2.1. The Political Ecology of Climate Coloniality

To interrogate decolonial politics in climate litigation, we draw on a theoretical framework that integrates decolonial theory and political ecology, both of which are informed by world-systems analysis. This combined lens enables us to approach climate litigation not merely as a legal tool but as a politically situated practice embedded within long-standing global structures of capitalism that reproduce ecological, economic, and epistemic inequality. It provides a foundation for critically assessing the origins and trajectories of climate harm, as well as the legal responses that seek to address it.

World-systems theory provides the macro-structural perspective necessary to understand the global distribution of ecological ruin. Originally developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, the theory delineates a global capitalist system stratified into core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones.Footnote ²⁰ These zones are distinguished by their production, accumulation, and exploitation/dispossession roles.Footnote ²¹ The core – primarily industrialized nations – accumulates capital and concentrates technological and legal control, while the (semi-)periphery provides cheap raw materials and labour, becoming the dumping ground for waste.Footnote ²² This configuration underlies what Jason Hickel and co-authors describe as unequal ecological exchange, in which the periphery consistently delivers more value than it receives in return.Footnote ²³ Climate breakdown is one of the most significant manifestations of this asymmetry, whereby nations least responsible for emissions are the most vulnerable to its effects.Footnote ²⁴ Farhana Sultana terms this the condition of ‘climate coloniality’: the entanglement of climate harm with racial capitalism, Eurocentric legal hegemony, and militarized development practices.Footnote ²⁵

Building on this, political-ecology and world-ecology approaches examine the material and socio-political processes that mediate environmental harm.Footnote ²⁶ Political ecology, particularly in the work of scholars like Jason Moore, Enrique Leff, and Maristella Svampa, considers environmental degradation not as an accidental by-product but a structural feature of capitalist modernity.Footnote ²⁷ Moore’s approach to the ‘Capitalocene’ reframes the climate crisis as dialectically constitutive of capitalist world-ecology – a system that depends on the appropriation of ‘cheap nature’ to sustain accumulation.Footnote ²⁸ Similarly, Alf Hornborg’s theory of unequal ecological exchange explains how economic production functions as an energy transformation process.Footnote ²⁹ He observes that the value of goods increases as more energy (or exergy) is dissipated in their production – meaning that products from industrial centres tend to contain less remaining energy than the raw resources they import.Footnote ³⁰ This creates a systemic energy flow from the periphery to the industrial core within the capitalist world system. As production intensifies, core regions accumulate more capital to import additional high-energy resources, perpetuating this imbalance. Hornborg argues that this cycle, which applies across all natural resources, leads to a spatial redistribution of environmental degradation. Crucially, he emphasizes that monetary systems do not mitigate ecological harm – they merely obscure or displace it, enabling the ongoing exploitation of the biosphere through global capitalist exchange. This framework bridges world-systems theory and ecological economics to expose the structural nature of a north-south divide.

These frameworks also draw on the concept of metabolic rift – a deep fracture between human society and the biophysical processes that sustain life, accelerated by capitalism.Footnote ³¹ Originally theorized by Karl Marx, the rift emerged from the separation of urban industrial labour from rural agriculture.Footnote ³² As food and energy were extracted from the countryside to feed cities, nutrients were not returned to the soil, leading to environmental degradation.Footnote ³³ This concept helps us to think ‘through a singular metabolism of power, nature, and capital’.Footnote ³⁴ Moore expands this theory by arguing that capitalism accelerates production through ‘shortcuts’ that compress the time required for nature’s reproduction, causing violent ecological consequences.Footnote ³⁵ Climate litigation, viewed through this lens, challenges immediate violations and the deeper rifts between capitalist production and planetary boundaries,Footnote ³⁶ as shown by the proliferation of lawsuits brought against high-emitting corporate actors and oil majors.Footnote ³⁷

