Antarctica’s Fate Will Impact the World. Is It Time to Give The Region a Voice at Climate Talks?

With the Earth at its most degraded point in recorded history, and humans making insufficient efforts to prevent the destruction of ecosystems, a growing number of scientists, lawyers and activists are proposing a potential solution that challenges more than 350 years of global governance. 

The idea is to get countries and civil society to sign onto a declaration that recognizes Antarctica and its surrounding Southern Ocean as its own autonomous legal entity, similar to a sovereign country. Along with that status comes the right of Antarctica to participate in decision making that affects it, like the United Nations conferences on climate and biodiversity. 

On Thursday, advocates with the group Antarctic Rights unveiled a draft declaration that would do just that. The document also says the continent possesses inherent rights to exist and continue its natural cycles “free of human disruptions.” Thursday’s event took place on the sidelines of the 16th gathering of parties to the U.N. Convention of Biological Diversity being held in Colombia. 

Roberta Bosu, global campaign leader for Antarctic Rights, said the organization is soliciting feedback on the draft treaty and looking to partner with other civil society organizations wanting to support the idea. Antarctic Rights members then aim to leverage that support to convince governments to adopt the declaration. 

Since 1959 the region has been governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, a Cold War-era pact designed to promote peace and scientific cooperation south of 60 degrees latitude. While largely successful at achieving those goals, that system has been criticized for making little progress on issues like environmental protection in recent years. Political deadlock, for instance, has prevented the creation of new Marine Protected Areas and the implementation of existing ones in the region.   

Antarctic Rights’ proposal is part of the growing rights of nature movement, which has cemented various rights of ecosystems and individual species, like sea turtles, into legislation and court rulings in more than a dozen countries. The worsening climate and biodiversity crises have helped the movement gain momentum. In Ecuador, frogs have taken mining companies to court and won. In Colombia, courts have appointed human-guardians to oversee the rights of the Atrato River. There’s even precedent for giving nature a seat in the boardrooms of companies. 

But never has an idea been set forth to put a natural entity on par with nation-states. Since the 1600s, international law has treated national governments as the primary force in global decision making.

Critics of that structure, which political scientists call the Westphalian system, argue that it is ill-equipped to handle many of today’s problems, including climate change and environmental destruction, which span national borders. Advocates argue that the nation-state system has an inherent and narrow focus on short-term human interests, neglecting other forms of life. 

That’s contributed to dire conditions.

Earth’s average temperature is now close to exceeding 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Monitored wildlife populations have decreased by 73 percent in the last 50 years. Roughly one million animal and plant species are on the brink of extinction. And humans have cleared trees from an area of land roughly the size of two United States. 

All this degradation is boomeranging back on humans. It makes communities less resilient to worsening impacts from climate change, like intense storms, flooding and drought. And it affects the livelihoods of billions of people: Around half of the world’s gross domestic income is generated by businesses that directly depend on healthy ecosystems. 

Antarctica presents a unique opportunity for humans to change direction in a systematic way, according to Cormac Cullinan, a South African lawyer and seminal figure in the rights of nature movement. That’s because the continent, twice the size of Australia, plays an outsized role in maintaining Earth’s climatic stability and is not owned by any government. Those conditions allow for the possibility of something, legally speaking, that is entirely new. 

“It would be a pure voice for nature,” said Cullinan, a co-author of the proposed declaration. “If you’re speaking on the basis of what is in the interest of Antarctica, you’re really saying what is in the interest of Earth.”  

Scientific research underscores Cullinan’s point.

Antarctica and its surrounding sea, which together make up about 10 percent of Earth’s surface, are intricately connected to many of Earth’s vital cycles that make life on the planet as we know it possible. 

Like its counterpart in the North Pole, Antarctica acts like a gigantic pump that pushes cold water deep into the ocean, driving warmer waters through the gulf stream, Pacific and Indian oceans. As the Arctic and Antarctica warm, those pumps weaken. One consequence is that water from the tropics will no longer move northward through the Atlantic Ocean, causing the United Kingdom and wider great region to cool and the tropics to become much hotter. These climatic changes could potentially make some places uninhabitable. 

“Every single part of the Earth will be impacted,” said Lloyd Peck, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey.

Coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to an altered Antarctica. Water expands as it warms. If the landmass’ mile-thick ice sheet melts into the ocean, sea levels worldwide could rise by nearly 200 feet, subsuming large population centers like New York City, Tokyo and Cape Town, and entire island nations. Rising sea levels also allow intensifying storms to penetrate deeper inland.

Peck, who is not affiliated with the Antarctic Rights movement, also described the impact a warming Antarctica is having on biodiversity. Life around the southern pole, from leopard seals to emperor penguins and giant sea sponges, developed over millions of years in one of the most stable and isolated parts of Earth. But those conditions also mean that species are acutely vulnerable to warming temperatures and related acidification. 

The arms of starfish there, for instance, become brittle and prone to snapping off with just a degree of warming over current temperatures. Decreasing sea ice has also affected endangered emperor penguins’ ability to reproduce. On a warming planet, there are no cooler places on Earth for species endemic to Antarctica to move to and they will cease to exist. 

The changing continent is troubling in economic terms as well. Beyond the jobs that fisheries in the region provide, many advances in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals come from Earth’s biodiversity. Antarctica’s unique flora and fauna are estimated to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of economic services to the world annually. Already, information drawn from the continent’s life sources have produced breakthroughs in mechanical lubricants and helped create variants of tomatoes that can survive through first frosts. 

