Tage der Biodiversität 2027

Sitting at the foot of the Großglockner within the Hohe Tauern National Park, the Pasterze is Austria’s largest glacier. Since regular length monitoring began in 1879, it has lost more than half of its surface area and continues to retreat by several tens of metres per year; models project that much of the Eastern Alps‘ glacier cover could disappear by the end of this century. This trajectory serves as the starting point for exploring what recognising the Pasterze as a legal subject — under the international Rights of Nature (RoN) movement — could mean for nature conservation and biodiversity protection in Austria. Existing Austrian nature conservation and civil law treats glaciers, rivers, and ecosystems as legal objects, with protection structured almost entirely around human interests — tourism, water use, economic value — rather than nature’s own intrinsic worth. International precedents (Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, Spain) offer two contrasting representation models, guardianship and open standing, of which a guardianship-style glacier foundation under Austrian civil law appears more readily transferable to Austria’s legal environment. However, for the Pasterze, a specific tension emerges that most Rights-of-Nature precedents do not confront. While river-based RoN cases typically envisage restoration alongside protection, glaciological research indicates that ecological restoration is not a meaningful category for an irreversibly retreating glacier. The right to restoration could not be applied to the Pasterze — the status of legal personhood could only accompany its retreat and protect the postglacial landscape it leaves behind. This raises a broader question for biodiversity governance, namely whether legal and institutional structures oriented around restoring a stable baseline remain adequate once loss is no longer preventable, and how rights for non-human entities could be reconciled with continuing anthropocentric claims on nature’s ecosystem services. The urgency of these socio-legal questions is illustrated through a preliminary discourse analysis of recent Austrian media coverage of the Pasterze’s ‚death ‚, which suggests that RoN is being negotiated in public debate, well ahead of any legal resolution in Austria.