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An increasing number of court rulings and legislation worldwide are recognizing rights of nature to be protected and preserved. Recognizing these rights also entails the recognition that nature has the right to stand in court and to be represented for its defense. This is still an incipient field and every step taken in this direction constitutes a precedent from which to learn and on which to base new rulings and legislation initiatives. Within this doctrine, rivers seem to be on the spotlight and court rulings on the rights of rivers are the ones setting precedent. These cases have taken place in New Zealand, Ecuador, India, and Colombia. This review looks into what all these rulings and legislation worldwide say about the rights of nature and what legal and systemic considerations should be taken into account as the recognition of the rights of nature moves forward.

As governments race to implement new climate adaptation solutions that prepare for more frequent flooding, they must seek policies that are effective for all communities and uphold climate justice. This requires evaluating policies not only on their overall effectiveness but also on whether they benefit all communities. Using the USA as an example, we illustrate the importance of considering such disparities for flood adaptation through a FEMA dataset of  ~ 2.5 million flood insurance claims. We use C ausal F low , a causal inference method based on deep generative models, to estimate the treatment effect of flood adaptation interventions based on a community’s income, racial demographics, population, flood risk, educational attainment, and precipitation. We find that the program saves communities $5,000–15,000 per household. However, these savings are not evenly spread across communities. For example, for low-income communities savings sharply decline as flood-risk increases in contrast to their high-income counterparts. Even among low-income communities, savings are >$6,000 per household higher in predominantly white communities. Future flood adaptation efforts should go beyond reducing losses overall and aim to equitably support communities in the race for climate adaptation. Flood adaptation policies are effective at reducing overall losses from flooding. By leveraging deep generative models, this work reveals new evidence from the US that the benefits are spread disproportionately across communities.

Avoiding floodplain development is critical for limiting flood damage, yet there is little empirical evidence of how local governments effectively avoid floodplain development. We conduct a mixed-methods study to explain how local floodplain management influences floodplain development in New Jersey, a state with high development pressure and flood risk. We find that 85% of towns developed relatively little in the floodplain from 2001 to 2019, and they achieved this with commonplace land use management tools and modest levels of local government capacity. One hundred twenty-six New Jersey towns put none of their new housing in the floodplain 2001–2019. Our findings run counter to common reports of rampant floodplain development requiring legal innovation and capacity-building campaigns and suggest alternative approaches for promoting floodplain avoidance. We find multiple paths to floodplain avoidance, weak support for previously identified drivers, and strong evidence that the keys to avoidance include having a few high-quality tools that are well-implemented, requiring consistency, coordination, and commitment of local officials. The multiple paths and importance of maximum, rather than average, quality might explain the mixed evidence in prior research connecting floodplain management actions and development outcomes. A lack of attention to towns that limit floodplain development impedes our ability to learn from and disseminate their successes. Contrary to our expectations, we show that floodplain avoidance can be and is achieved through routine municipal practices. Our findings underscore the importance of sustained commitment to development management as a core tool for limiting flood risk. Lay Summary One of the most effective ways to limit flood damage is to avoid building new infrastructure and housing in flood-prone areas. This study identifies towns in New Jersey, USA, who have limited new development in their floodplains and then uses a mix of statistics and case studies to understand what conditions and actions enabled those towns to limit floodplain development. Contrary to our expectation, we find that most New Jersey towns use commonplace municipal plans, regulations, and programs to limit their floodplain development, rather than the legal or policy innovations often thought necessary. One hundred twenty-six New Jersey towns put none of their new housing in the floodplain 2001–2019. Having more regulations and capacity does not predict more floodplain avoidance, and there are multiple successful toolkits. Key actions include having a few high-quality floodplain management tools and consistently implementing them over time, which requires coordination and commitment from local officials. These results reframe floodplain avoidance as an achievable standard rather than an ambitious aspiration. Graphical abstract Graphical Abstract

The transnational movement to recognise the rights of Nature continues to fuel experimentation by a growing number of jurisdictions in legal form, content, powers, and governance arrangements. In this paper, we focus on the mechanisms through which Nature is represented in various ways. There is enormous diversity in representational arrangements, but there is no clarity on precisely who should be representing Nature, or how Nature can be represented in human spaces, or even what the intent of this representation is (or should be). We describe a spectrum of representation that ranges from speaking about, to speaking for, to speaking with the natural entity. We develop a model of relational representation that shows the power of speaking with Nature to not only develop relations between the representatives and the natural entity, but also to enable a broader dialogue of knowledges with a wider pool of participants. By examining four case studies (the Mar Menor in Spain, the Río Atrato in Colombia, the Birrarung/Yarra River in Australia and Te Awa Tupua/Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand), we show how these diverse representational models are moving towards the relational end of the spectrum, and identify the challenges and opportunities of relational representation of Nature.

