It makes little sense to write about Indigenous peoples’ rights without placing them in the post-pandemic context, and without articulating their distinct role in the climate crisis. Indeed, Indigenous peoples around the globe find themselves disproportionately affected by extractive operations but also so-called “development” or infrastructure projects – and this concerns, first and foremost, Indigenous peoples’ immediate environment and livelihoods, as sources of subsistence and spiritual significance. Discrimination and marginalization are not new. Since the colonial era, Indigenous peoples have been exposed to external threats, including deadly diseases and systemic dispossession, while often lacking the institutional means to defend themselves. Today, this legacy persists in the form of environmental injustice, prompting sustained and organized forms of territorial resistance and socioenvironmental defense on the ground. At the same time, the burden of protecting the planet’s climate and biodiversity has increasingly fallen to the grassroots – particularly to Indigenous communities. Their knowledge systems, based on long-standing ecological stewardship and intergenerational knowledge transmission, are now gaining recognition, also beyond their own contexts. They are being brought to the forefront of global environmental governance, where Indigenous voices are playing a growing role in shaping the agendas of international climate and biodiversity forums.

This chapter shows that the CBD regime contains provisions on benefit-sharing, consent-like rights, and the recognition of indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs) that help implementing Indigenous rights to land, natural resources, cultural rights, FPIC, and self-determination, and complement protection thereof in the context of biodiversity protection. This contribution also argues that the CBD regime gives rise to four new categories of collective rights of Indigenous Peoples that are not (fully) protected under IHRL: the right to benefit-sharing, the right to genetic resources, the right to traditional knowledge (TK), and biocultural rights. These rights bear a good potential for additional protection of collective rights because they apply to situations that would otherwise not be covered under IHRL, illustrative being the entitlement to genetic resources. In terms of the theoretical contribution of these rights, this chapter demonstrates that the CBD legal framework contributes to reinforcing legal pluralism, by assessing Indigenous Peoples’ entitlements to TK and, indirectly, to genetic resources in light of Indigenous customs, practices, and procedures. The chapter concludes that Indigenous Peoples’ rights protected under the CBD framework do not perfectly coincide with the categories of environmental rights due to their main object and substantive nature.

The determination with which Indigenous peoples aim at protecting their traditional territories from environmental degradation emanates from their deepest spirituality and religious beliefs. The most effective means they have to avoid the deterioration of Indigenous territories is traditional ecological knowledge, which has already been recognized as critical in the combat against the environmental crisis. This traditional knowledge is an inextricable, constituent part not only of these peoples’ right to a healthy environment, but also of their right to freedom of religion or belief, all of which shows how in Indigenous worldviews traditional practices and knowledge systems are intertwined with belief systems. In spite of this, there is a worrying lack of understanding and operationalization of these peoples’ freedom of religion or belief, which hinders, in turn, the full realization of their environmental rights. With that in mind, and through an inductive approach, this chapter aims at exploring this connection while assessing the threats Indigenous religious identities and cultural survival are currently exposed to as a consequence of environmental degradation, so as to provide critical guidelines on the way forward, which must necessarily build on securing the full and effective participation of Indigenous peoples in environmental action and policy-making.

The chapter responds to movements in international human rights law to articulate Indigenous rights to the environment. Specifically, the chapter draws upon critical Indigenous literature to identify Indigenous concerns regarding international human rights approaches. The analysis provides a brief background on prevailing international law approaches to Indigenous environmental rights, along with an overview of Indigenous critiques of international law for Indigenous peoples. The chapter extends the analysis to international human rights. The analysis reviews of jurisprudence in international law that extends international human rights to protect Indigenous rights to the environment. The analysis follows such review with a critique drawn from the commentaries of Indigenous scholars who view the existing international human rights system as being problematic for Indigenous peoples. The analysis finds that while international human rights law presents potential opportunities to protect Indigenous rights to environment, Indigenous critics still see human rights approaches as being problematic for Indigenous peoples.

This article examines Mapuche law (az mapu) through the lens of socio-environmental rights and explores its role in a transmodern discussion of legal pluralism. Challenging Western legal norms, the authors assert that Indigenous resistance is a fundamental right undermined by liberal positive law. They trace the colonial history of Indigenous peoples in Abya Yala and Wallmapu, advocating for alternative conceptions of justice and law to address entrenched asymmetries and colonial violence originating in the conquest of America. A transmodern framework is offered to envision Indigenous rights beyond Eurocentric colonial metaphysics. Within Latin America and Abya Yala, proponents of positive law confront a critical juncture regarding Indigenous rights, their existence, and revival. The dynamics of az mapu in Wallmapu are analyzed via transmodernity and legal pluralism, revealing the interconnected dimensions of environmental justice essential in the early twenty-first century. Ultimately, the authors link the Indigenous rights debate to the broader climate crisis—marked by eco- and ethnocidal threats such as global warming—and propose a decolonial understanding of justice. This approach reconfigures human-nature relationships and emphasizes that the severe socio-environmental crisis demands responses grounded in contextual rights like Mapuche az mapu and its intrinsic bond with itrofillmogen (all living things).

The recent recognition of the Rights of Nature (RoN) in the legal sphere presents significant challenges in its implementation. In modern States, justice is predominantly a human domain, based on the assumption that only in this realm can objectivity supersede subjectivity, rationality override emotionality, and the social transcend the natural. Consequently, the recognition of the Rights of Nature has required judicial systems to strive to overcome anthropocentric perspectives in order to advance biocentric and ecocentric frameworks. However, a critical question arises: How can non-human entities be formally recognized as subjects of justice? What poses a challenge for Western justice systems seems to be inherent in Indigenous justice systems, where the spiritual, human, and natural realms are not compartmentalized. The nature-culture nexus has been integrated from the perspectives of communities that maintain direct relationships with and dependencies on land and water sources, highlighting the relevance of worldviews that transcend segmented anthropocentric perspectives. To shed light on these challenges, this chapter proposes a theoretical-methodological analysis grounded in political ontology and the biocultural approach, aiming to facilitate dialogue between State legal systems and Indigenous customary law. We argue that biocultural rights and the recognition of legal pluralism offer the advantage of recognizing the role of communities as interactive participants in their territories, presenting an alternative for the decolonization of the Rights of Nature.

This article examines the relationship and conflicts between the Rights of Nature (RoN) framework and the Indigenous right to territory. While RoN has gained recognition across several jurisdictions as a response to the global ecological crisis, it often stems from Western moral-philosophical perspectives supported by conservationist and scientific debates. By contrast, the right to territory of Indigenous peoples represent a struggle for the recognition of ontological and relational plurality arising with the Indigenous peoples-environment nexus. Through analysis of diverse ecocentric frameworks and their legal applications, the article assesses the extent to which the recognition of rights to nature does not always align with Indigenous claims about territory. Additionally, it cautions against the risks of imposing Western ecocentric categories onto Indigenous struggles, which may replicate colonial logics underlying dominant ecocentric approaches. The article concludes by proposing an interpretation of RoN that embraces epistemic plurality and the ontological-relational representation of nature of Indigenous peoples to create spaces for equitable dialogue and strategic alliances between the right to territory of Indigenous peoples and RoN in the fight against anthropocentrism in courts.