Laws relevant to discrete sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are underenforced. This applies, for instance, to laws applicable to deforestation and to those regulating some conduct related to the extraction or use of fossil fuels. Accordingly, law enforcement agencies and the judiciary do not contribute their full potential when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Recent developments in ICT and other related sociological developments enable coordinated action by investigative NGOs, expert organizations, and private citizens to effectively support climate-relevant law enforcement and judicial action. The Center for Climate Crime Analysis (CCCA) is a group of prosecutors aiming to harness the collective potential of investigative NGOs and experts to support judicial climate action. By collecting and analyzing relevant information in collaboration with a broad and diverse network of partners and by strategically sharing that information with the competent law enforcement authorities or advocacy organizations, CCCA aims to trigger and support judicial actions against illegal activities related to climate change. This article illustrates the practical application of the proposed solution through a case study that addresses illegal deforestation through judicial climate action.

Most high-profile climate change litigation against major fossil fuel companies have yet to be decided. These cases are legally difficult, insofar as they face several procedural and substantive doctrinal hurdles. Yet, even before litigants get to a trial on the merits and an eventual judgement, they use the cases to influence different audiences. This chapter considers the key characteristics of high-profile climate litigation brought against Carbon Majors, using a temporal framing that characterizes cases by whether (1) they look into the past (liability cases) or (2) they focus on the present and the future (fraud claims, disclosure claims, and human rights procedures). This chapter then introduces a discussion on how to assess some of the direct and indirect regulatory and financial impacts of such cases. Focusing on the indirect financial impacts, this chapter suggests that event studies could be applied to assess the potential impact of climate litigation on the stock prices of defendant companies.

Climate change is the existential crisis of our lifetime, requiring immediate action to limit global warming to 1.5˚C. Countries have committed, through the Paris Agreement, to take measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, fossil fuel suppliers around the world continue to bet against the Paris Agreement by further expanding fossil fuels exploration, extraction, and production, which exacerbates the climate crisis and impedes meaningful action to safeguard human rights. As fossil fuel suppliers continue to profit from the climate crisis, they have consistently evaded accountability for climate change by leaning on domestic climate mitigation policies void of supply-side measures and hiding behind a wall of impunity. This chapter examines how climate litigation is closing this supply-side accountability gap through the judiciary, using the Norwegian climate case People v. Arctic Oil as an example. Although a loss for the co-plaintiffs, the Norwegian decision is, in some respects, a step in the right direction and a warning to the fossil fuel industry. This is because, for the first time, the Supreme Court held that greenhouse gas emissions from Norwegian fossil fuel products that are combusted abroad (“exported emissions”) must be considered when analyzing the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction and production.

This chapter explores how the climate litigation community could contribute to progress on climate change by creatively deploying visual evidence to help secure courtroom decisions that manifest in landmark change. The chapter first examines how visuals in the court room make the unobservable and the unimaginable understandable and can transform public opinion. The chapter then looks at several environmental and human rights cases in which the plaintiffs made use of visual evidence to their advantage. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the strategic value of visuals in rights-based climate cases.

A confluence of crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, is exacerbating inequalities in many countries around the world, leaving Africans particularly vulnerable to hunger, unemployment, and worsening poverty. The climate emergency reinforces these inequalities and vulnerabilities. Globally, the need for an environmental rights-based approach to sustainable development, founded on principles of equity, has received increasing attention. In Africa specifically, more work needs to be done to integrate rights into environmental and climate frameworks and support communities in protecting their territories and stopping violations. Climate cases, supported by international human rights frameworks, have increasingly asserted environmental rights, in response to the need for intergenerational justice and to protect communities from the threats of climate change. Three court cases from Kenya and South Africa, Save Lamu, Earthlife Africa, and PHA Food and Farming Campaign, all driven by grassroots campaigns, illustrate how climate change concerns have been successfully brought before the courts and how these judgments set a hopeful precedent for other communities.

This chapter presents the results of a comprehensive study of the universe of rights-based climate cases filed in domestic courts and in regional and international judicial and quasi-judicial bodies between 2015 and 2021. Part I offers an overview of human rights-based climate change (HRCC) litigation. Part II analyzes the legal rules and principles emerging from HRCC lawsuits and court decisions around the world. Part III offers conclusions about the potential and limitations of HRCC litigation in advancing climate action.The chapter argues that the regulatory logic and the strategy of HRCC litigation should be examined at the intersection of international and domestic governance. Litigants have predominantly followed a two-pronged strategy. They have (1) asked courts to take the goals of the climate regime (as set out in the Paris Agreement and IPCC reports) as benchmarks to assess governments’ policies and (2) invoked the norms and enforcement mechanisms of human rights to hold governments accountable for such goals. In the face of governments’ reluctance in taking the urgent measures that are needed to address the climate emergency, HRCC litigation can be fruitfully viewed as a bottom-up mechanism that provides domestic traction for the international legal and scientific consensus on climate action.

