Summary
In April 2010, Bolivian President Evo Morales called the first World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in response to a lack of a binding agreement on the issues of climate change. Afterward, Bolivia’s Ambassador to the United Nations submitted to the UN Secretary General, the Peoples’ Agreement, which contained 17 proposals developed by various organizations and the peoples’ conference. To address climate change, the proposal advocated various principles:
“We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, appreciation and strengthening of the ancestral knowledge, wisdom and practices of indigenous peoples, encapsulated in the experience and proposal of “living well”, in which Mother Earth is recognized as a living thing with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship.
To address climate change, we must recognize Mother Earth as the source of life and fashion a new system based on the principles of:
• Harmony and balance between everybody and with everything
• Complementarity, solidarity and fairness
• Collective well-being and satisfaction of everybody’s basic needs, in harmony with Mother Earth
• Respect for the rights of Mother Earth and for human rights
• Recognition of human beings for what they are and not what they have
• Elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism and interventionism
• Peace between peoples and with Mother Earth.
he proposal also calls for the recognition of the rights of nature, stating: “In an interdependent system in which human beings are just one component, it is impossible to recognize only the rights of the human element without causing an imbalance in the entire system. In order to guarantee human rights and restore harmony with nature, the rights of Mother Earth must be acknowledged and upheld effectively.”
To that end, the proposal calls for the adoption of the draft Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.
Related Initiatives
Suggested Citation:
Kauffman, Craig, Catherine Haas, Alex Putzer, Shrishtee Bajpai, Kelsey Leonard, Elizabeth Macpherson, Pamela Martin, Alessandro Pelizzon & Linda Sheehan. Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. V2. 2026. Distributed by the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. https://ecojurisprudence.org/initiatives/the-first-peoples-world-conference-on-climate-change-and-the-rights-of-mother-earth/.
When using our data, please follow the FAIR and CARE Principles for data governance outlined in our Ethics Statement. We are doing our best to be correct in the information we provide, but if you notice any omission or inaccuracy, please report this to us immediately at info@ecojurisprudence.org so we can correct it.
Eco Jurisprudence Tracker is licensed under CC BY 4.0
