Ecosystem Services as a Promising Paradigm to Protect Environmental Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America: the Constitutional Court Landmark Decision to Protect Arroyo Bruno in Colombia

Abstract

In the last years, the interest in ecosystem services (ESs) as a decision-making tool for environmental policy has been growing. The ES paradigm has also impacted the judicial system and in some countries the common law tradition. Experiences and lessons learned from the ES litigation have been already documented. In the initial analysis, this article aims to identify key trends in ESs case law in Latin America-a leading region in environmental constitutionalism-by exploring the judicial decisions issued by high courts and subnational environmental courts that mention or incorporate the ES term. In the second level of analysis, we focused on the Colombian Constitutional Court landmark decision; the Arroyo Bruno judgment aimed to protect the rights to water, food security, and health of the Wayuú indigenous people. We argue this is a groundbreaking ruling in Latin America, given that for the first time, a Court uses the ES-based approach to protect the environmental rights of ethnic communities, incorporating ES concepts to the constitutional law sphere and integrating into the same conversation, interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge.

Keywords: Colombia; Ecosystem services; Environmental constitutionalism; Human rights; Indigenous peoples; Latin America.