As a corollary to the phenomenon of the (semi-)periphery as a waste disposal site, the concept of sacrifice zones is central to political ecology.Footnote ³⁸ These are regions designated, explicitly or implicitly, for ecological ruin in the name of progress, development, or energy transition.Footnote ³⁹ Svampa identifies how Latin American territories, predominantly Indigenous and campesinos lands, are systematically turned into sacrifice zones through extractivist policies justified by national development goals and international demand.Footnote ⁴⁰ Framing territories as mere ‘productive sites’ strips them of relational and cultural meaning, converting living spaces into extraction zones. Legal action that reasserts territorial rights, challenges extractivist logic, or asserts environmental personhood thus becomes part of a broader struggle for environmental and epistemic justice.Footnote ⁴¹

Decolonial theory offers a complementary, and at times intersecting, analytic that foregrounds the epistemic and racialized foundations of global environmental harm. Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the ‘coloniality of power’ explains how modernity and capitalism are historically entangled with colonial patterns of domination.Footnote ⁴² According to Quijano and Ramón Grosfoguel, racial classification served to justify and naturalize the global division of labour.Footnote ⁴³ This logic persists today, both in the racialized distribution of ecological harm and in the privileging of Western legal and scientific epistemologies over Indigenous and subaltern knowledges.Footnote ⁴⁴

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui highlights that various voices from earlier generations have recognized that regressive forms of modernity, when imposed on colonial lands, have confronted a baroque, ch’ixi ethos that has resisted them and continues to do so.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rivera Cusicanqui asserts that such dialectical encounters have also fostered ‘an intelligent magma from which liberating energies could spring’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In that same spirit, Sultana invites us to conceive of decolonization within the climate context as ‘rethinking and addressing various institutions and processes at multiple intersecting scales’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Decolonizing climate involves critically examining the complexities of empire, imperialism, and capitalism, and understanding how to de-centre and dismantle them rather than simply doing so metaphorically.Footnote ⁴⁸ Malcolm Ferdinand echoes the ethos of Cusicanqui and Sultana by describing certain struggles as embodying what he calls decolonial ecology – a theory and praxis that condemns environmental colonialism. Decolonial ecology is resisting the imposition of ‘a way of using the Earth that usurps common goods for a profit on the one side and results in the degradation of the living environment for the local inhabitants on the other’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this sense, legal struggles can serve as resistance tactics within a larger political strategy of emancipatory struggle.Footnote ⁵⁰

Against this backdrop, a decolonial legal praxis for climate justice, reflected in the 58 climate litigation cases analyzed in the following sections, addresses four aspects that touch on the sensitive fibres of (post-)colonial legal technologies.Footnote ⁵¹ These aspects are:

• • historical and cumulative ecological harm,Footnote ⁵² acknowledging that climate change is not temporally isolated but accumulates over centuries of extractivism fuelling colonial expansion;

• • the racial capitalist origins of sacrifice zones, where subaltern territories are regularly sacrificed for the energy demands of the core;

• • the convenience of sovereign bordered regimes of ecological harm, which obstruct justice and accountability for subaltern plaintiffs from foreign jurisdictions;Footnote ⁵³ and

• • the multinational corporate structure, which shields the capitalist ruling class with legal fictions such as subsidiaries and discrete responsibilities in the global value chain.Footnote ⁵⁴

These aspects will be analyzed further in the context of legal mobilization.

To summarize, political ecology and decolonial theory provide the perspective to place climate litigation within the broader contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism. Rather than evaluating these cases based solely on their legal merits or doctrinal coherence, we examine how they act as political interventions to challenge the normative and material foundations of the transnational climate regime. In doing so, we aim to highlight how law can reinforce and resist climate coloniality.

