London Climate Action Week 2026 marked our first official presence at this gathering. Across eight events in five days, we stood with the GARN Indigenous Council, GARN Hubs, and allied organizations to bring the Rights of Nature into rooms where the framework is still taking root in the United Kingdom and across Europe. We met people encountering this legal paradigm for the first time, and we strengthened our relationships with the partners advancing the Rights of Nature across the region. This is a recap of some of the events we co-organized and participated in!
Speak Up for Nature: Shakespeare’s Globe, London, UK
London Climate Action Week opened on the Summer Solstice with Speak Up for Nature at Shakespeare’s Globe, organized by Letters to the Earth. Almost 3,000 people gathered to hear letters written to, and from, the Earth.
Casey Camp-Horinek, Chairwoman of the GARN Indigenous Council and a member of the Ponca Nation, spoke, accompanied by her daughter Julia Horinek, focal point for the Council. Casey’s intervention carried the Earth’s own response, delivered through a water ceremony that closed the day: a statement that humans are Nature, and that in this period of ecological and political crisis, humans acting in defense of Nature are Nature defending itself. Watch the ceremony here.
GARN ally Paul Powlesland, of the UK Rights of Nature movement, spoke about his relationship with the River Roding and his role as its guardian, and called on the audience to take up guardianship of the rivers in their own lives. Young people and activists read letters addressing the structural separation between human systems and Nature, including a letter from the River Thames and a letter to the future describing what interspecies flourishing could look like if built on today’s organizing.
Consultation on the Antarctica Declaration
From the Globe, London Climate Action Week moved into consultation. GARN’s Antarctic Rights initiative launched Voices for Antarctica, a global consultation process to draft the Antarctica Declaration, a document that would recognize Antarctica as a living, rights-bearing entity and establish new legal, ethical, and governance frameworks for the protection of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
The in-person workshop was hosted by GARN co-founder Cormac Cullinan, who co-leads the initiative, and campaigner Roberta Bosu. “Granting rights to Antarctica could be the blueprint for a governance that is beyond states. This can be the largest Rights of Nature case in history,” Roberta told the room. Cormac added: “The Antarctic Rights Declaration is the foundation for action.”
The consultation continues online through 15 September 2026, ahead of the Declaration’s formal signing in Cape Town, South Africa, on 1 December 2026, during Antarctica Week. Add your voice here.
From the Ground Up: Grassroots Power, Rights of Nature and Climate Justice
In the same space, GARN co-organized From the Ground Up: Grassroots Power, Rights of Nature and Climate Justice, structured across three panels. The event was organized with Movement Rights, Earth Law Center, Asociación Argentina de Abogades Ambientalistas, WECAN & Antarctic Rights.
Indigenous governance and testimony. The session opened under the Indigenous Council. Casey Camp-Horinek opened, Julia Horinek introduced the Rights of Nature framework and the Indigenous governance systems it draws from, and Leo Cerda, who facilitates the Indigenous Council, set the terms for the day: “Pushing Rights of Nature means change, and we need this change to come now rather than later.” Quetza Ramírez, who facilitates the Youth Hub, also spoke during this panel.
Arnilio Brenes gave testimony from the Guna territory in Panama. He traced the community’s self-determination to the 1871 Comarca de Tulenega agreement and to the 1925 revolution against the Panamanian state’s policy of forced assimilation, which led to the 1938 treaty formally establishing the territory’s political autonomy. He explained that the Guna General Congress represents 49 communities through a structure that mandates the participation of a young person and a woman from each community in every consultation, and described his community’s role in the national mobilization against a mining contract, invoking free, prior, and informed consent under national law. He connected this to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, framing the territory’s law as domestic enforcement of an international standard that most states treat as aspirational.
Grassroots organizing under denialist and repressive regimes. Movement Rights co-founder Shannon Biggs moderated a panel on organizing for Nature where governments are actively dismantling environmental protections. Enrique Viale, environmental lawyer and Rights of Nature Tribunal judge, spoke on the government of Javier Milei in Argentina, describing the reform to the National Glacier Protection Law, which Congress passed weeks before London Climate Action Week and which now allows provincial governments to open periglacial areas to mining and energy activity, alongside attacks on labor rights and public education, defunding of scientific institutions, and the repression of demonstrations by retirees and disabled people. He framed these measures as a coordinated push to reposition Latin America as a site of intensified extraction for mining and fossil fuel interests, rather than isolated policy decisions.
Francesco Martone, chair of the Judges Assembly of the Rights of Nature Tribunal, spoke on the criminalization of Earth defenders, citing the record prison sentences handed to Just Stop Oil activists over the 2022 M25 motorway blockade, among the longest ever given in the UK for non-violent protest, and the occupation of Germany’s Hambach Forest against the expansion of RWE’s lignite mine, a case the Rights of Nature Tribunal itself has heard. He argued for reframing defenders as protectors exercising an inherent right to self-defense on behalf of Nature, rather than as protesters violating public order. He also presented the Tribunal’s Policy on Earth Defenders, which can be found in the Tribunal’s Library.
