Nature speaks but can Courts and States listen? Indigenous approaches to Climate Change

Climate change represents one of the most significant global challenges of our time, with far-reaching implications for environmental sustainability, economic development, public health, and social justice. As the impacts of climate change become increasingly evident, legal systems at the national, regional, and international levels are being called upon to develop effective frameworks for mitigation, adaptation, accountability, and resilience. Given the pivotal role that law can play in shaping climate governance, this blog series, edited by Dr Azadeh Chalabi, brings together academics, legal practitioners, and policymakers to contribute blog posts on the theme “Law and the Climate Crisis". Contributions to the series seek to foster critical engagement with the evolving relationship between law and climate change while exploring innovative legal responses to contemporary environmental challenges.

Dr. Nina Bries Silva,   Post-Doctoral researcher, Université catholique de Louvain

Keywords: Climate change; Indigenous knowledge; Nature as living being; Inter-American Court Advisory Opinion OC-32-2025; Decolonisation.

“From our perspective, climate change is part of a spiritual and natural imbalance that has occurred in nature (...). A sacred space is affected and harmed—the sacred place that, for us, refers to the sites where the code of life and knowledge reside, such as a hill, a river, a plain, or a lagoon”.

With these words, the Wiwa and Kankuamo Indigenous communities described the impacts of climate change to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). Their account emphasises that climate disruptions go beyond environmental damage to create disharmony and imbalance. For these communities, the Sierra Nevada is the heart of the world (el corazón del mundo), composed of a network of relationships, including with the more-than-human world.[1] This view starkly contrasts with the anthropocentric foundations of international law, including human rights law, rooted in the modern Enlightenment, which promotes a dichotomy between humans and Nature, reducing Nature to mere natural resources. The current climate change framework, grounded primarily in scientific knowledge, often neglects Indigenous traditional knowledges and echoes these binary divisions, defining Nature in terms of ecocystem and biodiversity.

For indigenous communities, Nature, including trees, rivers, rocks, mountains, are living beings that can communicate, albeit through different languages and modes of expression from those of humans. The anthropologist Philippe Descola notes that “icons and indexes are the signs that nonhuman organisms use to represent the world and communicate between life forms”. Nature speaks through phenomena such as floods or avalanches, and spiritual leaders (the mamo and the saga for the Wiwa and Kankuamo) can interpret its messages through rituals, music, songs, and other practices. As the Wiwa and Kankuamo articulate, “the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta is a space narrated from the Law of Origin”, and it is necessary for States to “to feel, understand, and respect it”. The question is thus no longer in Spivak’s words, whether Nature can speak, but whether judges and states can listen, and how.

In July 2025, the Court acknowledged Indigenous views and issued a landmark advisory opinion on climate change, affirming that Nature is a subject of rights. However, it failed to fully recognise the implications of considering Nature as an active agent with its own language, whose voice should be heard in climate discussions, and of undertaking a paradigm shift. The Court continues to view Nature through the lens of “ecological processes” that require conservation via a “truly sustainable development model”. Yet, it declined to engage with the pluriverse and to dialogue with Indigenous ontologies as legitimate realities and sources of law and science.

As Nature can speak through signs and manifestations, Indigenous spiritual leaders should  have an opportunity to participate in climate discussions, which have so far been dominated by states, diplomats, scientists, and lawyers, to convey the voice of Nature and make “visible what was previously invisible or unintelligible”. This requires incorporating rituals beyond mere performative acts, such as those seen at COPs or in courtrooms, not just as symbolic gestures but as meaningful ways to communicate with Nature and ensure its participation in these spaces.

Engaging with Indigenous ontologies also means recognising that the harms caused by climate change extend beyond environmental destruction or biodiversity loss. In their submissions to the Court, the Wiwa and Kankuamo highlighted, for example, that climate change has displaced birds that, through their songs, alerted communities when it was time to plant crops. The displacement of birds is thus not only a threat to species but also disrupts the harmonic relationship with Nature. Similarly, pollution or drought affecting rivers has led to the disappearance of river spirits. For the Wiwa and Kankuamo, the Sierra Nevada is a living being; each river, lagoon, mountain, and forest constitutes a part of Mother Earth’s body, performing specific functions. Disruptions to these elements create imbalances and disharmony that can only be addressed through spiritual work and offerings.

Yet, these harms cannot be documented through traditional environmental reports or scientific expert testimony. Instead, they require what Kristina Marie Lyons terms “evidentiary ecologies”, modes of evidence rooted in the “sentipensar con la tierra” or the “thinking-feeling with the Earth”, grounded in Indigenous ancestral knowledge systems. Just as scientific expertise is valued, the accounts of spiritual leaders and evidence gathered through dreams, fire ceremonies, songs, rituals involving ayahuasca, mambe, coca leaves, and other spiritual or medicinal plants should also be recognised as legitimate forms of expertise, without the need for translation or supplementation by conventional environmental reports. While the IACHR’s advisory opinion acknowledges the value of Indigenous traditional knowledge in addressing climate change, it ultimately frames its findings within a scientific paradigm, without transforming the frameworks of scientific rationality and evidentiary validity.

These disharmonies inflicted on Mother Earth by climate change can only be addressed through adaptation and mitigation measures rooted in Indigenous governance, knowledge, and laws—rather than through what the Court terms “sustainable development policies” or “measures of protection, restoration, and regeneration of ecosystems”, which are embedded in Western values. For instance, as advocated by the Wiwa and Kankuamo, revitalising their own calendars (‘calendario propio’) and maintaining ongoing communication and harmony with Nature through offerings (‘pagamentos’) are vital steps.

To conclude, following Indigenous long history of mobilisation,  the IACHR in its Advisory Opinion on climate change, opened the door for for “un diálogo de saberes” (a dialogue of knowledges) and a pluriversal approach to climate change, acknowledging indigenous relationships with Nature. Yet, to move beyond mere rhetoric, concrete implementation and paradigm shifts are required. This entails fostering genuine engagement with indigenous ontologies and knowledge systems, resisting the persistent tendency to translate them into scientific narratives or “the language of natural resources or a commodity with associated value systems embedded in markets and pricing systems”, bearing the imprint of (neo)colonial practices. As the Court itself states, this approach must ensure “respect for different epistemological frameworks and equitable, symmetrical exchange aimed at promoting mutual learning”.

Author bio

Nina Bries Silva is a former human rights lawyer, specialized in Indigenous rights. She completed her PhD at the European University Institute (EUI), focusing on the Colombian transitional justice process and Indigenous ontologies, using legal anthropology and decolonial methods. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the CLAIM project (Climate Litigation Actions by the Internationally Marginalised), at UCLouvain.

Notes

[1] I must acknowledge that I am not Indigenous myself. I am a Spanish-Belgian researcher and lawyer who has collaborated for many years with Indigenous communities, including the Wiwa and the Kankuamo. In this blog, I engage with the perspectives presented to the Court in their submission, complemented by my own ethnographic fieldwork. Under no circumstances, I intend to speak on their behalf; rather, I aim to explore what happens for the climate regime when it begins to engage with Indigenous ontologies as valuable sources of law, science, and knowledge, within the perspective of the ‘dialogo de saberes’ y ‘el caminar juntos’.