2.2. Decolonizing the Law of Climate Change

Recent scholarship on law and decolonization highlights how legal systems have historically facilitated and continue to sustain global structures of racialized exploitation and ecological harm.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the context of climate change, this literature calls for a shift away from narrowly framed climate law towards a broader interrogation of legal norms and institutions that enable the climate crisis and its unequal impacts.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such an approach aligns with the framework developed in the previous subsection by treating law as embedded in a world system of capitalist modernity and ecological extraction.Footnote ⁵⁷

Modern legal systems, shaped by liberal ontologies and epistemologies, have naturalized dispossession through constructs such as property, sovereignty, and the juridical subject.Footnote ⁵⁸ Critics emphasize how these frameworks empower certain areas of knowledge while repressing others,Footnote ⁵⁹ and how legal doctrines – such as the Cartesian separation of subject and object – underpin exploitative relationships between humans and nature.Footnote ⁶⁰ Folúkẹ́ Adébísí, for instance, exposes how European legal epistemologies facilitate the ‘property-fication’ of nature and support ongoing accumulation grounded in colonial logics.Footnote ⁶¹

The racialized character of these legal structures is central to understanding the climate crisis. As Frantz Fanon observed, colonial economies operate through a dialectics of race and class: ‘You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich’.Footnote ⁶² Eve Darian-Smith similarly argues that whiteness functions as a global legal and epistemic structure legitimating legal practices born in the global north.Footnote ⁶³ Through these racialized ‘logics of enclosure’, certain territories – often Indigenous, Black, or otherwise subaltern – have historically been transformed into ‘zones of nonbeing’ or sacrifice zones for the benefit of imperial accumulation.Footnote ⁶⁴ These logics persist today, exposing historically marginalized communities to both the legacy and intensification of ecological exploitation.Footnote ⁶⁵

In this light, the legal regimes created to manage climate accountability are themselves shaped by colonial asymmetries.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Sarah Riley Case and Stephen Humphreys note, the climate crisis overlays long-standing racial injustices, with legal regimes often exonerating the historical emissions of industrialized states.Footnote ⁶⁷ The result is a differentiated exposure to climate impacts, adaptation burdens, and legal invisibility for those least responsible for emissions.Footnote ⁶⁸

Nevertheless, scholars have identified avenues for legal resistance. Proposals for climate reparations aim to confront the global north’s unaccounted historical emissions,Footnote ⁶⁹ demanding redistribution, land repatriation, and adaptation funding as part of a broader programme of justice.Footnote ⁷⁰ This focus on broader historical reparations may aim to shift the framing and forum for loss and damage in United Nations (UN) climate negotiations away from being the only venue for ventilating issues of climate-related harm.Footnote ⁷¹ These structural remedial claims are rooted in centuries of atmospheric appropriation, extractivism, and structural violence.Footnote ⁷²

In litigation, legal mobilizations from the global south are increasingly asserting alternative epistemologies and forms of agency.Footnote ⁷³ Scholars highlight that Indigenous litigants, although constrained by the liberal frameworks of international and domestic law, have used litigation to contest extractivist logics and defend relational understandings of land and territory.Footnote ⁷⁴ This seemingly contradictory ontology exists also in regional adjudicative bodies, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), described as a ‘liminal space’ where emancipatory potential coexists with colonial and liberal constraints.Footnote ⁷⁵

Thus, decolonizing the law of climate change requires more than policy reform. It demands critical engagement with the law’s structural complicity in upholding global eco-apartheid.Footnote ⁷⁶ This decolonial understanding of the relationship between law and climate change is situated within broader narratives of agency and responsibility for the rise of global capitalism, including its earlier precursors: colonial trade systems premised on slavery, dispossession, and unequal ecological exchange within the world system. A decolonial climate litigation involves reimagining spatial and temporal opportunities for justice, considering the relationality of legal frameworks, understanding the historical and political role of law in the broader cause of emancipation, and valuing perspectives beyond liberal paradigms. It also emphasizes foregrounding struggles led by racialized and historically dispossessed communities. As the broader framework in this article suggests, law can both reinforce and resist climate coloniality – its role is contingent on how it is mobilized, by whom, and to what ends.