Osprey Orielle Lake, of WECAN, connected these cases to the Indigenous-led resistance at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and to the divestment campaign that followed, which targeted European banks financing the pipeline. She noted that human rights standards in Europe provided firmer ground for that organization than domestic channels in the United States.
Growing the movement in Europe, Latin America, and beyond. GARN European Hub facilitator Pietro Consolandi moderated a panel with GARN European Hub facilitator Stella Bongiorno, GARN Latin America facilitator Rafael Colombo, GARN Youth Hub facilitator Tosana Toben, Earth Law Center’s Missy Lahren,and more. Stella described the European Hub’s role connecting Rights of Nature initiatives across the region, including work with the European Citizens’ Initiative as a tool of direct democracy and support for grassroots resistance against the sale of protected natural areas in Albania. The panel discussed the need to localize the Rights of Nature at the community level across Europe, and named Europe’s particular responsibility, as the origin point of the colonial governance structures that were exported globally, to lead a corresponding shift in how European institutions relate to Nature.
Casey Camp-Horinek closed the session with a statement on Indigenous political status: “We’re not just stakeholders, we’re rights holders.” She grounded this in the treaty rights and nation-to-nation status of Indigenous nations under international law, and stated that Indigenous peoples’ work must extend beyond grassroots organizing into governmental processes and the United Nations, in direct enforcement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Breakfast Briefing: Indigenous Rights, Rights of Nature, and the Future of the Amazon
The following morning, GARN convened a Breakfast Briefing on Indigenous Rights, the Rights of Nature, and the future of the Amazon.
Women Leaders Protecting People and Planet
At the Rights and Nature Hub, we joined Women Leaders Protecting People and Planet: Stories, Solutions and Solidarity, organized by If Not Us Then Who, WECAN, Amazon Watch, and the Rainforest Action Network. Casey Camp-Horinek opened the session, and Osprey Orielle Lake spoke on the role of women in climate justice organizing. Frontline Indigenous and Afro-descendant women leaders and global advocates from across the Americas discussed strategies for defending territorial rights.
Puyr Tembé, First Secretary of State for Indigenous Peoples of Pará, Brazil, and co-founder of ANMIGA, named the underlying issue directly: “It’s not just a climate crisis — it’s a crisis in values, in relationships, in forgetting that we are part of the same web of life.”
Rights of Nature Showcase: ELC x Imp(act) Earth Film Festival
That night, we watched GARN’s Natalia Greene featured in Wild Hope’s film on the Rights of Nature, screened at the Earth Law Center x Imp(act) Earth Film Festival’s Rights of Nature Showcase. Afterward, Natalia joined a panel to talk about the constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature in Ecuador and the significance of the Los Cedros case, in which Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled in December 2021 that mining concessions in the Los Cedros protected forest violated the constitutional Rights of Nature. Osprey Orielle Lake also participated on the panel: “We are all living on this beautiful Mother Earth together, and we need to put her at the center and see the Earth as alive. The natural system is the ordering system of how we should live.”
A Rights of Nature Night
Later that same night, we hosted A Rights of Nature Night, a culture and rights celebration where musicians Sebastian Green and Wesley Tilbrook opened the evening, followed by DJ Eric Terena, an Indigenous artist from the Pantanal region of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, whose sets combine Nature imagery, Indigenous voices, and electronic production. We (almost!) closed the week’s events on the dance floor.
Field Notes from Around the World: Rights of Nature in Action
On our final morning, we co-hosted Field Notes from Around the World: Rights of Nature in Action at the Rights & Nature Hub alongside Synchronicity Earth, Lawyers for Nature, Letters to the Earth, Antarctic Rights, and We are Nature Based.
Kay Michael of Letters to the Earth opened the session, addressing the cultural foundations of the movement and the exhibition of letters on display.
Casey Camp-Horinek opened with a water ceremony on the significance of water and on the fact that human bodies are largely water. Hosted by Natalia Greene (GARN) and Paul Powlesland (Lawyers for Nature), the panel brought together Casey, Thomas Rickard of the UK Rights of Nature movement, and Roberta Bosu of Antarctic Rights. Natalia spoke on Ecuador, while Paul addressed what it means to live alongside Nature in the UK, and how citizens, companies, artists, and institutions might restructure that relationship. Roberta spoke on extending accountability to Antarctica, a territory most people will never visit but whose waters connect to every ocean, and Thomas reported on the progress of the Rights of Nature movement in the UK, including the adoption of the Charter for the Rights of the River Wye and growing support at county council level.
Our thanks to Synchronicity Earth for making this event possible, and to their partners for hosting us at the Rights & Nature Hub.
What This Week Opened
This was our first official participation in London Climate Action Week. It opened a space where the Rights of Nature is still taking root in the UK and Europe, where new audiences are encountering this shift from a governance model based on domination to one based on relationship, and where our partners across the region are building legal and political ground for what comes next. We leave this week clear that it marks a beginning, not a conclusion.
