is not only about reducing fossil fuel emissions: it is also about governing transitions in a way that protects ecosystems, biodiversity as well as the communities and defenders whose rights are tied to them. This is also consistent with La Oroya Community v Peru, where the Inter-American Court addressed severe environmental harm together with failures of public participation, access to information and protection against threats and harassment (Case of the Inhabitants of La Oroya v Peru, 2023). In this sense, recognition of EHRDs and biodiversity safeguards are not separate objectives, but mutually reinforcing and complementary ones: EHRDs are essential to biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, and more effective biodiversity and climate governance can reduce risks to defenders.
Anchored in Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration and the Preamble to the Escazú Agreement, we recommend the FFNPT moves beyond passive consultation to establish a legally guaranteed voice for EHRDs. This necessitates mandatory, informed participation in national plans and transitional policies. Specifically, we urge the treaty framework to recognise the right of defenders to meaningful public participation across all decision-making processes related to fossil fuel non-proliferation, phase-out planning and the implementation of just transition mechanisms.
Furthermore, we recommend State Parties to formally recognize and elevate the indispensable role of EHRDs – not merely as stakeholders, but as right-holders and essential catalysts for environmental protection, biodiversity conservation and sustainable practices throughout the transition away from fossil fuels.
Grounded in this rationale and building on the GBF and the Escazú Agreement, we suggest including in the preamble of the FFNPT language along the following lines:
Recognizing EHRDs not merely as actors facing threats, but also as agents of change and central participants in shaping just sustainability pathways.
“Recognizing also the important work of the public and of human rights defenders in environmental matters for strengthening democracy, access rights and sustainable development and their fundamental contributions in this regard” (Escazú Agreement, Preamble).
“Alarmed by the continued loss of biodiversity and the threat that this poses to nature and human well-being” (Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, Preamble)
If a new treaty was to be drafted, we recommend including explicit reference to EHRD and nature to fulfil the ambition to ensure just transition to a fast, fair and financed phase-out of fossil fuels. We therefore suggest including provisions within the operational part of the treaty that:
Guarantee a safe, participatory and enabling environment for Environmental Human Rights Defenders inter alia groups, movements, activists and scientists, and individuals from children tograndparents – who are taking action to defend their human right, and the human right of future generations to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment (Forst, 2024), including water, air, land, flora and fauna.
Recognise the role of EHRDs in environmental protection and
sustainable practices during the transition away from fossil fuels.
We propose to include treaty provisions that specify State obligations towards EHRDs and that build in already existing plurilateral treaties inter alia:
Parties shall implement measures to protect EHRDs from harassment, threats, discrimination, and violence related to their work (Escazú Agreement, Art. 9(2)).
“Each Party shall guarantee a safe and enabling environment for persons, groups and organizations that promote and defend human rights in environmental matters, so that they are able to act free from threat, restriction and insecurity” (Escazú Agreement, Art. 9(1)).
“Each Party shall take adequate and effective measures to recognize, protect and promote all the rights of human rights defenders in environmental matters, including their right to life, personal integrity, freedom of opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association, and free movement, as well as their ability to exercise their access rights, taking into account its international obligations in the field of human rights, its constitutional principles and the basic concepts of its legal system” (Escazú Agreement, Art. 9(2)).
“Each Party shall also take appropriate, effective and timely measures to prevent, investigate and punish attacks, threats or intimidations that human rights defenders in environmental matters may suffer while exercising the rights set out in the present Agreement” (Escazú Agreement, Art. 9(3)).
Mainstreaming Biodiversity
Recognising that fossil fuel phase-out is important for protecting nature and also recognising that some proposed solutions risk creating new extractive sites, we urge for an added focus on biodiversity on the pathway to an energy transition along the lines of the Kunming Montreal GBF. Embedding biodiversity and systemic risk safeguards should likewise be framed as a proposal grounded in existing treaty obligations and implementation frameworks. The Convention on Biological Diversity already requires States to integrate biodiversity into sectoral and cross-sectoral planning and to use impact assessment and public participation in decisions that may significantly affect biodiversity, especially through Articles 6 and 14.
This is also supported by Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku v Ecuador, where the Inter-American Court addressed oil activities authorized in Indigenous territory without prior consultation, underscoring the importance of prior consultation and impact assessment in extractive contexts (Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku v Ecuador, 2012). The GBF strengthens this through Target 14 on mainstreaming biodiversity across policy and planning. Together, these instruments support a treaty design in which biodiversity protection is not external to the transition away from fossil fuels, but part of its legal architecture.
