In the last years, the interest in ecosystem services (ESs) as a decision-making tool for environmental policy has been growing. The ES paradigm has also impacted the judicial system and in some countries the common law tradition. Experiences and lessons learned from the ES litigation have been already documented. In the initial analysis, this article aims to identify key trends in ESs case law in Latin America—a leading region in environmental constitutionalism—by exploring the judicial decisions issued by high courts and subnational environmental courts that mention or incorporate the ES term. In the second level of analysis, we focused on the Colombian Constitutional Court landmark decision; the Arroyo Bruno judgment aimed to protect the rights to water, food security, and health of the Wayuú indigenous people. We argue this is a groundbreaking ruling in Latin America, given that for the first time, a Court uses the ES-based approach to protect the environmental rights of ethnic communities, incorporating ES concepts to the constitutional law sphere and integrating into the same conversation, interdisciplinary and intercultural knowledge.

Harms resulting from a 50-year-old conflict in Colombia were out of all proportion. Clashes between organized armed groups, such as guerillas, army troops and paramilitary groups, resulted in countless human rights violations. The emergence, degradation and continuation of the war has shown that, beyond a clash of armed groups, the conflict was and continues to be underpinned by a ‘logic of dispossession, exploitation, and domination.’ In the shadows of the strife, non-armed actors, such as businesspeople, corporations and politicians, benefited from the war, and participated in land grabbing, forced displacement and the illegal possession of land that historically belonged to Indigenous People, campesino and afro-communities. Along with human bodies as the first territory targeted for dispossession, lands, rivers and animals were severely impacted. This article explains how the Colombian transitional justice architecture – anthropocentric and focused only on armed actors’ accountability – is ill-equipped to deliver justice and remedy for victims of corporate abuse and to properly address the harms against land, rivers and animals. This piece also reflects on the endeavours that both transitional justice institutions themselves and civil society at the domestic and international levels have made to effectively respond to the Colombian conflict’s systems of dispossession and, most importantly, to their victims.