Sovereignty, as inherited, answers one question: who has the authority to decide. Metabolic Standing answers a different one: on what continuing fact does that authority rest. It does not replace a government. It sits underneath one, the way a foundation sits underneath a house that still gets to choose its own furniture.
1. Recognition. Any polity — a state, a city, a river basin governed jointly, a corporation operating a bounded territory — may hold Metabolic Standing over the specific systems it maintains: an aquifer, a soil horizon, breathable air, a fishery, a forest's regeneration rate. Standing is granted per system, never once and for all. A government can hold standing over its water table and be in default on its coastline in the same year.
2. Threshold. Each system carries a maintenance threshold set from the best available earth-systems evidence, re-set on a fixed interval, never by the polity being measured. Falling short of a threshold is not a crime and carries no fine. It is a fact, dated and made public.
3. Certification. A certifying body — independent, plural, no single seat empowered to certify alone — reviews each system against its threshold on a public schedule. Certification is binary, per system: held, or lapsed. No system holds lapsed certification for more than four intervals without a filed remediation plan.
4. Notice. A lapse triggers notice, not seizure. The polity in default gets one full interval to remediate, appeal, or contest the threshold itself before any consequence attaches.
5. Revocation. Standing that lapses past its remediation window is withdrawn — for that system only. Withdrawal does not transfer the system to another sovereign, dissolve the polity, or authorise invasion, annexation, or occupation under any framing whatsoever. What it withdraws is the polity's exclusive claim to decide that one system's future; the decision passes, for that system alone, to whatever body the certifying process names as trustee until standing is restored.
6. Restoration. Standing is restored automatically the interval after a system clears its threshold again — no petition required. The protocol is built to be recovered from, not to punish permanently. A sovereign that loses standing over its rivers and fixes its rivers gets its rivers back.
7. Refusal. A polity may decline certification entirely, for some or all of its systems. Refusal is not a violation — it is simply the polity declining to claim that its authority rests on maintenance. It forfeits nothing by refusing except the ability to say later that it was certified.
What this protocol does not do is doing real work, so it's stated plainly rather than left to be inferred: it does not create a body empowered to invade a failing state in the name of its rivers. The two most dangerous readings of "sovereignty conditioned on habitability" both run straight through that omission, and both are refused here on purpose. A certifying body of the kind this protocol needs would be a close relative of The Ministry for the Distant Future — built for maintenance instead of deep time, but answerable to the same discipline: power to certify, none to seize.