Project
Preserving the legacy of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Heart of the World
Rising abruptly from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta reaches 5,775 meters (18,946 ft.) at its highest points, the peaks of Bolívar and Colón. It is the highest coastal mountain system in the world, a place where indigenous knowledge and nature’s own wisdom converge.
The sheer changes in elevation create a wide variety of ecosystems within a small area, where the diversity of plant and animal life creates a unique exuberant region. The melting snows of the highest peaks form rivers and lakes, whose freshwater flows down steep slopes to the tropical sea at the base of the mountains.
The indigenous Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo people protect and care for this natural treasure with an authority they have inherited from their ancestors. According to their worldview the land is sacred and shared in divine communion between humans, animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and the spirts of their ancestors.
Despite this ancestral inheritance, development projects proposed for the region have failed to take the opinions of these indigenous groups into consideration. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is currently threatened by 251 mineral concessions, hydroelectric projects, agriculture, urban sprawl, and infrastructure projects.
Many of these concessions were granted without the prior consultation of the indigenous communities, which represents a persistent and systematic violation of their rights.
Mining, which implies the contamination and erosion of watersheds, threatens the health of more than 30 rivers that flow out of the Sierra; these are the water sources of the departments of Magdalena, César, and La Guajira.
These threats have brought this natural paradise to the brink of no return. With it, would go the traditional lives of its indigenous inhabitants, who are dependent on the health of their land and the sacred sites it contains.
The Sierra hosts the archaeological site of la Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City, known as Teyuna, the cradle of Tayrona civilization. According to tradition, it is the source from which all nature was born—the living heart of the world.
The four guardian cultures of the Sierra are uninterested in allowing this natural and cultural legacy to disappear.
Related projects
Fracking: A step toward the energy transition or a continued reliance on fossil fuels?
One argument made by supporters of fracking as a step toward the energy transition is that the technique buys time while alternatives to fossil fuels reach maturity and stability.Behind this line of reasoning lies the possibility of extracting more gas and the myth that it is a natural resource—when in fact it is a fossil fuel—and that it allows for the safe generation of energy without causing as much pollution as oil and coal.But a technique that perpetuates the use of fossil fuels—and whose environmental and social harms are widespread and well-documented—cannot be viewed as a solution or a step toward a transition that not only seeks to move beyond fossil fuels but also involves a paradigm shift in the energy system.Furthermore, by increasing dependence on oil and gas, fracking contributes to the worsening of the climate crisis due to methane emissions associated with the gas industry, as methane has a greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide (CO₂).Below, we debunk arguments that promote this technique as a step toward the energy transition. The continuation of an extractivist systemHydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique for extracting gas from underground that involves drilling deep into the ground to inject, at very high pressure, a mixture of water, sand, and chemical additives (some of which are toxic) to fracture underground rock formations and extract the hydrocarbons "trapped" within them.Like the oil and coal industries, fracking uses a non-renewable energy source, intensively exploits natural resources such as water, and causes large-scale disruptions in the areas where it is carried out.Not only does it replicate these patterns of the fossil fuel industry, but its negative impacts are similar—and even more severe—than those of other fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and production activities. These include: water and air pollution, overexploitation of natural resources, land encroachment, ecosystem disruption, and the devastation of flora and fauna.This repetition of patterns seen in the fossil fuel industry means that fracking not only perpetuates dependence on fossil fuels, but also contributes to its expansion and consolidation.In fact, the development of infrastructure for its operation helps create and consolidate markets for long-term gas consumption, since it requires large-scale investments spanning several decades. This can create economic incentives to maintain and maximize its use over time, and discourage or delay decarbonization efforts. "Natural" gas? Less CO₂, but more methaneThe gas obtained through fracking has been called “natural”—a label meant to make it seem clean. But gas from fracking is neither natural nor clean.It’s dirty from start to finish—from the toxic chemicals injected into the ground to extract it to the greenhouse gases emitted during its production and combustion. Not to mention that it’s a fossil fuel, just like oil or coal.Another argument used to suggest that fracking gas is cleaner—and thus to promote it as a "transition fuel"—is that it produces fewer CO₂ emissions than other fossil fuels. This is a half-truth, as it fails to mention that the main component of natural gas is methane, a greenhouse gas whose global warming potential is much greater than that of CO₂.According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), methane’s global warming potential is approximately 82.5 times greater than that of CO₂ over a 20-year time horizon. This means that, despite emitting less CO₂ during combustion, fracking gas can