Environmental Constitutionalism Through the Lens of Comparative Law. New Perspectives for the Anthropocene

The upsurge of environmental constitutionalism over the last decades has produced a substantial increase in the number of democratic Constitutions containing environmental rights and principles. Globally, out of 193 Constitutions of member States to the UN, 153 contain explicit references to the environment. These Constitutions reflect the growing sensitivity of the world and public concerns towards the protection of the environment. This is also a reaction to the insensitivity and indifference, mainly by the global North, towards the recognition of the serious and unavoidable problems posed by the Anthropocene, an era in which man is jeopardising the very foundations of life on this planet. If we look at the qualitative aspect, the evolution of ‘environmental constitutionalism’ appears evident, marking an upward trajectory: environmental protection has nowadays reached a central position in the world’s constitutional systems, with more stringent and, above all, structural forms of protection. The turning point for this evolution was marked during the first decade of the new millennium, with substantial improvements of the quality of environmental protection in some contemporary Constitutions. In these texts, the relation between man and the environment is considered as the foundation of the constitutional order and a basic element of the social pact, thus pervading the entire State structure. For example, in the recent Constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia (but also in some other Asian and African texts), the relationship between man and nature becomes the focal key to reading the whole constitutional order. This also marks a paradigm shift towards the development of a Constitutionalism for the Anthropecene that requires the recognition of environmental values and interests as absolute priorities for the contemporary constitutional systems worldwide