The Paris Agreement (2015) itself refers in Article 5 to conserving and enhancing sinks and reservoirs, including forests, while the Ramsar Convention supports the conservation and wise use of wetlands through Article 3 (Convention on Wetlands, 1971). Together, these instruments reinforce a basic proposition: a credible transition must protect biodiversity, forests, wetlands, oceans and other carbon sinks, rather than sacrificing them in the name of climate ambition. At the marine level, the ITLOS Advisory Opinion of 21 May 2024 held that anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions constitute pollution of the marine environment under UNCLOS and that States have obligations to prevent, reduce and control that pollution, reinforcing the need to protect oceans and marine ecosystems as part of climate governance (ITLOS, 2024).
Strengthening a focus on biodiversity along the pathway to an energy transition is therefore necessary to prevent the replication of harmful extractive practices. This is especially important because transition pathways can reproduce environmental injustice if they are not carefully governed. The Fosen judgment is instructive, as the Norwegian Supreme Court held that wind power licences violated Article 27 of the ICCPR, showing that even renewable energy projects can violate rights if transition governance ignores Indigenous land use, culture and participation (Statnett SF and Fosen Vind DA v Sør-Fosen sijte and Nord-Fosen siida, 2021). This is precisely why biodiversity safeguards, participation guarantees and rights-based impact assessment should be built into treaty design from the outset.
Catalysing the Right to a Healthy Environment
One framework that already embraces a theory of change is the Kunming Montreal GBF, which recognises that urgent policy action is required globally, regionally and nationally to achieve sustainable development so that the drivers of undesirable change exacerbating biodiversity loss are reduced and reversed, allowing for the recovery of ecosystems and the realisation of the CBD’s vision of living in harmony with nature by 2050. It also seeks to “ensure the full, equitable, inclusive, effective and gender-responsive representation and participation in decision-making, and access to justice and information related to biodiversity … and ensure the full protection of environmental human rights defenders” (CBD, 2002: target 22). These provisions are valuable not only for biodiversity governance as such, but because they show how defender protection, participation and ecosystem integrity can be mainstreamed together rather than treated as isolated concerns.
This integrated reading is now strongly reinforced by the ICJ’s 23 July 2025 climate advisory opinion, which treated the CBD, UNCCD and UNCLOS as among the most directly relevant applicable laws for climate change and affirmed that a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of many human rights. At the human rights level, Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland further confirms that inadequate climate action can engage human rights obligations, with the European Court finding violations of Article 8 and access to court (Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland, 2024). These developments strengthen the argument that the proposed treaty should be drafted and interpreted systemically, drawing not only from climate-specific instruments, but also from biodiversity, marine, wetlands and human rights law.
For that reason, it is important to explicitly recognise that EHRDs’ rights and biodiversity safeguards are not separate objectives, but mutually reinforcing and complementary ones. EHRDs are essential to the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems, while healthy ecosystems, effective climate and biodiversity governance and better procedural guarantees can reduce the risks faced by defenders.
Conclusions
The global transition away from fossil fuels, underscored in the Belém Declaration for Green Industrialization, presents both significant opportunities and systemic risks. Rapid renewable energy expansion and critical mineral extraction, if ungoverned, may replicate extractivist harms under the banner of “green energy” or “sustainable development.” Frontline communities and EHRDs face new threats, making it urgent to incorporate biodiversity and environmental human rights into the roadmap for transition to a non-fossil fuel economy now.
Embedding language on EHRD, biodiversity and the right to a healthy environment in the Non-Proliferation Fossil Fuels Treaty building on existing MEAs, international human rights treaties and authoritative interpretations of Advisory Opinions on Climate Change can set a precedent for integrating human rights, environmental and climate objectives in transitioning to a fossil fuel free economy, advancing multilateral cooperation and accelerating a just, ecologically responsible transition.
Recognising that a just transition and fair phase-out away from fossil fuels is inextricably linked to the active, secure and meaningful participation of EHRDs, we urge for EHRDs to be included in every phase of the process towards a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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[1] What this contribution refers to as EHRD can also be described as “biosphere defenders.” This term highlights the web of connections between climate, biodiversity and peoples and recognises that humanity is also part of the biosphere itself. For the contribution to the Santa Marta Conference, however, the term EHRD was chosen.