3.1. Empowering the Legal Agency of Racialized Subjects through Climate Litigation

One of the case selection criteria for deeming climate litigation cases to be of a decolonial nature is the claimants’ self-identification as belonging to historically racialized communities – in settler-colonial, post-colonial, or global periphery contexts. Out of the 58 decolonial cases assessed in this study, all but two involve plaintiffs or claimants who identify as racialized individuals or communities. It is noteworthy that racialized plaintiffs often file claims in conjunction with other individuals or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). For example, the claims developed by Our Children’s Trust in the United States usually include Indigenous (youth) plaintiffs filing alongside (youth) plaintiffs of other or unspecified ethnic or racial backgrounds.Footnote ⁷⁸ The two cases in which racialized plaintiffs are not directly involved are Amis de la Terre and Sherpa v. Perenco,Footnote ⁷⁹ and Les Amis de la Terre France and Others v. Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhône and SAS Total Raffinage France,Footnote ⁸⁰ both introduced under the French Loi de Vigilance (Duty of Vigilance Law).Footnote ⁸¹ In these cases, there are evident – albeit implied and indirect – connections with racialized communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo affected by Perenco’s oil exploitation operations, and in Malaysian and Indonesian regions affected by the rise of palm oil products in Total’s value chain. The alleged harm to their local environment is a principal element of the claims against Perenco and Total. For this reason, we have included the cases in the collection of decolonial claims despite the absence of a formally racialized plaintiff.Footnote ⁸²

Some of the earliest climate litigation cases were launched by Indigenous communities living on the frontlines of the changing climate. In this sense, the transnational phenomenon of climate litigation has always held elements of decolonial political transformation.Footnote ⁸³ In their 2005 petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the plaintiffs in Sheila Watt-Coultier and Others v. United States of America Footnote ⁸⁴ include the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and dozens of Inuit individuals from the Arctic regions of the United States (US) and Canada, who sought protection from the Commission for the alleged violations of their human rights caused by the impacts of the US contribution to climate change and, in particular, the impacts that they have had on the Arctic environment. Their petition details extensively how warming weather in the Arctic region – including melting sea ice and glaciers, thawing permafrost, sea-level rise, and habitat shifts – has an impact on Inuit culture, economy, property, and security. Their petition singles out the US as mainly responsible for the alleged violations of the human rights of Inuit peoples based on it being ‘currently [in 2005] the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the world’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Also significant for the decolonial climate litigation thesis, the petition incorporated arguments about the US historic (or cumulative) emissions to further justify their focus on obligations purportedly held by the US – as opposed to other states or actors – for human rights impacts caused by climate change.Footnote ⁸⁶ Although the Commission refused to take up the petition, it was followed by a subsequent petition in 2013 by the Arctic Athabaskan Council detailing similar complaints against Canada for failing to regulate black carbon emissions sufficiently.Footnote ⁸⁷ This petition has been pending for over a decade, during which the IACtHR has rendered two relevant advisory opinions, on the environment and human rights and on the climate emergency.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although neither of these early mobilizations has succeeded, they have been described as offering a ‘port of entry’ for articulating the rights impacts of climate change faced by Indigenous peoples, specifically in the context of settler colonies.Footnote ⁸⁹

Claims brought by Indigenous peoples and descendants of historically enslaved peoples related to the harm they purportedly experience as a result of climate change, or through the activities of economic operators significantly contributing to climate change, have become more frequent. Notable examples include Smith v. Fonterra (New Zealand),Footnote ⁹⁰ Gwich’in Steering Committee v. Bernhardt (US),Footnote ⁹¹ and Daniel Billy and Others v. Australia (Torres Islanders Petition) (UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC)).Footnote ⁹² Remarkably, the Smith and Daniel Billy cases represent early legal victories that might catalyze further mobilizing strategies in their respective jurisdictions.Footnote ⁹³

