Rights of Nature at Climate Week 2025 in New York

Indigenous Rights-Rights of Nature as the Climate Solution, a conversation regarding policy and priorities at COP30

How do we truly achieve sustainability when the world’s original caretakers of land and water remain excluded from decision-making? This Climate Week NYC conversation centers Indigenous frameworks—reciprocity, community governance, and ecological balance—as living systems of relationship and responsibility that both meet and extend the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The event will spotlight Indigenous-led solutions—from defending rivers and sacred lands to advancing food sovereignty, Rights of Nature, and youth-led cultural revitalization—and invite participants into concrete pathways for action, funding, and solidarity. Speakers: Dr. Crystal Cavalier-Keck (7 Directions of Service); Knellee Bisram, M.A. (UN for AHAM Education); Brenna Yellowthunder (Keep It In the Ground, Indigenous Environmental Network); Alexander Easdale (Southeast Climate & Energy Network).

Join ELC at Fordham Law School for a dynamic series exploring the rising influence of the Rights of Nature and Earth law movements in New York and beyond. This three-part program covers the Green Amendment and Earth Law in New York State, offers an introduction to Earth Law principles, and examines urban ecocentrism through law and culture. Attend one, two, or all three sessions to deepen your understanding of how communities are advancing legal protections for the Earth.

Join us for an intimate gathering of funders, organizers, and advocates exploring how philanthropy can move in step with the growing Rights of Nature movement. Together, we’ll reflect on how generosity, reciprocity, and solidarity can nourish this transformative shift in how we relate to Earth. Limited capacity.

Event will be followed by a light lunch – over at 1 PM. Featured Speakers: Casey Camp-Horinek, Chairwoman GARN Indigenous Council – Ponca Nation; Natalia Greene, Director, Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature; Fernando Lloveras, President, Para la Naturaleza; Naniki Reyes Ocasio, El Caney Orocovix – Boricua; Enrique Viale, Asociación de Abogados Ambientalistas Argentina

North Carolina is on the frontlines of the fight to recognize the legal rights of rivers, wetlands, forests, and sacred sites. From the foothills of the Appalachians to the coastal plains, Indigenous communities are resisting fossil fuel projects, such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Southgate and Transco’s Southeast Supply Enhancement (SSEP), while advancing a transformative legal framework: the Rights of Nature.

This session will dig into how 7 Directions of Service is building a state-based Rights of Nature movement through the Rights of the Rivers campaign, provide updates on key regional pipeline fights and discuss how culture and ceremony can inform policy.

In recent years, proposals to manipulate the ocean to remove carbon dioxide – commonly referred to as marine carbon dioxide removal (marine CDR) or marine geoengineering – have proliferated. Often framed as necessary tools to meet global climate goals, these techniques remain scientifically uncertain, ecologically risky, and politically contentious. Yet pilot experiments are increasingly moving from the lab to the ocean, often targeting coastal or Arctic regions where communities have little say in how these projects are designed, tested, or approved.

This panel brings together grassroots organizers, Indigenous leaders, and environmental advocates to explore how frontline communities are resisting marine geoengineering in practice. Rather than treating ocean-based CDR as a neutral scientific endeavor, panelists will highlight how power, justice, and local sovereignty are central to debates about climate interventions. They will share firsthand accounts of organizing efforts that have challenged industry-led experiments, emphasized precaution over techno-fixes, and demanded accountability from governments and funders.

Across Appalachia and the Gulf South, Indigenous women have long led movements to protect land, water, and community—often in the face of environmental destruction, cultural erasure, and climate injustice. This intimate fireside chat centers rematriation—a framework for climate justice rooted in returning land to Indigenous stewardship, reviving matrilineal governance, and restoring cultural and ceremonial relationships with Mother Earth.

Speakers will share stories that connect land back movements, food sovereignty initiatives, and sacred site protections to the global struggle for climate justice.

Moderator: Crystal Cavalier Organizer: 7 Directions of Service

The International Rights of Nature Tribunal will present the newly released judgment on the Mountain Valley Pipeline case and hear testimonies on fossil fuel extraction and destructive monoculture practices, exposing how projects like pipelines, fracking, and industrial plantations violate the rights of ecosystems, communities, and the climate. The event will highlight pathways for justice and accountability while inviting broader engagement with the movement to defend Earth and uphold the Rights of Nature.

From the plains of Oklahoma to the woodlands of the Southeast, Indigenous nations are rising to defend land, water, and climate through the Rights of Nature framework—laws and cultural protocols that recognize rivers, forests, and ecosystems as living entities with the right to exist, regenerate, and thrive.

In this evening conversation, frontline Indigenous leaders will share how they are confronting fossil fuel colonialism—the pipelines, extraction projects, and corporate interests that threaten their communities—and replacing it with climate solutions grounded in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), matrilineal governance, and land rematriation.

Panelists: Casey Camp-Horinek (Ponca Nation of Oklahoma), Dr. Crystal Cavalier-Keck (Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation), Julia Horinek (Ponca Nation of Oklahoma) Organizers: 7 Directions of Service & Movement Rights

During this in-person event, women leaders in all their diversity will come together to share comprehensive and intersectional approaches and strategies to accelerate community-led climate solutions, advance a Just Transition, phase out fossil fuels, protect democracy, and uplift the climate justice movement. Critical topics include forest protection and reforestation, gender-responsive climate policies, fossil fuel resistance, food sovereignty, Indigenous and human rights; Rights of Nature; and strategic campaigns and policies for COP30 and beyond. There will also be a special presentation about WECAN’s ongoing campaigns and programs. Organizer: Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN)

This event will highlight the urgent need for fossil fuel phase out at New York Climate Week, center the voices and ideas of youth and frontline activists campaigning to phase out fossil fuels, especially those doing so in politically unfavorable environments, and provide opportunities to build relationships and create pathways for youth to get involved in campaigning, including for the Fossil Fuel Treaty.

As part of the road to the Colombia 2025 National Summit on the Rights of Nature, this Preliminary Summit will take place on September 25 and will be live-streamed both within the official agenda of New York Climate Week 2025 and across platforms in Colombia, highlighting a powerful South–North collaboration for climate justice. This year’s focus is Lake Tota, Colombia’s largest freshwater lake—an ecosystem of high ecological and cultural value currently facing serious environmental threats. The lake symbolizes both the urgency and the possibility of creating new legal frameworks that recognize nature as a rights-bearing subject.