In November 2024, Monica Feria-Tinta, a veteran of UN tribunals and the international criminal court, strode through a heavy black door into a Georgian building in London’s august legal district for a meeting about a tree in Southend. Affectionately known as Chester, the 150-year-old plane tree towers over a bus shelter in the centre of the Essex seaside town. The council wanted to cut it down and residents were fighting back – but they were running out of options. Katy Treverton, a local campaigner, had travelled from Southend to ask Feria-Tinta’s legal advice. “Chester is one of the last trees left in this part of Southend,” said Treverton, sitting at a large table in an airy meeting room. “Losing him would be losing part of the city’s identity.”
Feria-Tinta nodded, deep-red fingernails clattering on her laptop as she typed. She paused and looked up. “Are we entitled to nature? Is that a human right? I would say yes. It’s not an easy argument, but it’s a valid one.” She recommended going to the council with hard data about the impact of trees on health, and how removing the tree could violate the rights of an economically deprived community. Recent rulings in the European court of human rights, she added, reinforced the notion that the state has obligations on the climate crisis. This set a legal precedent that could help residents defend their single tree in Southend. “It isn’t just a tree,” said Feria-Tinta. “More than that is at stake: a principle.”
The meeting was just a tiny example of a much bigger shift in how law is being used to fight climate breakdown. Since the early 1980s, communities and campaigners have turned to the courts to fight back against polluting industries. But traditional environmental claims are geographically specific – as in West Virginia, say, where residents sued the chemical firm DuPont for failing to prevent toxic chemicals from leaking into their water supply. Climate litigation presents very different challenges. A vast number of actors are responsible for emissions, making it hard to establish legal responsibility, and often the worst harms occur in a different continent to the worst emissions. But in the last decade, a series of court cases around the world have sought to change the legal status quo. “It’s been a huge shift,” said Adam Weiss, chief programmes and impact officer at ClientEarth, an environmental law charity that has spearheaded this approach. “Judges now see the environmental issues we’re facing as existential, and have allowed the interpretation of human rights law to shift to grasp that.”
Feria-Tinta is one of the pioneers of this change. In 2017, she worked on the first case to argue before an international court that state failings on the climate crisis were violating the human rights of a group of Indigenous people. The case was successful, and since then, hundreds of claimants around the world have made similar arguments. Feria-Tinta is “one of a small group that’s really engaged in thinking strategically about how to use the law as a tool to push for greater ambition on climate change and biodiversity”, says Margherita Cornaglia, a barrister specialising in climate and environmental justice.
After the meeting with Treverton, Feria-Tinta explained to me how all of these grand legal debates related to Chester the tree. “It is not just that this tree is threatened, but that it’s valuable,” she said. “After the second world war we developed certain standards in human rights treaties because of the horrors humanity endured. But we separated what is human from nature. We are living in such a cataclysmic moment that only now are we realising how vital nature is for human beings. The law has to be reframed, rethought.”
Many observers see the law as the last hope for preventing catastrophic climate change. “It seems to me all other avenues have been exhausted,” says Brett Christophers, professor at Uppsala University and the author of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. “Governments and companies aren’t taking serious and significant action, but in theory, at least, both are beholden to the law.” This strategic shift also has limitations, since, put bluntly, states can ignore rulings made in faraway international courts (or, for that matter, in their own courts). Meanwhile, it is not just environmental groups who are embracing climate-related litigation. In the US, there has been a significant rise in cases filed by airlines, fossil fuel producers and even states arguing against the obligation to consider climate risk in their financial planning. Yet Feria-Tinta passionately believes in the power of the law to create change. As the world passes the grim benchmark of 1.5 degrees of global heating, can the law save us from environmental destruction?
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The barristers’ chambers grouped around the four Inns of Court in central London are the epitome of the British establishment. The buildings – courtyards with neatly manicured lawns, stone staircases and gothic masonry – resemble Oxbridge colleges and grand private schools, and many of the people who work there are graduates of these institutions.