While the two IACtHR petitions discussed above omit any discussion of the historical marginalization faced by the Inuit and Athabaskan community petitioners, more recent cases brought by Indigenous and Black communities have been more explicit in linking historical marginalization to contemporary exposure to climate change risks. For example, a case filed in 2020 by community leaders of the Wet’suwet’en community in Western Canada against the Canadian federal government articulates that the ‘disproportionate deprivations’ of the community’s constitutional rights arising from Canada’s contribution to climate change would ‘perpetuate the trauma caused by existing and historical attempts by the defendant to subjugate the plaintiffs’ identity, culture, laws and practices’, historical actions intended to ‘assimilate the plaintiffs’ members as individuals into the Canadian mainstream’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Similarly, a 2023 case brought by environmental justice organizations in St James Parish, Louisiana (US), against local government authorities sought a moratorium on the authorization of additional petrochemical industrial facilities in a region infamously coined ‘Cancer Alley’ resulting from the disproportionately high rates of cancer among its residents.Footnote ⁹⁵ The plaintiffs in the case described themselves as ‘descendants of people who were enslaved on the plantations that flourished in St James Parish, and descendants also of those who endeavoured to make a life for themselves and their families after slavery was legally abolished – despite the continued brutality and exploitation following the end of Reconstruction’.Footnote ⁹⁶ According to the plaintiffs, it is ‘a legacy of slavery and white supremacy in Louisiana and St. James Parish specifically to disregard the political voice of Black communities and discount the physical, psychological, and emotional trauma imposed upon them for the profit and benefit of white communities’.Footnote ⁹⁷ While this case does not target climate change directly, it is illustrative of a large body of legal and political mobilizations led by Indigenous peoples and communities descended from enslaved peoples against the authorization and further expansion of industrial and infrastructural activities related to oil and gas extraction. It thus indirectly seeks to obstruct economic activities that contribute to and profit from climate change.Footnote ⁹⁸

In sum, the prevalence of racialized/subaltern plaintiffs in settler-colonial, post-colonial, and global periphery political contexts is a unifying characteristic of decolonial climate litigation. Their positionality also lends itself well to incorporating claims relating to the historical conditions of their territories, which have been forced to become sacrifice zones, and the obligations they seek to assert for the historical emissions of powerful states and private actors, as discussed below.

3.2. Litigating in Various (Post-)Colonial Political Contexts

The decolonial claims assessed here arise across three political contexts reflecting colonialism’s historic and ongoing power arrangements. Firstly, some claims arise in settler-colonial political contexts, featuring Indigenous, Black, or historically oppressed and racialized plaintiffs asserting obligations against powerful private economic actors domiciled in, or public authorities associated with, the settler (post-)colony. Examples include many cases from the US,Footnote ⁹⁹ Canada,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Australia,Footnote ¹⁰¹ New Zealand,Footnote ¹⁰² and Argentina.Footnote ¹⁰³ A second group of claims arise in the context of power relations between (historic) colonies and their respective metropoles, with plaintiffs in the colony bringing claims against private or public actors in the metropole. This is seen, for instance, in the claim before the United Kingdom (UK) and Dutch courts for harm caused by Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ claims brought by state and local public authorities in Hawai’i and Puerto Rico against oil and gas companies operating in the US,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and a claim brought by residents of the Caribbean island Bonaire against the Dutch state.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ A third set of claims is pursued within the more generic power relations of global economic core and (semi-)periphery economies, familiarized by world-system theory,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ with claims from individuals and communities in the global (semi-)periphery brought against public and private actors based in the core countries. Examples of such claims include the loss and damage claim brought in Switzerland by Indonesian islanders against the cement manufacturer Holcim,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and the claim brought by a Zapotec Indigenous community in Mexico against EDF for its involvement in a wind farm project that allegedly interferes with the community’s land rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ With cases found across all three of these political contexts, it is evident that decolonial climate litigation pursues transformations of diverse colonial power dynamics affecting climate justice.

With these first observations about who is filing decolonial claims and the political contexts of (post-)colonialism in which they are raised, we now turn to four types of claim found in the analysis.

