The horrific destruction of the Amazon rainforest under Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, raises a pressing question for the world community: do the prerogatives of sovereignty entitle a nation to destroy resources within its territorial control, when this destruction has global environmental consequences? The answer delivered by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, at the G7 summit is an emphatic no. It is time for the international community to build on Macron’s lead and to recognize a right to environmental intervention patterned on the notion of humanitarian intervention.

For centuries, the international community treated sovereignty as an absolute shield against intervention in a state’s domestic affairs. International law insisted that a nation’s treatment of its own citizens and legal subjects was not a matter of international legal concern. The ideology of sovereignty authorized a nation to treat – and mistreat – its people as it saw fit.

Nuremberg shattered this understanding. At Nuremberg, the allies recognized that a sovereign’s systematic destruction of its own people was a matter of international concern and constituted an international crime.

The Nuremberg understanding gave birth to the idea that the world community need not stand by idly when a nation commits atrocities against its own inhabitants. Many human rights activists today speak not simply of a right to intervene but of an affirmative obligation to do so. Activists understand that massive human rights abuses – crimes against humanity and genocide – never remain entirely local, even when committed exclusively within a state’s borders. These atrocities inevitably create refugee problems that spill over into other nations, creating larger international crises.

All the reasons that support the project of humanitarian intervention apply with equal, if not greater force, in the case of the environment. Massive environmental crimes, such as those presently unfolding in the Amazon, necessarily have a spill-over effect, as the degradation of the rainforest will do grave, and arguably irreversible, damage to our planet’s climate.

The degradation of the rainforest will do grave, and arguably irreversible, damage to our planet’s climate

Admittedly, the concept of humanitarian intervention is not uncontroversial, especially as it is understood to authorize the threat or actual use of military force to put an end to massive human rights abuses. The doctrine can be manipulated to justify military intervention for less than humanitarian grounds.

But the 2001 report on the Responsibility to Protect, prepared by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, offers a sound template for a workable practice of environmental intervention. The idea is that when a state fails to protect its own inhabitants, either by omission or commission, the international national community must take responsibility – not, in the first instance, by deploying military force, but through strong non-military means, such as trade sanctions and economic boycotts. All this can and should be applied to circumstances in which a nation fails to protect an environment the defense of which is a matter of global concern.

Macron deserves credit for highlighting at the G7 summit Brazil’s environmental crimes. The $20m in emergency funds pledged by the G7 to fight the thousands of fires presently burning will hardly solve the problem. Far more promising was Macron’s threat to scuttle a trade deal with South American countries unless Bolsonaro acts in decisive fashion to stop the burning. In delivering this threat, Macron recognized that the responsibility to protect the environment is a matter of global concern and not a prerogative of a reprobate sovereign.