Living in Harmony with Nature and Future Generations
A long-term partner of the World Ethic Forum, the World Future Council offers yearly policy awards that bring visibility to transformative legal innovations, guided by the principle that “nature can live without us. We cannot live without her.” The World Future Council identifies, develops, and promotes future-just solutions to the pressing challenges facing humanity and the more-than-human world. Its Council of fifty global changemakers works with a technical team to highlight exemplary laws that safeguard ecosystems for generations to come and strengthen recognition of nature’s intrinsic value.
Acknowledging such policies expands the window of what we believe to be possible. They shift norms, and demonstrate that solutions are out there. “Since its creation, the World Future Policy Award has shown that visionary policymaking can change the course of history,” says CEO Neshan Gunasekera, who is also a firekeeper of the World Ethic Forum. These policies highlight the power of human creativity in the face of profound ecological challenges, and they reflect a broader movement toward radically shared aliveness.
Legal Personhood for Nature
The 2025 Global Impact Winner is the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act in Aotearoa New Zealand, which granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River.
Passed in 2017, the Act recognises the river not merely as a body of water but as a living being sustaining life and holding spiritual meaning. Grounded in Tupua te Kawa, the Māori natural law and value system, it was the first law of its kind to recognise a river as a living being with authority and dignity.
The Act also restored Indigenous guardianship through a dual office of co-governance between Māori and the Crown: an example of future-oriented environmental governance rooted in a worldview where humans are part of nature and hold a duty of care. It has since inspired a wave of similar legal innovations worldwide.
One of those developments happened in Spain with Law 19/2022, granting legal personhood to one of Europe’s largest coastal salt-water lagoons, the Mar Menor and its basin. This was also celebrated in the 2025 World Future Policy Awards.
After decades of pollution, agricultural runoff, mining impacts, and mass tourism, the ecosystem collapsed, suffering repeated algal blooms. A people-led initiative demanded protection, and Spain became the first European country to grant enforceable rights to an ecosystem: the right to exist, regenerate, and be defended in court. This landmark law shows that Western legal systems can also accommodate the rights of the more-than-human.
Giving Nature a Voice in Institutions
Granting rights is one step. Enabling those rights to function within institutions is another. A range of developments celebrated by the World Future Council in 2025 aim to foster relationships rooted in care, respect, and coexistence, shifting the relationships of humans to the natural world, for now and for future generations.
In Tyrol, Austria, the Ombudsman for Nature represents natural interests in environmental impact assessments and construction processes, giving a voice to nature and ensuring that every intervention respects ecosystems. Uganda’s 2019 National Environmental Act enshrines the rights of nature alongside citizens’ rights to a clean, safe, and healthy environment, and it establishes duties to protect ecosystems for future generations. South Africa’s Biodiversity Act aligns with this approach, recognising Indigenous knowledge and embedding intergenerational equity within a constitutionally protected right to a healthy environment.
These developments stretch to global governance. The Vision Award winner, the BBNJ Treaty (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction), is the first global framework to safeguard life in the high seas, an area previously vulnerable to overfishing, deep-sea mining, and exploitation. Through marine protected areas, environmental assessment, and fair benefit-sharing, the treaty signals a collective shift from extraction to planetary guardianship.
Culturally Rooted Models of Protection
Those regenerative policies often formalise long-standing cultural and spiritual worldviews.
Bhutan’s Biodiversity Act responds to threats of land conversion, overharvesting, and biopiracy. It protects traditional knowledge and the rights of farmers and breeders. It is also directly shaped by Buddhist principles of compassion, karma, and interdependence.
Panama’s Law 287 recognises nature as a living being with rights to exist, regenerate, and be restored. It affirms that Indigenous worldviews and ancestral knowledge must guide how these rights are interpreted and applied.
These frameworks demonstrate that legal innovation can be rigorously grounded and culturally rooted, blending jurisprudence with centuries-old ecological ethics.
Policy as Collective Stewardship
“We cannot separate our conservation crises from our governance crises,” notes Katy Gwiazdon, Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Ethics and Law and Chair of the Ethics Specialist Group of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. “The World Future Policy Award recognizes this critical link between decision-makers and the impacts of their decisions on the community of life.”
Policy plays a large role in determining what we do collectively. Through these laws, radically-shared aliveness begins to find an expression as a set of concrete legal structures, backed by enforcement and institutions.
Together, the developments celebrated by the World Future Policy Awards point toward a future where harmony with nature and future generations is not an aspiration, but an actionable set of collective rules. It is a future that is already being built, one policy at a time.