3.3. The Atmospheric Weight of History: Obligations concerning Cumulative Emissions

The first type of claim contributing to decolonial climate litigation articulates obligations or liabilities of states or private actors arising from their historical or cumulative emissions. Such claims run against the grain of international climate law, which has focused principally on future-oriented reduction obligations rather than establishing responsibility for historical emissions.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Notably, Sarah Mason-Case and Julia Dehm offer a detailed account of how diverse norms and principles of public international law could serve as a framework for responsibility towards historical emissions.Footnote ¹¹¹ Nevertheless, accountability for historical emissions raises challenging legal issues, including questions about when actors became aware of their contributions to GHG emissions and when their corresponding negative consequences were scientifically established.Footnote ¹¹²

Despite the challenges of articulating responsibility for historic emissions and the political character of reparations that are likely to be required to address the corresponding justice demands, climate activists have started to integrate historic emissions claims in litigation against public and private actors. In Lliuya v. RWE, a case before the Higher Regional Court of Hamm (Germany), the plaintiff Saúl Lliuya referred to the cumulative emissions of RWE from 1751 until 2010 to establish RWE’s relative contribution to the causation of a property nuisance in the form of a heightened risk of flash flooding.Footnote ¹¹³ As such, though the plaintiff claimed that the costs of removing the nuisance amounted to roughly €3.5 million, he sought only a remedy equivalent to 0.47% of those total costs (provisionally estimated) to correspond with RWE AG’s relative contribution to global GHG emissions.Footnote ¹¹⁴

A second illustration of incorporating historical emissions in climate litigation is seen in a recently decided lawsuit against the Dutch state, in which Greenpeace Netherlands, acting as a representative of the residents of the Caribbean overseas territory of Bonaire, built on the Urgenda Footnote ¹¹⁵ jurisprudence to argue that the state is violating the human rights of Bonaire residents through both its insufficient climate adaptation and mitigation frameworks.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In their statement of claim, the plaintiffs discuss the issue of accountability for historical emissions in detailing various interpretations of the ‘fair share’, ‘equity’, and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ principles of international climate law. They argue, and the Court agreed, that the state has failed to meet its obligation to explain how its national climate framework sufficiently corresponds to its obligation to calculate the state’s remaining carbon budget, though the Court had little to say about what would constitute a ‘fair share’ of effort in mitigating climate change as it relates to calculating a carbon budget.Footnote ¹¹⁷

A third illustration is found in the class action claim brought by the municipalities of Puerto Rico against an open-ended list of carbon majors – currently defined as the 122 private actors responsible for the largest share of emissions historically and contemporarily. There, the plaintiffs articulate that the defendants are jointly responsible for 39.6% of GHG emitted between 1965 and the present.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The plaintiffs’ decision to account for historic emissions starting in the 1960s aligns with their claim that throughout the 1950s and 1960s the defendants were repeatedly notified of the possible impacts of increasing GHG in the atmosphere.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The internal research of several carbon majors confirmed this scientific conclusion in the same period.Footnote ¹²⁰ The plaintiffs thus argue that this awareness, coupled with public campaigns of denial and failures to warn the public of the risks posed by their products and operations, amount to various unlawful acts of (conspiracy to commit) consumer fraud, racketeering, and design defects and failures to warn that give rise to strict liability.

In summary, litigation incorporating articulations of responsibility for historic and cumulative emissions – stretching back to the 1960s or even as far as 1751 – is shifting the accountability frameworks for climate change liability. These cases are poised to reconfigure, in part, the established international climate law framework, which is oriented principally towards future emissions reduction and adaptation plans and obligations. Such reconfiguration includes evaluating the lawfulness of past emissions activities, their contributory causation to contemporary climate-related harm, and the (failures to) disclosure of awareness of the risks posed by increasing GHG emissions. In doing so, they scrutinize the ongoing coloniality of ‘emissions grandfathering’ and corporate accountability, focusing exclusively on future-oriented climate plans.

3.4. The Wretched of the Planet: Obligations Concerning Sacrifice Zones

The second type of decolonial claim found through the cases relates to the creation and maintenance of ‘sacrifice zones’ amid the ongoing climate crisis.Footnote ¹²¹ These cases emphasize the localized effects of climate change, including the impacts of fossil and renewable energy infrastructures and mitigation offset projects in racialized territories. They are oriented both towards historical actions that have harmed the local environment and the livelihood of individuals and communities who live there, as well as future-oriented claims about obligations related to adaptation and mitigation measures in locations already experiencing heightened risks and harm caused by the changing climate.Footnote ¹²² This was the most common claim found in the selected cases, appearing in all but ten cases. Collectively, they illustrate how specific places, sites, and territories – including mines, oil and gas extraction fields, infrastructure projects, low-lying coastal regions, and semi-arid agricultural areas – are sacrificed as losses to climate change, areas for extractivism, and as sites essential for the energy transition process. Therefore, the logic of the formation and perpetuation of a sacrifice zone is linked inextricably to the political contexts of colony-metropole, periphery-core, and settler-colony relations in which they arise.

