Granting legal rights to rivers fails to halt pollution, SEI report warns

Around 40 freshwater systems globally have secured legal rights as of 2025, but SEI’s international team of researchers caution that legal victories are frequently reduced to mere symbolic announcements.

Evaluating the efficacy of Rights of Nature frameworks, the study centres on a deep-dive comparative analysis of two landmark global precedents: the Turag River in Bangladesh and the Atrato River in Colombia. Both rivers historically experienced severe pollution, prompting grassroots campaigns that led to landmark rulings – the Atrato in 2016 and the Turag in 2019. The project team from SEI York, SEI Latin America and SEI Asia, worked with actors from academia, governments and NGOs in Bangladesh and Colombia to produce the findings.

Alison Dyke, Research Fellow at SEI York, who led the project team said: “Securing legal personhood for a river makes for a historic headline, but our research proves that a court ruling or a piece of legislation is merely the starting line, not the finish.”

The report highlights a stark contrast in how legal rights manifest on the ground, offering vital lessons for policymakers, NGOs and legal commentators.

In the Atrato River, the rights of river (RoR) implementation achieved relative success due to an inclusive distributed guardianship model. This system explicitly accounted for Indigenous knowledge and legally shared responsibility between government bodies and river-based communities. However, the report notes that a lack of systemic support and funding concerns threaten to undermine this community-led protection.

Despite a sweeping ruling that theoretically extended protection to all rivers in the country, the initiative faltered in the Turag River. Researchers identified a lack of community representation, restricted autonomy and weak political agency for river-dependent populations, leaving them entirely unable to advocate or enforce the river’s legal rights against powerful polluters.

The SEI report details five recommendations for global governance:

1. Legal recognition must be treated as a tool for mobilization, not a self-executing solution.
2. Establish transparent, funded arrangements that involve local communities in day-to-day river guardianship.
3. Integrate local and indigenous knowledge as governance systems must incorporate the lived experience of those coexisting with the ecosystem.
4. Ensure government regulatory bodies have harmonized, unambiguous legal powers and the financial capacities to prosecute violations.
5. Actively address historical, political and economic legacies (such as industrial prioritization) that inherently compromise environmental protections.

Alison Dyke concludes: “Rights of rivers frameworks hold the potential to transform ecological governance structures, they cannot do so in a vacuum. Governments and civil society must be willing to have fundamental conversations regarding the socioeconomic structures currently driving ecological degradation.”