Feria-Tinta’s path was different. She grew up in Peru, the daughter of Indigenous parents who had migrated to the capital city, Lima, and become successful businesspeople. Although she occasionally visited her grandparents in the Andes, most of her early life was spent in Lima, which she describes as a “grey, concrete city”. Indigenous culture was part of the background of her life, but one step removed; her parents spoke Quechua at home, but she never learned to speak it. She couldn’t communicate fully with her grandmother, who refused to learn Spanish – the language of the colonisers.
At school, Feria-Tinta excelled in debating and she ended up studying law at university. Soon after graduating, she was offered an exciting work opportunity, as an assistant producer on a British documentary about the political situation in Peru. She helped the team orchestrate interviews and set up shoots. By the time the programme aired in 1992, everything had changed. In April that year the president, Alberto Fujimori, dissolved Congress and began a brutal dictatorship. Political opponents were being persecuted. Facing the threat of jail time, torture or even death for her work on the film, Feria-Tinta fled to the UK in 1993 with the help of the documentary team. “It was difficult to accept that I’d become a refugee,” she told me. “Suddenly, I was at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. I was unprepared for that. Then I thought: OK, now what do I do?” She decided international law would be the best use of her training, and soon won a scholarship for a graduate degree at the London School of Economics.
Adjusting to life in Britain wasn’t easy; she was confused by people’s physical reserve and struggled to understand the accent. But these were small complaints. “I understand what it is to live in fear,” she said. “This was an opportunity to be alive, and I took it seriously.” She spent hours at London’s many free museums and public libraries and developed an enduring passion for English literature – her conversation is full of references to writers such as Alfred Tennyson, William Blake and Virginia Woolf. After graduating from LSE, she spent the next decade and a half working in international courts in Strasbourg, The Hague, Latin America and elsewhere. In 2014, she qualified as a barrister and won a pupillage at the London chambers Twenty Essex, where she is still based.
Feria-Tinta’s interest in environmental law developed in the wake of the 2015 Paris agreement, when she found herself wondering how the treaty could be enforced. The agreement set out states’ obligations on the climate but it did not include any enforcement mechanism to ensure that they actually complied. “At Cop each year, states seemed happy to just chat, chat, chat, despite how critical the situation was,” she said. “I wondered whether the old frameworks could be used to address it.”
Human rights law is broadly individualistic – to win a claim, someone has to show that their particular rights are being violated by a state, corporation or other entity. Environmental destruction tends to have more diffuse causes and effects. But in the aftermath of the Paris agreement, a fierce debate broke out among lawyers and scholars about whether international courts could be used to pursue climate justice – and if so, how.
In 2018, Feria-Tinta entered the fray with a paper arguing that even specific human rights agreements, and other longstanding, binding treaties such as the Law of the Sea, could apply to the climate crisis. “Treaties are living instruments – they have to be interpreted in light of modern developments,” she told me. Using apparently narrow treaties to build legal cases about climate change would prove to be an influential idea. But the only way to find out if it would work was to test the principle in court.
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The year before Feria-Tinta published her paper, Sophie Marjanac was living in her native Australia and working for ClientEarth, a legal charity focused on the environment. Her first job after university had been working on indigenous land rights on the Torres Strait, an archipelago off the northern coast of Australia. From the mid-2000s, tidal surges had sent flood water crashing over the inhabited islands, destroying graves and leaving human remains washed up on the land. Rising sea levels had led to saltwater seeping into the soil and poisoning coconut trees. Coastal erosion and flooding had decimated other crops.
For years, islanders had campaigned for help from the Australian government. They wanted funding for seawalls and other coastal defence measures, and they wanted Australia to address the root problem by setting more ambitious targets for reducing emissions. But nothing was changing. Marjanac, who had stayed in touch with elders on the islands, hit on the idea of arguing that climate breakdown was violating the islanders’ human rights.
At first glance, it was not a promising strategy: there was no successful precedent in the international courts. But the timing, at least, was good. Several similar cases had recently been brought in domestic courts around the world in what legal experts now call the “rights turn” in climate litigation. In 2015, a district court in the Netherlands ruled that the Dutch government had an explicit duty to protect the human rights of the Dutch population against climate breakdown and to reduce emissions. The same year, the Pakistani high court ruled that the government had violated citizens’ constitutional rights by not upholding its climate policy. Marjanac reasoned that if international courts made similar findings – that states have a legal duty to tackle the climate emergency – it could have a significant global impact.