In the Pirá Paraná case, representatives of Indigenous communities from the Pirá Paraná territory, belonging to the Great Indigenous Reserve of Vaupés in the Colombian Amazon, alleged the violation of their fundamental rights as a result of the imposition of a project under the framework of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) in their territory.Footnote ¹²³ They argued that private companies, some of which were international, developed such a project without understanding the communities they affected and their ways of life and self-governance structures. They pointed out that these companies relied on a mandate contract with a legal representative who lacked sufficient authority to implement it and accused the Colombian state of omitting social and environmental safeguards. Therefore, the case exemplifies how a corporate conglomerate, in the interest of commodifying the carbon sequestration strategy for offsetting markets, instrumentalized Indigenous territory for capital accumulation without regard for traditional land–community relationships, thus sacrificing territory at the altar of carbon markets.Footnote ¹²⁴

In the Greenpeace Netherlands case, the plaintiffs sought to connect the island’s historical economic use as a site of colonial plantations utilizing slave labour to its contemporary underdevelopment and disproportionate vulnerability to climate change.Footnote ¹²⁵ As the plaintiffs argue, ‘poverty is a problem for Bonaire because of a structural lack of attention from the Dutch government, and Bonaire, as an island, is very vulnerable to global warming’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Notably, in its ruling the Hague District Court avoided engaging on this historical dimension of the lawsuit, mentioning the historical practice of slavery only once, in passing reference to the climate vulnerability of a historical site featuring former slave houses on the island. Relatedly, the Court found the Dutch state to have discriminated against the residents of Bonaire, but implied that the discriminatory treatment took place on the grounds of geographic residency rather than the ethnic or racial identities of the majority of the islands’ inhabitants and the particular vulnerability arising from the island’s history of slavery.Footnote ¹²⁷

Other examples of claims regarding sacrifice zones are found in the cases of Pabai Pabai and Guy Paul Kabai v. Commonwealth of Australia Footnote ¹²⁸ and Mataatua District Māori Council v. New Zealand,Footnote ¹²⁹ in which Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders and Māori plaintiffs (respectively) alleged that the failures on the part of Australia and New Zealand to reduce emissions more rapidly amount to violations of the duties of care of the two states to these Indigenous communities. The duties owed by Australia to the applicants are established in an international accord between Australia and Papua New Guinea, dating back to 1978, and those owed by New Zealand arise from a treaty between the Māori and the Crown, dating from 1840. These cases emphasize the contemporary vulnerability of Indigenous peoples from factors arising out of historic economic underdevelopment, such as inadequate access to public health infrastructure, poverty, malnutrition, and their economic and cultural dependence on climate-sensitive primary industries.Footnote ¹³⁰

Climate claims premised on the creation of sacrifice zones are poised to increase in frequency in the future as many (post-)colonies will (and already are) experiencing the harmful effects of climate change earlier and with greater vulnerability than developed nations, caused in part by their historic and ongoing underdevelopment. Likewise, expanding justiciable rights to a healthy environment offers meaningful procedural tools for communities to hold public and private actors accountable for the local harm caused by their carbon-intensive and energy-transition activities.Footnote ¹³¹

3.5. Local Harm from Corporate Unbound: Extraterritoriality of Fossil Capital

The third type of decolonial claim found in the cases is the assertion of extraterritorial obligations of carbon majors for the dispersed adverse effects of climate change.Footnote ¹³² While climate litigation against private actors is becoming increasingly common, some of the first rulings to hold corporations accountable – such as Milieudefensie and Others v. Shell of the Hague District Court – expressly limit the territorial scope of affected interests in the case to the residents of the Netherlands.Footnote ¹³³ This resulted notably in the exclusion of one of the co-plaintiffs in the case, ActionAid, for the reason that ‘its operations in the Netherlands are geared towards developing countries, not Dutch residents’, making its statutory purpose as a public interest organization too differentiated from the other plaintiff organizations.Footnote ¹³⁴

