The Vaca Muerta Tribunal Delegation investigated the impacts of the expansion of the extractive frontier on Rights of Nature and Indigenous Peoples in Patagonia – Argentina.  

Between March 29th and April 5th, 2023, a delegation of judges from the International Rights of Nature Tribunal visited Vaca Muerta, in the Argentinian provinces of Neuquén and Río Negro. The delegation focused on the environmental and human rights impacts of the expansion of the extractive fracking industry in the region.

During the visit, the delegation met with representatives of the government, oil companies, social organizations, and communities affected by the activity. The agenda included visits to the province of Neuquén, where the Vaca Muerta megaproject and the oil companies are located; to the oil dumps in Neuquén Capital and Añelo, where contamination and illegal storage of toxic waste from fracking has been reported; to the Ruca Mapuche, to evaluate the impacts on the territory and the rights of Indigenous Peoples; and to the town of Sauzal Bonito, where seismic movements have been recorded and the relationship between fracking and earthquakes has been questioned.

At the end of the visit, the delegation presented a report of the findings at a meeting at the Chamber of Deputies of Argentina.

Climate and environmental crisis

In most of the legal systems operating in the world today Nature only exists as a “natural resources”; a form of human property to be exploited – to a greater or lesser degree – at will. Our current legal systems make it impossible to truly protect Nature in a court of law.

It is now clearer than ever that these legal systems have not only failed to protect our planet from the advances of an insatiable extractivism, but are, in fact, the tools of that same extractivism, supposedly “regulating” the destruction caused by industries such as mining and fracking, while in practice only sanctioning and perpetuating it.

Faced with the inadequacy of traditional environmental law, the Rights of Nature present as a new form of jurisprudence that, by recognizing Nature as a legal subject of rights just like humans, pushes courts to look beyond economic incentives and make decisions based on the interests of both humanity and the Earth community as a whole.

Time is up: the ecological crisis is upon us. To deny it would be to reject the evidence we see with our own eyes, and we cannot afford to continue to comply with laws that are fundamentally inadequate to address the current situation; the Rights of Nature must be recognized at the legal level, at all scales: from the local, to the national and international, if we are to avoid this crisis.

To this end, the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature aims to demonstrate how the Rights of Nature can be applied by presenting a series of urgent real-world cases before a panel of distinguished judges, who examine and rule on the cases from a Rights of Nature perspective.

Specifically, the Tribunal ruled as follows:

Fracking uses

cubic meters of water a year

The current scenario in the Neuquina Basin clearly denies the existence of “safe and responsible fracking”, a formula spread globally and repeated locally and nationally by oil companies and governments. It should be added that none of what is happening comes as a surprise, since the information on the environmental and territorial impacts of fracking was already available in 2013, the year in which exploitation began in Vaca Muerta. The difference between 2013 and 2023 is that the impacts, in their multidimensional nature, are already visible and palpable. If we add to this the fact that, in reality, Vaca Muerta has barely taken off, since only 3% has been exploited, it is worth asking what will be the extent of the impacts when the large scale is a reality.

Finally, in a context of climate emergency, Vaca Muerta is considered a potential carbon bomb (28.9 billion tons of CO2 equivalent to 2/3 of current global CO2 emissions).

Far from being a “transition fuel” as oil corporations have been claiming, shale gas and tight gas generate higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional gas during their production stage, since more wells are needed per cubic meter of gas produced; their operations use energy, generally from diesel engines, which increases CO² emissions per unit of useful energy produced. Hydraulic fracturing also requires more energy consumption and even more venting or flaring of gas during the completion phase of the well. On the other hand, methane gas emissions contribute very powerfully to the greenhouse effect. It is no coincidence that in 2018 the UN Committee on ESCR made it clear that, if progress is made in Vaca Muerta, “the full exploitation, with hydraulic fracturing, of all shale gas reserves would consume a significant percentage of the global carbon budget to achieve the goal of (no more than) 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, stipulated in the Paris Agreement”, and will therefore recommend the Argentine State to reconsider the exploitation in vaca Muerta, in light of the commitments adopted.