In the autumn of 2018, ClientEarth contacted Feria-Tinta to ask whether she would act on behalf of the Torres Strait islanders. The team decided to bring a case before the UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with a specific treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – one of the courts of limited jurisdiction that Feria-Tinta believed could be used for this purpose. But there were many reasons to think the case might fail. Back in 2005, an Inuit activist had filed a similar claim against the US, arguing that global heating was melting the Arctic and violating the inhabitants’ human rights. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had rejected the claim without considering it. “One of the things that the petitioner in that case said is that what starts in the Arctic doesn’t end in the Arctic,” Feria-Tinta said. “That really, really stayed in my brain.”
As Feria-Tinta immersed herself in the islanders’ testimony, she found herself deeply moved. Feria-Tinta has two distinct modes: one is sharply rational, the other is emotionally attuned to the point of raw vulnerability. (During one of our conversations, she told me a story about watching a brood of newborn ducklings, gearing up to jump from their nest into the pond water far below. “Watching nature, you learn what courage is,” she said. “I thought: if a duck can do that, what can’t you do?” Her voice was steady as she recounted this, so it took me a moment to realise her eyes were streaming with tears.)
Feria-Tinta brought a fresh perspective to the Torres Strait islanders’ case. Indigenous people have special status in international law, and having worked with these communities professionally and being intimately connected with them personally, she was able to build a powerful argument. “She really helped us think how to broaden [the case],” said Marjanac. “She talked about bringing in children to the claim, because the right to culture was something transmitted to young people – and if the islanders are forced to leave because of the climate crisis and rising seas, it’s a fundamental breach of culture.”
In May 2019, the case was filed with the Human Rights Committee. The UN moves slowly at the best of times, and the committee faced pushback from the Australian government, which argued that climate breakdown was not the fault of any one state, and that Feria-Tinta’s interpretation of the treaty was incorrect. This approach was no surprise. Australia’s prime minister at the time, Scott Morrison, had once brandished a lump of coal in parliament as a sign of his commitment to the fossil fuel industry.
In September 2022, three and a half years after the case formally began, the verdict was announced. The committee found that the Australian government had failed to adequately protect Torres Straits islanders against the adverse impacts of the climate crisis. The UN ordered the government to compensate people for the harms they had suffered and to take measures to secure their communities’ safe existence.
Feria-Tinta was thrilled, not only for the islanders, but because of the possibilities the case opened. “It was the first time in international litigation that the question was, ‘Can a state be held responsible for lack of climate action?’” she recalled. “And the answer was ‘yes’.”
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In the five years between the inception of the Torres Strait case in 2017 and its conclusion in 2022, the field of climate litigation had transformed. In that time, the number of climate-releated cases going through courts had more than doubled. In 2023, the World Economic Forum identified failure to mitigate climate breakdown as the biggest risk facing the planet, and suggested that the increase in litigation was a result of governments moving too slowly in the transition to net zero. Today, litigation is an integral part of the climate movement.
Not everyone is happy about this shift. Recent judgments in the European court of human rights – such as a 2024 ruling in favour of a group of Swiss women who argued that their rights were being violated by their governments’ inadequate action on the climate – set a precedent that will have a sweeping impact on all European states, including the UK. Speaking to a British parliamentary committee soon after this ruling, Lord Sumption KC, a former supreme court justice, warned that such court decisions could limit national governments from making their own climate legislation. He was concerned that some of the interpretations were a stretch. “You can’t have moving goalposts and call it law,” he said.