have a climate impact equal to or even greater than that of other fossil fuels when methane emissions are taken into account.These emissions can occur both during planned events and as a result of leaks throughout the entire production and supply chain.Some studies estimate that methane leaks from unconventional gas operations—such as fracking—can reach up to 12% throughout the production and transportation chain, or that global leaks account for up to 5% of total gas production. Incompatibility with climate and human rights obligationsAs we have seen, fracking means greater dependence on fossil fuels and higher levels of polluting emissions. This not only undermines the argument that it is a "transition fuel," but also shows how this technique runs counter to countries’ international commitments regarding the climate crisis.The Paris Agreement, the most important binding global commitment to address the climate crisis, stipulates that countries must substantially reduce their greenhouse gas emissions—including CO₂ and methane—to limit the rise in global temperatures.How could a country justify that using a technique that involves generating more polluting emissions is consistent with its commitments to reduce them?Implementing fracking is also incompatible with States’ obligation to protect the human right to a healthy environment, especially in light of the impacts of the climate crisis. This principle was established in Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which reinforced States' obligation to adopt measures to protect the climate system and the human rights of both present and future generations.At this time, when various countries in the region are considering launching or expanding fracking activities, it is essential that discussions not be limited to technical analyses, but rather address the environmental, climate, and human rights dimensions of these activities in light of the countries’ international commitments.So that narratives attempting to portray fracking as a step toward the transition do not obscure the fact that, in reality, it is an anchor that keeps us tied to our dependence on fossil fuels. Learn more about the impacts of fracking and the actions being taken to curb its expansion.
Read more
Climate-focused environmental assessment: Key to protecting human rights
In a landmark ruling for climate justice in Latin America, on June 16, Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court ordered the government to include a climate impact analysis in the assessment of any project, construction, or activity that could affect the environment.The decision builds on similar achievements in other countries on the continent, resulting from strategic climate litigation.The ruling in Costa Rica was the result of litigation supported by AIDA, in which we filed a legal brief presenting solid arguments demonstrating that incorporating a climate perspective into project assessments is an obligation under national legislation, international agreements, and the experience of other countries in the region.Since the climate crisis is the most urgent environmental and human rights threat the world currently faces, it is important for courts to uphold the requirement that governments assess climate-related risks and impacts before authorizing any project or activity.The procedure established to conduct this analysis—known as an environmental impact assessment (EIA)—is specifically designed to identify, anticipate, analyze, mitigate, and/or prevent the environmental impacts of potentially harmful projects or activities.At the same time, it is a key tool for preventing development proposals from violating the rights of individuals and communities, including the universal right to a healthy environment.Below, we detail the reasons why governments must assess a project’s climate impacts before giving it the green light—these were our contributions to the recent legal victory in Costa Rica. National and international obligationsSeveral national regulations establish the obligation to include climate change criteria in project environmental assessments. In Costa Rica, for example, we have: Decree 42465 of 2019, which requires institutions carrying out public infrastructure projects to assess climate risks, climate change, and other natural or human-induced factors at all stages of the project. Our brief also refers to a series of documents that analyze climate risk in Costa Rica, a country that, due to its location in the Central American tropics, is exposed to extreme weather events—hurricanes, tropical storms, droughts, and floods—whose frequency and intensity have increased as a result of global warming.At the international level, Costa Rica, like other countries on the continent, is a party to treaties and other instruments of international law that entail obligations regarding the environment and human rights, which make reference to the environmental assessment of projects: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It requires governments to use appropriate methods, such as project impact assessments, to minimize the adverse effects of climate change on the economy, public health, and the environment.Paris Agreement. It requires governments to take and report on the actions they will undertake to reduce climate-damaging gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change, all of which must respect human rights.Convention on Biological Diversity. It requires countries to implement appropriate procedures to ensure that projects likely to have a significant adverse impact on biological diversity are assessed, with a view to preventing or minimizing such impacts, and to allow for public participation where appropriate.Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. It calls on countries to develop, strengthen, and implement relevant actions to align sustainable development and growth, food security, health and safety, climate variability and change, environmental management, and disaster risk reduction.Advisory Opinion No. 23 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It requires that environmental assessments of projects take into account their cumulative impacts, prevent harm to indigenous communities and tribal peoples, include contingency and mitigation plans, and ensure that the assessments are objective, independent, and subject to state oversight. Lessons from other Latin American countriesIn several countries on the continent, the requirement to incorporate climate criteria into environmental assessments has been institutionally established and also upheld by court rulings. Two recent cases illustrate this:Chile. In a 2022 litigation related to the Mejillones thermal power plant, located in the Antofagasta Region, the Supreme Court ordered Chile’s Environmental Assessment Service to analyze the atmospheric component—including those elements that have changed in the terrestrial environment due to climate change—from the start of the project’s implementation to the present.Colombia. In response to a lawsuit challenging the country’s environmental permitting regulations, the Constitutional Court ruled in 2024 that environmental impact studies must include an assessment of climate change impacts: “a global phenomenon determined by multiple biophysical and socioeconomic variables that interact over long periods of time, which is having an increasingly decisive effect on natural processes and impacts territories, communities, and individuals in different ways, with Colombia being one of the most affected countries.” Protecting a healthy environment in the face of the climate crisisAs noted above, incorporating climate change criteria into the environmental assessment of projects is essential for the enjoyment of the right to a healthy environment. This implies:Assessing the impacts that the project or activity may have on climate change. This includes quantifying and documenting direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions; determining whether, and to what extent, these emissions increase or decrease; and analyzing appropriate mitigation strategies to address anticipated impacts.Considering the effects of the climate crisis (such as climate-induced accidents or disasters) on the development, viability, and sustainability of the project or activity over time, this analysis should inform the decision on its authorization. The climate crisis is not a threat, but a reality that is already severely affecting the region. In this context, it is imperative that development projects continue to undergo proper environmental assessments that require mandatory, systematic consideration of climate impacts for both mitigation and adaptation. Through strategic litigation, AIDA will continue to contribute to this effort. Learn more in our fact sheet, "Climate Change Perspectives in Environmental Impact Studies" (in Spanish). Check out our report, "Global Best Practices for Environmental Impact Studies" (in Spanish).
Read more
Climate justice unlocked
How the Inter-American Court’s Advisory Opinion 32/25 Rewrites the Rules for Climate Litigation in Latin America. This article was originally published on Verfassungsblog. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has just handed climate litigators in Latin America the most powerful tool they have ever had. Advisory Opinion OC-32/25, issued in 2025, does not merely interpret existing rights in the context of the climate crisis. It restructures the procedural architecture of climate litigation by inverting burdens of proof, authorising the presumption of causal links between state emissions and climate harm, and recognising satellite imagery as evidence that states must make accessible to victims. For organisations that have spent years fighting for communities on the front lines of the climate emergency, this is not an incremental development. It is a transformative moment.The Opinion did not emerge from a vacuum. Over the past decade, the Inter-American Court has built the foundations step by step. In 2017, Advisory Opinion OC-23 established the right to a healthy environment as an autonomous right under the American Convention – not a derivative entitlement, but a freestanding legal guarantee with its own independent status. That standard moved from theory to practice in the contentious case of La Oroya v. Peru, where the Court found that severe environmental contamination created a systemic risk to life, health, and physical integrity. OC-32/25 is the third step in this trajectory – and by far the most ambitious.The Opinion characterises the climate crisis as a human rights problem that falls disproportionately on those already marginalised. It maps the vulnerabilities of Latin America and the Caribbean with precision, identifying Central America, the Amazon, the Caribbean and the Andes as zones of existential risk. The figures the Court cites are sobering. In 2021, the region counted 17.1 million internally displaced persons due to climate-related causes. The top one per cent of the population generated 92 per cent of per-capita CO₂ emissions in 2019, while the bottom 50 per cent generated just 0.27 per cent. Those who emit the least suffer the most. Across these ecosystems, indigenous peoples and traditional communities are disproportionately affected by ongoing violations of their rights linked to climate change. A New Autonomous RightFrom the right to a healthy environment, the Court derives a new autonomous right: the right to a healthy climate, defined as the right to live in a climate system free from dangerous anthropogenic interference. The Opinion treats this right as an indispensable precondition for the exercise of all other human rights in the context of the climate emergency. States are accordingly bound by a standard of heightened due diligence. Climate governance is no longer treated as a matter of political discretion alone. States must prevent climate harm inside and beyond their borders, require environmental impact assessments to include specific analyses of greenhouse gas emissions before authorising projects, and set ambitious, progressive reduction targets calibrated to the best available