Metamorfose do Direito Ambiental: por uma revisão das gerações/dimensões de direitos

The climate emergency reveals the insufficiency of classical Environmental Law instruments to address complex, diffuse, transnational, and cumulative ecological damage. This article analyzes the evolution of generations of environmental rights, arguing that the first generation, focused on localized damage, and the second, structured around prevention and precaution in the risk society, no longer fully respond to the challenges posed by the metamorphosis of the world and cannibal capitalism. Based on a critical-hermeneutic, qualitative, bibliographical, and documentary approach, the article argues for the need for a third generation of environmental rights, guided by the protection of a stable climate system, the rights of nature, global-risk environmental liability, the admission of technological evidence, structural litigation, and polycentric socio-environmental governance. The analysis of the Federal Justice Council’s statements and the Structural Public Civil Action concerning Lagoa da Conceição, in dialogue with Article 133 of the Organic Law of Florianópolis/SC, demonstrates that the institutional legal-dogmatic space can be ecologized to recognize nature as a subject of rights and address complex socio-environmental conflicts. The article concludes that the third generation of environmental rights constitutes both a theoretical and practical response to the climate emergency, capable of expanding environmental dogmatics and strengthening the protection of present and future generations.