Within the climate movement, most agree that a variety of tactics – protest, political negotiation, lawsuits – are needed to force change. But some are concerned that litigation risks absorbing disproportionate time and funding. “Donors like litigation,” one campaigner told me, with a weary shrug. It’s not hard to see why: a victory can make a tangible difference and generate a torrent of good publicity. The 2015 Dutch case spent years going through the courts – the government lost its final appeal in 2019 – but is credited with leading to a more stringent climate policy in the Netherlands and the phase-out of coal power stations. But litigation is also “slow, expensive and difficult”, says Catherine Higham, a senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and winning a legal battle is usually only the start of the story. Consider the Torres Strait, where three years after their moment of triumph, the islanders are still fighting for all the mitigation measures they were promised.
In March 2025, a landmark trial began in Germany that shows the limitations and possibilities of this approach. A Peruvian farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, is suing the German energy multinational RWE. His argument is that the company’s greenhouse gas emissions have fuelled global heating and accelerated glacial melt above his home town of Huaraz, Peru. This is despite the fact that RWE has never operated in Peru. The case has been extremely slow. First filed a decade ago, it is only just going to trial – but if it succeeds, it will open up a whole new avenue to hold major polluters accountable.
Feria-Tinta believes deeply that progress can be achieved through the courts, even if that change is incremental. “The law is what we have,” she told me, firmly. Yet in our conversations, she made clear that her loyalty is to the courts rather than to any particular cause. “There’s nothing like a dictatorship to make you appreciate the rule of law,” she said. “Try to live without it and you realise how important it is.”
This can lead to work that, to an outsider to the legal world, may seem odd. In her book, A Barrister for the Earth, which will be published later this month, Feria-Tinta discusses her work in 2019 on behalf of communities in West Timor affected by the Montara oil spill, one of the worst offshore oil platform accidents in history. Describing the “disturbing images” she saw of the aftermath of the spill, she writes that the quiet of her barristers’ chambers helped her “avoid becoming paralysed by the weight of it all”. Given this strong reaction, I was surprised when she later told me that even after she started working on groundbreaking climate crisis cases, she has acted on behalf of oil companies; in one case advising a company after an oil spill caused by a third party, in others advising on reputational risk or disputes.
Feria-Tinta does not see this as contradictory to her climate work: it is simply the nature of her job. She is not an environmental campaigner but a barrister. As such, she is a firm advocate for the “cab rank” rule, a professional obligation that states that barristers cannot pick and choose their cases according to personal preference. “I will sometimes defend parties with whom I disagree completely,” Feria-Tinta said. “I can still argue their case within the limits of the law.” One reason she particularly values the cab rank rule, she told me, is because in Latin America, where it doesn’t exist, lawyers can be persecuted for representing certain clients, whereas in Britain the rule helps maintain a level of distance. (Even so, Feria-Tinta’s stance is not shared by all of her peers. In 2023 more than 100 lawyers, including more than 20 barristers, said they would no longer abide by the cab rank rule when it came to climate-related cases.)
Feria-Tinta’s respect for the law does not amount to reverential conservatism: she wishes to change it from within. “She’s painstakingly focused and intellectually very, very ambitious,” said Jake White, head of legal at World Wide Fund for Nature. As her work repeatedly brought her into contact with people at the frontlines of climate disaster, she started to wonder if the legal system needs to change even more drastically – and to recognise the rights of nature itself.
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For a long time, even as an adult, Feria-Tinta felt disconnected from the natural world. It was through her long-term partner, Klemens Felder, who grew up in the Austrian Alps, that she began to develop an appreciation for nature. “I was oblivious – but he’s the kind of person to tell me, ‘Actually you’re not seeing this properly’,” she said. Learning to love the English landscape has been a way of connecting both with her adopted homeland and with Indigenous ideas about the interrelation of life on Earth.
This personal transformation was under way when, in the summer of 2020, Feria-Tinta was asked to provide advice for a case against a mining company that had begun exploration in Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest. Spanning almost 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres), Los Cedros is home to an extraordinary variety of species – from fungi and orchids to snails, jaguars and bears – many of which cannot be found anywhere else.
Feria-Tinta had worked on many cases involving mining in Latin America. But this one was unusual because there were no people in the area where mining was to take place – and therefore, no basis for a human rights claim. However, it happened that in 2008, Ecuador had become the first country in the world to recognise the rights of nature. Its constitution states that “nature, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”.
