ERCS today launches our new Advocacy Manifesto, setting out a route map of how every person’s right to live in a healthy environment can be respected, protected, and fulfilled.
Everyone deserves to live in a healthy environment, with a safe climate, clean air and water, sustainably produced food, and a thriving natural world. To secure this, we must be able to hold public bodies and polluters to account on environmental issues.
Our Manifesto offers a route map for political parties to protect human rights, improve access to justice and strengthen environmental governance, so that laws to protect people and nature are effective and enforceable.
It identifies the legal reforms needed to tackle entrenched environmental inequalities, learning from communities who have experienced environmental injustices, from sewage pollution in our rivers and seas to the loss of greenspace to industrial development.
Our advice service has now received more than 500 enquiries from people across Scotland, and our growing Environmental Justice Network has created a forum for environmental defenders across Scotland to identify recurring barriers to justice , providing a robust evidence base to support our calls to action.
We highlight how the legal recognition of the right to a healthy environment, fair and affordable access to justice, and the creation of a dedicated environmental court can transform Scotland’s flawed environmental governance regime, empowering people up and down the country to exercise and uphold their environmental rights.
Our ‘Clean up Scotland’s Sewage’ campaign is a practical example of how the right to safe water and healthy biodiversity can be met, by obligations on duty bearers to improve monitoring, match EU water quality standards and upgrade infrastructure.
The publication of our Advocacy Manifesto comes in advance of the 2026 Holyrood elections, which will be a key test of Scottish political parties’ commitment to delivering transformative solutions that can address the triple planetary crisis of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and pollution.
Polls show that three out of four people in Scotland worry about climate change and more than two out of three want ambitious action. Now is the time for all parties to respond and take the steps needed to guarantee our environmental rights.
