Climate change litigation

Climate change litigation, also known as climate litigation, is an emerging body of environmental law using legal practice to set case law precedent to further climate change mitigation efforts from public institutions, such as governments and companies. In the face of slow climate change politics delaying climate change mitigation, activists and lawyers have increased efforts to use national and international judiciary systems to advance the effort. Climate litigation typically engages in one of five types of legal claims:^[2] Constitutional law (focused on breaches of constitutional rights by the state),^[3] administrative law (challenging the merits of administrative decision making), private law (challenging corporations or other organizations for negligence, nuisance, etc., fraud or consumer protection (challenging companies for misrepresenting information about climate impacts), or human rights (claiming that failure to act on climate change is a failure to protect human rights).^[4] Litigants pursuing such cases have had mixed results.

Since the early 2000s, the legal frameworks for combating climate change have increasingly been available through legislation, and an increasing body of court cases have developed an international body of law connecting climate action to legal challenges, related to constitutional law, administrative law, private law, consumer protection law or human rights.^[2] Many of the successful cases and approaches have focused on advancing the needs of climate justice and the youth climate movement.^[5] Since 2015, there has been a trend in the use of human rights arguments in climate lawsuits,^[6] in part due to the recognition of the right to a healthy environment in more jurisdictions and at the United Nations.^[7]

High-profile climate litigation cases brought against states include Leghari v. Pakistan,^[8] Juliana v. United States (both 2015), Urgenda v. The Netherlands (2019), and Neubauer v. Germany (2021),^{[9][10][11][12]} while Milieudefensie v Royal Dutch Shell (2021) is the highest-profile case against a corporation to date.^[13] Environmental activists have asserted that investor-owned coal, oil, and gas corporations could be legally and morally liable for climate-related human rights violations, even though political decisions could prevent them from engaging in such violations.^[14][15] Litigations are often carried out via collective pooling of effort and resources such as via organizations like Greenpeace, such as Greenpeace Poland which sued a coal utility^[16] and Greenpeace Germany which sued a car manufacturer.^[17] Such cases may take many years to unfold, and have occasionally been unsuccessful despite lengthy efforts, as was the case with Juliana v. United States.

The 2010s saw a growing trend of activist cases successfully being won in global courts.^[18][19][20] The 2017 UN Litigation Report identified 884 cases in 24 countries, including 654 cases in the United States and 230 cases in all other countries combined. As of July 1, 2020, the number of cases has almost doubled to at least 1,550 climate change cases filed in 38 countries (39 including the courts of the European Union), with approximately 1,200 cases filed in the US and over 350 filed in all other countries combined.^[21] By December 2022, the number had grown to 2,180, including 1,522 in the U.S.^[22] The number of litigation cases is expected to continue rising in the 2020s.^[23]

There is a growing number of cases, and international decisions can influence domestic courts. However some cases challenge climate action.^[24]