The idea that nature could have legal rights has gathered pace in the 21st century. Bolivia and Panama have followed Ecuador’s lead, while other countries have passed laws awarding rights to natural entities. In 2017, the government of New Zealand passed legislation which recognised the Whanganui river as a legal person. In 2019, Bangladesh granted all its rivers the same status as humans, empowering the National River Conservation Commission to represent them. These rights of nature cases tend to focus on biodiversity, distinguishing them from strategic climate litigation, which uses the law to hold states and corporations to account for climate harm. But biodiversity and climate breakdown are closely interrelated. Forests, rivers and oceans sustain human life and absorb carbon emissions, even as rising temperatures threaten their survival.
Awarding rights in principle is only one part of the battle; these rights also have to be protected on the ground. The Los Cedros case, which would be heard in the constitutional court of Ecuador, was going to test this principle. The mining company’s argument was that preventing them from going ahead would violate a trade agreement between Ecuador and Canada. Feria-Tinta had been asked to act as “amicus curiae”, providing expertise without acting on behalf of either party. As she worked on her brief, Feria-Tinta found herself thinking much more broadly about what the law is actually for. “Not that long ago, women were not considered legal persons,” she said. “In Europe, abstract entities – corporations, robots – can end up having rights. So what is the proper legal argument against a river or a forest being a legal entity?”
In December 2021, Ecuador’s constitutional court delivered its verdict. The rights of nature, the court said, were not mere rhetorical statements, but “binding legal obligations”. The forest had won. It was a judgment that showed what is possible for the worldwide rights of nature movement.
Los Cedros has, for now, been preserved. But the outcome of such cases is not always so clearcut, even after a positive court verdict. In 2017, India’s Ganges river was recognised as a legal person, but by 2023 pollution had continued to the extent that most of its water is undrinkable.
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The notion of trees or rivers having rights may seem distant from the UK. These ideas are most firmly established in countries with organised Indigenous communities, who see the Earth as a “single, interconnected organism”, as Feria-Tinta puts it in her book. “I suspect many British judges would roll their eyes if you tried to argue a forest should have rights,” said Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK. But even in Britain, there have been some developments on this front.
A few years after the Los Cedros case, an environmental group in Sussex instructed Feria-Tinta to help them draft a charter for the river Ouse. Like many other rivers in the UK, the Ouse is polluted with effluent and wastewater. The charter they produced states that the Ouse is a living entity with eight specific rights, including the right to flow and the right to be pollution-free. In February 2025, Lewes district council confirmed that it supports the principles of the charter. However, it is not binding, and the next stage is to work out how these rights can be implemented. And yet seeing this happen in her adopted country was emotional for Feria-Tinta. “I’ve come to love the rivers of England, which have been on this island long before any form of human life,” she said. “Rivers are places where civilisations began, and most people I have met around here want nature to be cherished.”
The more cases she has worked on, the more Feria-Tinta has come to see commonalities in how seemingly very different communities relate to their natural environments. At the start of 2025, she finalised her legal advice about Chester, the tree in Southend that the council intended to chop down. She set out the council’s obligations on the climate under the European convention on human rights. As she drafted the document, she found herself thinking about the Salween river in Myanmar, where she had advised an Indigenous community fighting a dam project some years earlier. Both the tree in Essex and the river in Myanmar were seen by the authorities as expendable, rather than as living entities valued by the people around them. “Whether it’s a single tree, or a whole community depending on a river, what is at stake is the future of humanity,” she told me.
A couple of months later, on a blustery day in early spring, I met Feria-Tinta in the village on the border of Surrey and Sussex where she now lives. Mud squelched underfoot as we walked through woodland, stepping over twisted tree roots, past banks of heather and marshy pools of water. “Back in 2016, I was one of the pioneers doing this [work], but now it’s become mainstream, and it’s a knowledge you can’t be without,” she said excitedly, reaching out a hand to help me climb over a tree felled by a recent storm. “We need everyone.”
• This article was amended on 9 April 2025 to clarify that while Lewes district council approved a motion to support the principles of the Rights of Rivers Charter in relation to the Ouse, this does not confer legal rights upon the river.
