Environmental Law News Update

Lough Neagh and legal personhood

Lough Neagh is situated in the centre of Northern Ireland. It is the largest freshwater lake in the United Kingdom covering an area of 383 km2. It is fed by six major rivers and supplies drinking water to over 40% of Northern Ireland’s population. Since 2023, Lough Neagh has been blighted by potentially toxic blue-green algal blooms. This is primarily due to excess nutrients from agricultural runoff and wastewater discharges. There has been public and political debate about how the lough should be governed and protected. People are calling for action to be taken, and some are suggesting that Lough Neagh be recognised as a legal “person”.

Environmental personhood is a concept which emerged from the Rights of Nature movement. It assigns a legal personhood to a natural entity, meaning that entity has rights and can be represented in court by guardians. The concept of granting legal personhood has been used in several countries to help protect precious sites:

• In New Zealand under the Te Urewera Act 2014the original status of the Urewera Forest as a national park was removed and replaced with legal personhood. The Act used Māori language to reiterate that the forest has its own mana (authority) and its own mauri (life force).
• Also in New Zealand, in 2017, a settlement agreement between the Whanganui iwi (extended kinship group, tribe, nation, people) and the government – Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 – gave legal personhood rights to the Whanganui river.
• In 2022, the Spanish Senate enacted Law 19/2022 granting the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean, Mar Menor, legal personhood.

In regards to Mar Menor, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents banded together to successfully campaign for legal personhood. Professor Eduardo Salazar-Ortuño (a former lawyer) played a fundamental role in securing legal personhood for Mar Menor. Despite legal personhood being granted in 2022, the council in charge of representing Mar Menor was only established in 2025 and upstream from the Mar Menor intensive agricultural activity continues, which is widely regarded as a major source of nutrient pollution.

Some are of the view that the granting of legal personhood to Mar Menor has had a positive impact. Professor Eduardo Salazar-Ortuño has commented: “There is a big pressure in the environmental ministry – they have invested more than €600 million (£517.5m) by restoring of the Mar Menor… So it’s a big impact after the mobilisation.”

Others, such as Pablo Rodríguez Ros, an oceanographer and the author of the 2023 book ‘El mar que muere’ (‘The Dying Sea’), are of the view that there is an enforcement problem. Pablo Rodríguez Ros has commented: “The problem here is not that there are no laws; the problem is that the laws are not enforced.”

The proposal to grant legal personhood to Lough Neagh represents an attempt to rethink how law values and protects the natural world. The deteriorating condition of the lough has exposed weaknesses in existing regulatory and governance arrangements and has prompted serious discussion of alternative approaches. Whether Northern Ireland ultimately adopts a Rights of Nature model remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the debate surrounding Lough Neagh has become a significant issue in environmental law, raising fundamental questions about ownership, stewardship, and the legal status of nature.