Earlier this month, I gave a talk to people who have worked for the Earth for years. Lawyers who give the rights of nature a face. People who fight for rivers, forests and soils. I had half an hour to explain why I believe the Earth system needs the first rank in our legal orders, not the last. The first question still came the way it almost always comes. A verdict with a question mark: How is that ever going to get through? It’s far too big.
I have heard this question many times, and for a long time I believed I had to answer it with examples. The Montreal Protocol, for instance, adopted in 1987, ratified today by every state in the world, and it has actually put the ozone layer on a path to recovery. Not through goodwill alone, but through binding rules, differentiated deadlines, funding and control.
I stand by the claim, because it can be tested. A constitution for the Earth, as the Declaration for an Earth Constitution sketches it in eight principles, requires no entirely new institutional principle. We already know the decisive building blocks.
We already measure the state of the Earth system with satellites, monitoring networks and scientific observation programmes. Planetary limits are scientifically described: nine planetary boundaries, six of them transgressed, according to the peer-reviewed assessment by Katherine Richardson and her team in 2023. The polluter-pays principle has been a basic principle of modern environmental policy for decades and is anchored in many legal orders. Courts can enforce higher-ranking law against subordinate decisions.
The building blocks are there. What is missing is their order of rank.
That is exactly the place of a constitution. It is not one more tool beside the existing ones, but the fundamental one: it determines the order in which the others apply. Without it, measurement, the polluter-pays principle and the courts remain separate instruments that cancel each other out in a conflict.
Technically simple does not mean politically simple. We would not have to invent anything fundamentally new. We would have to decide what prevails in a conflict. Rank is a decision, not an invention.
And that is why it is politically so hard. A decision needs someone to take it. For the integrity of the Earth system as a whole there is no institution with a corresponding, enforceable mandate. That is neither an accident nor the failure of individuals; it is a system error. Whoever fails to see it repairs in the wrong place. Whoever sees it has to act from there.
The obstacle is called fragmentation
The word sounds like analysis, like a world map, like 193 states that cannot agree. That is how I used it for years: responsibilities are fragmented, the Earth system is one, politics is many. That remains true. But that evening something else became clear to me.
Even in a room full of people on the same side, we return remarkably quickly to our own subject. While one person speaks, the next is already preparing their reply. We listen in order to answer, not in order to understand. Each of us hears the whole through the experience of our own work. I do not exclude myself: I had just spent half an hour talking about my own agenda.
That everyone has their own cause is not a weakness; it is the reason these people move anything at all. But it has a side effect nobody wants: the whole is left without a common voice.
Fragmentation is not a property of our opponents. It sits with us too.
As long as each of us carries only our own piece, many right pieces of work still do not add up to a shared planetary point of reference.
Why the alliance therefore comes first
If that is true, then the order in which we usually talk about solutions is wrong. We start with implementation: How will it get through? Who enforces it? Which court, which authority, which treaty? And because we start with the hardest step, we stand still.
I see four steps, which increasingly overlap. First, a common point of reference: a text that says what should apply, and that people from different fields can carry without giving up their own field. Then an alliance that carries this point of reference. Then institutions — universities, cities, organisations, eventually states — that examine it, take it up and develop it further. And out of that, finally, legal implementation and enforcement.
In parallel, the constitution and its organs are refined: a narrow mandate, separation of powers, courts, transparency. That can be designed while the alliance grows. But no draft replaces the social and political backing that can make it effective.
What speaks against this order
I know the objections, and three of them are serious.
First: alliances fall apart. They live on momentum, and momentum is fleeting. True, and that is why the point of reference has to be a text, not a mood. A text that is published and citable outlives the climate in which it was written.
Second: who defines the goal? An alliance around a goal that one person formulated is a following, not an alliance. Correct. That is why the eight principles of the Declaration are drawn as narrowly as possible: precedence only where the functioning of the Earth system is at stake; a planetary level with a strictly limited mandate; no world government.
Third, and this is the strongest objection: an alliance without power is an appeal. There are enough appeals. That holds as long as one equates power with enforcement. But an alliance carries a different political weight when recognised scientists, lawyers, organisations, cities, countries and people from different regions of the world carry it together.
That is why the alliance has to grow before it can have political effect. Power blocks correction; so correction has to start with the structure of power. The alliance is a first step there, not the last.
There is a fourth objection: fragmentation is also diversity. It is protection against centralism, and it is the reason the river has one advocate and the forest another. An alliance must not level this diversity. It may demand only one thing: that one’s own work is connected to a common planetary point of reference that gives orientation in a conflict. The vanishing point towards which everything runs is a constitution that gives the Earth system its rank.
Nobody has to give anything up. Everybody has to add something.
What this means concretely
The Declaration for an Earth Constitution has been published since 25 September (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22960459). Nine people carry it so far as initial signatories, in a personal capacity, from law, medicine, philosophy, climate science, politics, literature and civil society, and from four countries.
That proves nothing. It is the beginning of an alliance. The first circle is meant to be professionally credible, international and deliberately diverse. Institutions and a wider public are meant to follow.
The question I have been asking since my presentation is therefore no longer simply: Will you sign? But what would have to happen for you to connect your own work to a common planetary point of reference?
The answer to that question is uncomfortable: if we begin with implementation, we begin at the hardest point.
The building blocks are there. Politically, it is hard. The obstacle is us — our fragmentation, and the power relations that stabilise it.
So the path does not begin with a world constitution. It begins with enough different people carrying the same whole.
Sources / further reading
- Declaration for an Earth Constitution, v1.6, 25 September 2026: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22960459
- Katherine Richardson et al., “Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries”, Science Advances 9 (2023): https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
- UNEP Ozone Secretariat, Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987, in force 1989): https://ozone.unep.org/treaties/montreal-protocol
- Status of ratification, 198 parties (as of 10 August 2026): https://ozone.unep.org/all-ratifications
- OECD, The Polluter Pays Principle: Definition, Analysis, Implementation (1975, reissued 2008): https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264044845-en
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