Earlier this year, 1,500 leading Antarctic scientists warned of unprecedented climate changes happening in Antarctica, including intense heat waves, heavy rainfall and high melt rates of ice sheets and glaciers that wrap around the continent like a skirt. The land mass is also rapidly starting to green, a trend that could accelerate warming as something called the albedo effect—when white ice reflects sunlight—is lost. Water and land that had been beneath that ice then takes in more of the sun’s heat. 

The Southern Ocean around Antarctica already absorbs an outsized amount of heat from the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, contributing to the Antarctic region warming faster than nearly any other place on Earth. Scientists warn that it’s possible the continent could be near a tipping point beyond which its ecosystems, and the Earth at large, would be irreversibly altered. 

Despite these scientific realities, diplomats at the U.N. climate and biodiversity conference have largely overlooked Antarctica, Cullinan said. 

“If you look at Indigenous systems, the community’s wisest members take a big role in decision making,” he said. “But the word wisdom doesn’t enter into our political systems—it’s just not part of how we choose people to make important decisions.”

Aligning Law with Science 

A core aim of the rights of nature movement is to align human-made laws with natural systems of order to ensure that humans stay within Earth’s limits for maintaining a stable environment. In his 2011 book “Wild Law,” Cullinan referred to this approach as “Earth Jurisprudence,” a philosophy that could remake legal systems in a way that puts guardrails around human activity to safeguard the natural cycles of the Earth—from rainfall in the Amazon to ocean currents and animal migratory patterns—that ultimately protect us, too.

A major challenge for the movement is the inevitable clashes with existing laws, like pollution permitting rules, and the entities that benefit from them. At the national level, countries with rights of nature laws have not automatically transformed into societies free of environmental harm. Rather, legal battles have played out on a case-by-case basis.

In Ecuador, for instance, the country’s Constitutional Court has raised the level of protection afforded to ecosystems while giving teeth to a long overlooked legal concept known as the precautionary principle, which means that absent adequate scientific evidence, it is better to avoid certain risks that could lead to irreversible damage of ecosystems. Still, Ecuador is a top crude oil producer and its government is increasingly looking to expand mining in the country.

Members of Antarctic Rights say they don’t see their proposal as an attack on the existing legal framework governing activity in the Antarctic region. Rather, they argue their proposed declaration complements the Antarctic Treaty System because the treaty’s 57 nation-state parties have struggled to address new threats to the continent, including a growing and largely unregulated tourism industry, invasive species, pollution and the biggest danger of all: climate change, fueled by emissions far from Antarctica’s shores. 

“The main threat to Antarctica can’t be regulated from within the Antarctic Treaty System,” said Carola Rackete, an ecologist and member of the European Parliament. She noted that many of the world’s biggest emitters are parties to the treaty, including the United States, Australia and China. 

Rackete, who hails from Germany and started her career as a merchant mariner working on ships sailing through the fjords of Patagonia, got the idea for the Antarctic Rights movement after making several expeditions to the continent aboard polar research ships. Rackete saw less and less ice on successive missions. It incensed her that despite the overwhelming scientific evidence confirming why that was happening, politicians were not taking sufficient action to protect Earth’s polar regions. 

Through a series of email exchanges around 2019 with Natalia Greene at the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, Rackete worked out that this paradigm could be applied to Antarctica. Through Greene, Rackete linked up with Cullinan and the academic Alessandro Pelizzon. The movement has since grown to 24 working-group members and about 10 supporting non-governmental organizations.

For Rackete, the most exciting part of the draft declaration is the new role it could give to Antarctica in governmental negotiations on climate change. At a minimum, she said, this would elevate the status of the continent, long out of sight and out of mind for diplomats.

The draft declaration doesn’t say how Antarctica would be represented at those meetings, or in any future litigation. But an explanatory memorandum to the draft says the movement’s members propose convening a “Peoples’ Convention” to draw up how the declaration would be implemented. 

“Antarctica is massively impacted by the climate policies of the European Union. But in Brussels, you’re hard pressed to find any regulation which really addresses Antarctica.” 

— Carola Rackete, European Parliament member

One idea is to elect scientific experts and Indigenous leaders who can give voice to different parts of the Antarctic ecosystem, such as emperor penguins, the Thwaites Glacier and the Southern Ocean. 

Rackete is experimenting with such an arrangement in the advisory council she’s assembling to help guide her decision making as a member of the European Parliament. One seat on that council will belong to Antarctica, she said. 

“Antarctica is massively impacted by the climate policies of the European Union,” Rackete said. “But in Brussels, you’re hard pressed to find any regulation which really addresses Antarctica.” 

Drawing attention to the region, and changing the way humans think about ecosystems, has never been more important, according to Yelena Yermakova, a political philosopher and Antarctic Rights member. When the Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959, it was technologically impossible to drill for minerals or carry out commercial extractive projects there. But today, with the region rapidly melting and quantum leaps in technology, the playing field has changed and countries are positioning themselves to take advantage, though mining is technically banned under the treaty. Last year, Iran announced intentions to build a new base on the continent, and China started constructing its fifth research station. 

“The main problem is that we, humans, designed a system that views the region as full of resources that are up for grabs,” Yermakova said. “That thinking is a story we’ve told ourselves, and the time has come to start questioning it.”