The ecological transition: an impossibile challenge or a great opportunity for environmental sustainability?

During the Covid-19 health crisis, the world's population realized how close the continents, states, and people who make up the much larger global community are and how fragile they were as the pandemic rapidly unfolded. As prisoners in our own homes, we witnessed the impressive spectacle of Nature reclaiming her own space, which had been man-made for too long. The theme of ecological transition, which has come to the forefront of public attention over the last decade, has finally become a priority objective in the 2019-2024 period of the European Green New Deal. Following the pandemic emergency - thanks in particular to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, the green transition has regained new impetus through the Next Generation EU recovery plan (1/3 of the €1,800 billion investment) and by raising substantial funding from the EU's seven-year budget. Analyzing the Next Generation EU package, one can see that the most important instrument for the economic recovery of individual countries is the Recovery and resilience facility, commonly referred to as the Recovery fund and consequently the Recovery bonds. This is a European recovery and resilience plan intended to shake up the economies of Member States, such as Italy, that the economic crisis, triggered by Covid-19, hard hit. The resources available from the European Fund that concern ecological transition are very substantial compared to the other objectives, but the essential condition for ensuring that European countries receive European funds - in the form of low-interest loans and grants - is the presentation of well-designed projects that are aimed at contributing to ecological transition. The PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan), finally approved by a Council Implementing Decision implementing the European Commission's proposal, enabled Italy to receive EUR 24.9 billion in pre-financing or 13% of the total amount. Following a Europe-wide survey on the priority actions to be taken by the European Parliament, climate change was ranked first (43%). At this point, European recovery funds could be an indispensable tool for ensuring that governments apply the rule of law and democratic principles, as they could be withheld from the Member States that do not uphold the rule of law or that violate the democratic values on which democratic states are founded. Within this global framework, there was a strong need to quickly innovate the law to address sustainability within the different Member States. After environmental law had long been considered incapable of halting the degradation of the planet and protecting the health of citizens, its foundations were reconsidered. It is thanks to the impetus of associations such as ELGA (Ecological Law And Governance), which came into being following the approval of the Oslo Manifesto, drafted in 2016 within the framework of the Academy of Environmental Law of the UCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), that new ecological constitutionalism has been achieved. In the new environmental perspective, from this valuable laboratory, capable of selecting virtuous case studies and creating new legal models of ecological protection and territorial governance, emerging best practices in different world areas were rapidly disseminated. In particular, some recent proposals for change have been based no longer on an anthropocentric vision but on an ecocentric one (deep ecology), i.e., placing ecological integrity at the heart of law in place of human domination over Nature. Following the achievement of the indicators for monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda, the principle of responsibility towards Nature must be pursued by the new legal norms and environmental governance. This is the result of historical achievements in terms of international environmental rights, achieved since the Stockholm Declaration of 1972, which incorporated the international principle of the connection between environment and economic development, but also with the Rio de Janeiro Conference of 1992, which was established in Article 1 that "human beings are at the center of the issues of sustainable development. They have the right to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature". The implementation of this international provision is entrusted to the public authorities and the social components. In addition to cooperation between States, it is up to citizens to use instruments of direct participation and use instruments of claim before the Courts. This contribution intends to consider the new earth jurisprudence and constitutional provisions related to Mother Earth's rights. As in the case of the Constitutions of some Latin American States such as Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), refer to the cosmo-vision of the Andean peoples. The legal prominence assigned to the earth's rights in Latin legal systems may constitute new models of ecologically sustainable development within the European perimeter.