science. The scientific consensus reflected in IPCC assessments is explicitly treated as the legal reference standard.The Court adds a prohibition on regression: protection levels already achieved are a floor, not a ceiling. It extends due diligence obligations not only to states’ own activities but also to companies operating under their jurisdiction. These propositions are not entirely new, but the Opinion consolidates them into a unified framework and gives them the authority of a definitive Inter-American interpretation. For litigation purposes, the catalogue of obligations is now largely settled. Procedural Rights as the Real InnovationIf the substantive obligations are important, the procedural innovations are transformative. The most significant contribution of OC-32/25 for climate litigation is not the declaration of a right to a healthy climate – it is the way the Opinion restructures the access rights framework. Indeed, the Court developed two very valuable elements: the right to science, and standards of proof and evidence that strengthen climate litigation. "The right to science includes access to the benefits of scientific and technological progress and to the co-production of knowledge between scientists and holders of local, traditional and indigenous knowledge." (par. 473) The right to science, grounded in Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and read together with OC-32/25, creates enforceable obligations for states to guarantee effective access to scientific climate knowledge. States can no longer rely on claims of scientific uncertainty or insufficient knowledge: policies must be based on the best available science and updated as that science evolves. Environmental impact assessments (par. 362), national adaptation plans (par. 388), and Nationally Determined Contributions are treated as auditable documents that must rely on scientifically credible evidence and remain transparent (parr. 510, 511 and 486). Most significantly, judges can and must evaluate whether the scientific basis relied upon by the state satisfies Convention standards (parr. 488–539). This substantially expands the scope of judicial review of climate policy within the Inter-American system. Reversing the Burden of ProofProving a direct causal link between a specific state’s emissions and a specific harm has historically been the single greatest obstacle in climate litigation – technically demanding, judicially contested, and practically out of reach for most affected communities. OC-32/25 dismantles that obstacle in four concrete moves.The Opinion acknowledges that climate litigation is characterised by marked asymmetries between parties in their access to technical and scientific information. National courts must therefore adopt measures – including the reversal of the burden of proof – to guarantee effective judicial protection. The language is direct: "the burden of justifying any denial always falls on the State" (par. 490). In matters of information access passivity is not an option for the state.Second, the Opinion accepts a presumption of the causal nexus between a state’s greenhouse gas emissions and the degradation of the global climate system, and in turn the link between that degradation and the risks facing people and ecosystems – provided this is anchored in IPCC assessments. This responds directly to the attribution problem that has shaped the limits of climate litigation for decades. Courts are no longer required to resolve the full scientific chain of causation in each individual case.Third, the Opinion introduces alternative standards of proof. Access to climate justice does not require proving individualised causation for each harm. It is sufficient to demonstrate the generation or tolerance of significant risks through state inaction, and the effective exposure of people or groups to those risks. Communities do not need to show that a specific tonne of CO₂ from a specific state caused their specific flood. They need to show that they were exposed to foreseeable risks that the state failed to address.Fourth, the Court highlights satellite evidence as particularly relevant in climate cases and requires states to ensure cooperation and technology transfer to make such evidence accessible to victims in judicial proceedings. This is a practical recognition that the evidentiary tools needed for climate litigation are often technically sophisticated and economically inaccessible to the communities that need them most. What Changes for LitigationTaken together, these four innovations transform the strategic landscape for climate litigation across the Americas. Organisations like AIDA can now challenge fossil fuel projects whose environmental impact assessments fail to incorporate adequate climate analysis – invoking the right to science directly. We can contest state climate policies on the grounds of scientific insufficiency or obsolescence. We can bring cases on behalf of entire communities without proving individual, direct harm, thanks to the broad standing the Opinion recognises. And we can defend indigenous territories by connecting climate damage to collective territorial rights through a framework that no longer demands the near-impossible standard of individualised causation.OC-32/25 is not a self-executing judgment. Its standards will need to be invoked, argued, and developed case by case before the Inter-American Court, the Commission, and national courts across member states. Resistance from states that seek to preserve the status quo is predictable. But the architecture is now in place: the applicable rules have changed.At AIDA, we have spent years litigating in a region where the gap between states’ formal climate commitments and the actual protection experienced by communities is vast. OC-32/25 gives us legal instruments to narrow that gap. It does not ask us to be more optimistic. It asks us to be more ambitious – in the cases we choose, in the standards we invoke, and in the connections we draw between international law and the communities on the front lines of the climate crisis.
Read more