Civil society has always been with us. In fact, it has been present in some way since the earliest forms of human society, although the term is of recent origin. Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, were already speaking about forms of civil society. They describe citizens as persons who engage in the life of the polis and care about its development. Athenian society is never depicted as complacent or passive. They tell stories of citizens with distinct interests and a willingness to fight for them, including through public citizen forums such as the agora. Yet not until hundreds of years later, in the middle of the 18th century, did a formal concept of civil society begin to be defined. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, expresses his belief that a government derives from an agreement or social contract among men who agree to give up life in the state of nature, with its risks to survival-like war and civil disturbance, in favor of a more secure life in a civil society. Hegel defines it as a dialectical relationship that occurs between the macro-community of the state and the micro-community of the family. Rousseau goes so far as to equate civil society with the state. This discussion was reignited in the 20th century, during the 1980s, with the development of glasnost in the Soviet Union, the rapid expansion of economic globalization, and the rise of new civil movements across the world. From ancient Greece to modern times, civil society has been present and has fostered development and stability across nations. Political theorists have shown on the basis of repeated historical experience that civil society plays a critical role in giving legitimacy to the state and also gives rise to movements that delegitimize states that do not follow or address their citizen's will. It is an engineering concept, or a feedback mechanism between citizens and governments. People everywhere have grievances, and they naturally want to air them; they want to be heard. Moreover, state policies and laws are effective only when they are endorsed and accepted by a state's citizens, so politicians who are committed to democracy and long-term stability have a vested interest in strengthening and maintaining wellfounded civil societies. A well-developed civil society can protect the state from economic and political crisis and can foster innovation and social improvement. In the words of former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, civil society is the oxygen of democracy as it acts as a catalyst for social progress and economic growth. But the actions of civil society can interfere with vested interests. It is therefore not surprising that many governments have sought to suppress civil society. Governments worldwide are increasingly carrying out a crackdown on civil society, adopting subtle, but deleterious techniques, which, if not countered, could over time have negative consequences for the development, as well as the stability of their nations. Given the complexity of civil society, research on this field is lacking, and it is difficult to reach clear uniform conclusions about the importance of civil society. This paper is an attempt to lay out some of the main functions and benefits of civil society, show the ways in which governments worldwide are cracking down on it, and propose recommendations on how governments can benefit from a good relationship with civil society by permitting it to act as a valve that will let off social tensions and promote growth and social stability. But this means all voices need to be heard.

As governments race to implement new climate adaptation policies that prepare for more frequent flooding, they must seek policies that are effective for all communities and uphold climate justice. This requires evaluating policies not only on their overall effectiveness but also on whether their benefits are felt across all communities. We illustrate the importance of considering such disparities for flood adaptation using the FEMA National Flood Insurance Program Community Rating System and its dataset of \\(\\sim\\)2.5 million flood insurance claims. We use \\({\\rm C{\\scriptsize AUSAL}F{\\scriptsize LOW}}\\), a causal inference method based on deep generative models, to estimate the treatment effect of flood adaptation interventions based on a community's income, diversity, population, flood risk, educational attainment, and precipitation. We find that the program saves communities \\$5,000--15,000 per household. However, these savings are not evenly spread across communities. For example, for low-income communities savings sharply decline as flood-risk increases in contrast to their high-income counterparts with all else equal. Even among low-income communities, there is a gap in savings between predominantly white and non-white communities: savings of predominantly white communities can be higher by more than \\$6000 per household. As communities worldwide ramp up efforts to reduce losses inflicted by floods, simply prescribing a series flood adaptation measures is not enough. Programs must provide communities with the necessary technical and economic support to compensate for historical patterns of disenfranchisement, racism, and inequality. Future flood adaptation efforts should go beyond reducing losses overall and aim to close existing gaps to equitably support communities in the race for climate adaptation.

Efforts are needed to identify and measure both communities' exposure to climate hazards and the social vulnerabilities that interact with these hazards, but the science of validating hazard vulnerability indicators is still in its infancy. Progress is needed to improve: 1) the selection of variables that are used as proxies to represent hazard vulnerability; 2) the applicability and scale for which these indicators are intended, including their transnational applicability. We administered an international urban survey in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Johannesburg, South Africa; London, United Kingdom; New York City, United States; and Seoul, South Korea in order to collect data on exposure to various types of extreme weather events, socioeconomic characteristics commonly used as proxies for vulnerability (i.e., income, education level, gender, and age), and additional characteristics not often included in existing composite indices (i.e., queer identity, disability identity, non-dominant primary language, and self-perceptions of both discrimination and vulnerability to flood risk). We then use feature importance analysis with gradient-boosted decision trees to measure the importance that these variables have in predicting exposure to various types of extreme weather events. Our results show that non-traditional variables were more relevant to self-reported exposure to extreme weather events than traditionally employed variables such as income or age. Furthermore, differences in variable relevance across different types of hazards and across urban contexts suggest that vulnerability indicators need to be fit to context and should not be used in a one-size-fits-all fashion.