The Environmental Protection of Future Generations: A Necessary Foundation for Sustainable Development

The decisions adopted by the people alive today can deeply impact the lives and rights of those born in the years, decades or many centuries to come. Therefore, protecting and defending future generations is a moral duty for today's society. The generations who will live on the planet in the future have a clear right to a healthy environment in order to exist there; or to the natural resources of the Earth not to have been depleted so that they can continue to have a full live; or to have an optimum quality of life that is not threatened by an aggressive and hostile climate, the result of the legacy of the acts of the humans who lived on the planet in its past.

The environmental legal protection of future generations is the project to be addressed by current environmental law; it will surely be one of the core themes of the environmental legislative policies of many countries around the world in the short term.

Protecting and defending the rights of future generations require the decision-making processes to evolve in order to consider and guarantee justice and sustainability over a series of time scales that include the present, the short and medium term, and the distant future.

Legislative policies must not only be able to protect current interests in the future, but they should also address the need to organise the demands that the future imposes on the present; therefore, a legal mainstream that implies recognising the generations that will live on the planet in the future as subjects of law must be developed.

Based on elementary human ethics, there has to be recognition that those who are yet to be born cannot defend themselves; therefore, the emphasis has to be on intergenerational justice gradually shifting beyond the moral debate to be based on the legal debate.