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In the last years, the interest in ecosystem services (ESs) as a decision-making tool for environmental policy has been growing. The ES paradigm has also impacted the judicial system and in some countries the common law tradition. Experiences and lessons learned from the ES litigation have been already documented. In the initial analysis, this article aims to identify key trends in ESs case law in Latin America—a leading region in environmental constitutionalism—by exploring the judicial decisions issued by high courts and subnational environmental courts that mention or incorporate the ES term. In the second level of analysis, we focused on the Colombian Constitutional Court landmark decision; the Arroyo Bruno judgment aimed to protect the rights to water, food security, and health of the Wayuú indigenous people. We argue this is a groundbreaking ruling in Latin America, given that for the first time, a Court uses the ES-based approach to protect the environmental rights of ethnic communities, incorporating ES concepts to the constitutional law sphere and integrating into the same conversation, interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge.

Knowledge about the distribution and diversity of wetlands has become an essential tool for environmental management and policy-making. Yet, while recent estimates indicate that 27% of the area of Colombia is covered by wetlands and despite a number of regional studies, information about the diversity of wetlands nationally is scarce. In response, we present a national wetland classification system that is based on an ecological approach, from the perspective of wetland scientists, and which builds upon the assumptions underlying the flood pulse concept and hydrogeomorphic approach. Thus, the approach and structure of the Brazilian wetland classification system are used, with geomorphological adjustments made according to Colombia’s topography. The classification is hierarchical, multi-scale, functional, and organized according to four levels (system, macroregion, subsystem, and class), with the wetland diversity of Colombia represented nationally by 89 macrohabitats across marine-coastal, inland, and anthropogenic systems. The primary purpose of this classification is to provide integrated and organized information on the distribution and diversity of Colombian wetlands that will serve as a baseline for transparent environmental policy-making.