Environmental rights amendment
Open-knowledge reference entry
An environmental rights amendment is type of amendment usually proposed to a constitution or a bill of rights. It seeks to outline and protect the environmental rights of people, such as clean water, clean air, and a stable climate.
The term is often used synonymously with the term “Green Amendment,” although Green Amendments were defined by the educational advocacy organization Green Amendments for the Generations and its founder Maya van Rossum who coined the term.
Environmental Rights Amendments and Green Amendments seek to guarantee people the right to a healthy environment. Related rights included in these proposals often include a right to a stable climate, clean air and water, environmental justice, preservation of natural, scenic, esthetic and historic values of the environment.
The right to a healthy environment can be implemented into constitutional law other ways, such as written into constitutions in their drafting, such as in Tunisia, or enforced through climate change litigation, such as in Colombia. In the United States, most advocates are focused on amending existing state constitutions or enforcing existing state constitutions, such as in Held v. Montana, where youth won a trial court judgment for enforcement the existing state constitution.
United States
In the United States, there is no federal environmental rights amendment. While environmental rights are mentioned in a number of state constitutions, the states of Montana, New York and Pennsylvania have passed environmental rights amendments.
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This entry incorporates text from “Environmental rights amendment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.