Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced.

Dr Erin O'Donnell
Dr Erin O'Donnell

Why this matters

Many countries are recognising Nature’s rights, in ways ranging from local laws and court cases through to constitutional reforms. In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were
given the status of legal persons.

In 2017, the Victorian government passed the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act, the first statute to recognise a river as a living entity. Victoria has now committed to new legislation
recognising all waterways as living entities.

As rights of rivers has accelerated across the globe, it is now time for policy makers, academics and advocates to consider not just whether Nature could (or should) have rights, but how these rights can be
effectively implemented.

When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources?

Our impact

My research examines our relationship to water – our rivers, wetlands, lakes, aquifers, estuaries, rainfall – and the many ways in which we both care for and seek to regulate and control water. Since 2018, I have been a member of the Birrarung Council, the voice of the Yarra River, which is recognised in law as a living entity.

In settler colonial Australia, my research is also focused on water justice and Indigenous ways of knowing water. In 2021, we completed the Cultural Water for Cultural Economies project, a collaboration between the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) and the  University of Melbourne, as well as representatives from 20 Traditional Owner organisations and First Nations across Victoria.

Designed to identify specific law and policy pathways to increase water access for Traditional Owners and First Nations across Victoria and to support their use of this water for economic development in accordance with their laws and cultural protocols, it demonstrated the importance of ensuring that water for economic development is not seen as separate to water for cultural values.

This project led directly to the Victorian Government’s new Aboriginal water rights policy, ‘Water is Life’, launched in 2022, which commits to recognising all waterways as living entities.

In 2023, I commenced a new project entitled Ending Aqua Nullius: Sustainable and Legitimate Water Law in Settler States, funded by the Australian Research Council.

This project works with Indigenous Peoples in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the USA to investigate how  treaty and agreement making can address aqua nullius, increase Traditional Owner power and resources in water, and create more sustainable and legitimate settler state water laws.