This chapter examines the advantages and the hazards of the current approach to environmental public interest litigation, including climate litigation, in Pakistan. It begins with a look at the history of environmental litigation in Pakistan. Building upon that, the chapter continues with an analysis of climate change litigation specifically and how it relates to broader judicial trends. The chapter concludes by underscoring the limitations of climate public interest litigation in Pakistan, despite some high-profile wins.

To comply with its human rights obligations, how much does an individual state have to do reduce greenhouse gas emissions within its jurisdiction and by when? And what are the criteria by which a tribunal can objectively assess the adequacy of a state’s efforts to reduce emissions? This chapter proposes five tests, building on the practice of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), for such an assessment. First, has every feasible human rights-consistent step been taken by the state to reduce emissions? Second, is the state subsidizing emissions, disproportionately allocating resources to spending that does not benefit the public, or failing to take adequate steps to mobilize resources towards emissions reduction? Third, is the climate plan reasonably ambitious in comparison to peer states at comparable levels of development? Fourth, has there been a progressive increase in ambition and avoidance of any retrogression? Fifth, are the state’s plans to reduce emissions in line with limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5°C? A sixth test addresses the “how” question, rather than “how much or how fast”: is the manner in which emissions are being limited consistent with human rights standards?

This chapter explores the potential of climate cases to drive climate transformation. Since the first climate cases were filed in the early 1990s, jurisprudence has shifted from rejecting the claims for lack of standing and for speculative harms to issuing findings in favor of petitioners and using IPCC reports as legal proof. We find that in most of these cases, courts do not hand down spectacular, precedent-breaking decisions or treat climate change as an exceptional legal problem. Instead, they tend to engage in low-profile climate jurisprudence, adapting existing legal frameworks to make them workable for climate-related issues. Elaborating on MacKinnon’s Butterfly Politics, we argue that advancing low-profile cases in a coordinated manner could create an atmospheric “butterfly effect.” In the past decade, low-profile, “butterfly climate jurisprudence” has nudged governments into making better informed decisions on issues such as fuel efficiency standards, the licensing of extractive projects, airport expansions, urban developments along coastlines, and incentives for renewable energy projects. The normalization or routinization of climate adjudication broadens its reach and impact and is less prone to backlash and vulnerabilities than more spectacular cases. As a result, their potential should be further studied and tested.

This chapter turns from the legal to the sociolegal to offer a different lens through which to consider the phenomenon of climate change litigation. By drawing on theoretical approaches in the study of legal mobilization, this chapter sheds light on some of the social and political dynamics of climate change litigation. I suggest that situating climate change litigation in its social and political context is useful in gaining a more holistic understanding of what is at stake when individuals and groups turn to the courts as part of their efforts to address the climate crisis. Drawing on the contributions to this volume, this chapter (1) shows how legal mobilization theory can be helpful to practitioners and scholars interested in understanding, explaining, and assessing climate change litigation in practice, and (2) highlights some of the ways in which studying climate change litigation can shape our conceptual and empirical understandings of processes of legal mobilization more generally.

This chapter examines the role that the Indian judiciary has played in advancing climate action and environmental governance. This chapter traces the judiciary’s contributions through a few landmark judgements and its relationship to varieties of environmentalism in India. India’s environmental movement, and the lawyering that supports it, oscillates between environmentalism of the poor and exclusionary conservation, where the human rights of forest-dwelling and other local communities are often violated. Moreover, though the judiciary in India has been a site of progressive environmental jurisprudence, it has nonetheless produced jurisprudence that violates the human rights of vulnerable communities. The judiciary is very often left to choose between the two competing strains of environmentalism and responding to the needs of development. These pressures, I argue, will shape the decisions the judiciary is likely to make in the context of climate change. Yet, this chapter ultimately argues that courts can play an important role in climate change governance if they adopt a more sensitive approach to questions of climate justice.

This chapter examines the role that stories and narratives can play in the development of climate litigation strategies. Part I covers an introduction to thinking on narratives, the way they work to support or challenge the status quo, and some helpful definitions. Part II looks at some examples of successful reframings of narratives in campaigns. Part III draws on the existing literature on narratives in climate litigation to highlight some dominant narratives that are problematic and some new narratives that are being deployed. This chapter concludes with a suggested checklist for considering narratives in climate litigation strategies and case work and pointers to additional resources and networks.