Skip to main content

Natural Awakenings Naples and Fort Myers

Action Alert! The Right to Clean and Healthy Waters Constitutional Amendment

Sign the Petition for The Right to Clean and Healthy Waters Constitutional Amendment. Our state regulatory system fails to adequately protect us and waterways from pollution. The state has issued 23,000 National Pollutant Discharge Elimination permits, 10 percent of the nation’s total, allowing industry to pollute Florida’s waters. As of 2018, 2,440—more than half—of Florida’s 4,393 waterbodies assessed by the state have been declared “impaired”. Polluted water was the primary cause of the deaths of more than 1,101 manatees in 2021. Our health, our economy and nature depend upon clean water. 


Amend the state constitution in 2024 to recognize every Floridian’s fundamental right to clean and healthy waters. Fundamental rights provide the highest protection under law, above and beyond the reach of special interests and political ideologies. The Right to Clean Water amendment enables citizens to hold Florida state executive agencies accountable when they fail to protect our waters and aquatic ecosystems and thus violate this fundamental right. Creating a fundamental right to clean and healthy waters, the amendment may be used to sue state executive agencies for harm or threatened harm to Florida’s waters, which include aquatic ecosystems. 


The amendment defines terms, identifies affected constitutional provisions in Article IV governing the executive branch, provides for civil action enforcement, as well as attorney’s and expert witness' fees to prevailing plaintiffs, and provides for equitable remedies, including restoration of waters.


The amendment can stop pollution at its source, save our springs, stop polluting Lake Okeechobee, curtail the loss of wetlands, reduce fecal bacteria contamination and save our precious wildlife. Read the entire text of the amendment and sign the petition at FloridaRightToCleanWater.org.