Last year, four rivers were granted legal rights: the Whanganui in New Zealand, Rio Atrato in Colombia, and the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India. These four cases present powerful examples of the increasing relevance of rights-centered environmental protection. Like corporations, which have legal rights in many jurisdictions, these rivers are rights-bearing entities whose rights can be enforced by local communities and individuals in court. But unlike corporations, these rights are not yet recognized in international treaties. Which raises the question: what are the implications of rights for nature for international environmental law?

In a world rapidly churning out unpredictable political shocks, intelligence analysts occasionally need to clear their heads of the daily barrage of newsworthy events and instead work with simple theories that discern the direction and speed of trends and help predict their outcomes. Political demography, the study of population age structures and their relationships to political trends and events, has helped some analysts predict geopolitical changes in a world that, from time to time, appears utterly chaotic.

True to essentialist stereotypes, Latin America’s indigenous peoples are the best stewards of the region’s rainforests. But the source of their enthusiasm for environmental protection is more complex than mere ascriptive traits or whether they speak native languages. What’s more, in a development that should be worrying to environmentalists, exposure to the negative effects of extractive industries appears to have a degrading effect on that enthusiasm.

As global climate change affects livelihoods across the world, migration patterns are also changing. In a recent study published in Global Environmental Change, Clark Gray, Valerie Mueller, and I found that since the 1970s, climatic variations have been increasing internal migration across many South American countries, with few exceptions. And many people are headed to cities.

The Paris Climate Agreement sets forth a bold goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, keep global temperature rise below 2.0 degrees Celsius, and employ best efforts toward no more than 1.5 degrees of warming. It also sets forth a new set of rules to achieve these goals. [Video Below]

In January, over the objections of indigenous groups that live there, the government of Ecuador sold oil exploration rights to 500,000 acres of the Amazon to a consortium of Chinese companies. Whenever we hear about stories like this, there is a tendency to think: How can this happen? How can obscenely rich investors run roughshod over the land, livelihoods, and rights of impoverished local communities, and with utterly no consequences?

Venezuela seems suspended at a critical juncture. Following national elections in December, the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable was set to occupy two thirds of the 167-seat National Assembly, an upset that would reduce the late Hugo Chávez’s United Socialist Party to a distant second place for the first time and given opposition legislators the power to enact sweeping political changes.

Natural resources rarely feature during peacebuilding efforts, but there is growing evidence that’s a mistake. Unresolved natural resource management issues can make peace more fragile, while addressing them can act as a bridge toward cooperation.