In the light of this territorialization of climate claims, decolonial cases pursue the assertion of obligations that explicitly extend the responsibilities of carbon majors away from the jurisdictions of their incorporation to sites of communities living on the frontlines of the climate crisis. This is visible, for instance, in Asmania and Others v. Holcim AG, in which a group of plaintiffs from Indonesia assert that Holcim, a Swiss-based cement manufacturer, is responsible, in part, for the climate-related harm they experience in Indonesia.Footnote ¹³⁵ Hence, unlike Milieudefensie and Others v. Shell,Footnote ¹³⁶ this case emphasizes the global nature of the business operations, the allegedly tortious acts and omissions of carbon majors to bring the litigation and, more importantly, the legal interests articulated in the claims to communities facing disproportionate vulnerability and exposure to the risks of climate change. This claim parallels the argument in Lliuya v. RWE regarding obligations towards the extraterritorial harm caused by one’s emissions.Footnote ¹³⁷

Another illustration of this type of claim is found in the group of cases brought by the Public Prosecutor of São Paolo (Brazil) against major foreign airline companies – including KLM, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, and Emirates Airlines – for the harm caused by the emissions during flights to and from São Paolo International Airport.Footnote ¹³⁸ The claims, which were ultimately unsuccessful, sought to impose an obligation on airlines to offset these emissions through reforestation projects. Again, the case sought to leverage the global business activities of these companies to enable litigation against foreign companies with significant emissions, premised on the harm their activities cause locally in the global south.

Claims that articulate obligations for extraterritorial harm caused by emissions were the least common type of claim in the cases analyzed here, appearing in just four cases. The infrequency of this type of claim illustrates how jurisdictional doctrines continue to obstruct climate justice claims, as similar loss and damage claims within a national jurisdiction (hence without an extraterritorial dimension to the harm) are considerably more common. In other words, while this category would theoretically comprise loss and damage claims in core-periphery and metropole-colony settings, comparable claims in settler-colony contexts appear more feasible thus far.Footnote ¹³⁹

3.6. Nothing to Lose but Their Global Value Chains: Obligations of Multinational Corporations

The fourth type of decolonial claim identified in this analysis seeks to reinforce the climate obligations of contemporary multinational corporations, along with their extensive network of subsidiaries and supply-chain partners. Multilayered corporate structures and global value chains face criticism for isolating the liability and responsibility of powerful actors within these complex systems.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Currently, climate and environmental advocacy organizations are employing litigation as a means to broaden the scope and extent of responsibilities attributed to lead firms and parent companies regarding the environmental impacts of their extensive operations.

Examples of such cases include the litigation against Royal Dutch Shell that arose from its subsidiaries’ operations in the Niger Delta region, where oil spills caused extensive damage to the lives of residents, public health in the area, and the environment, including damage to agricultural fields.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The Dutch court found that Shell Nigeria (the subsidiary) was strictly liable for two specific oil spill incidents, and Royal Dutch Shell (the parent company) failed to meet its duty of care to the defendants in its failure to install sufficient leak detection systems. It was thus liable for the harm caused to the plaintiffs in this case, and subsequent negotiations resulted in a compensation agreement of €15 million. The precedent of this decision is momentous, marking ‘the first time a court of a home state of a transnational corporation has found a subsidiary located outside of its jurisdiction liable based on harmful acts’ as well as ‘the first time a [parent company] duty of care under common law has been established on the merits, and not just contemplated as a hypothetical ground for liability’.Footnote ¹⁴² While the compensation obtained in the case was relatively small in scale, with just four plaintiffs, the case pending before the UK courts – after having received a favourable interim judgment from the Supreme Court on the threshold for jurisdiction – arises from the enjoinment of some 42,500 individuals and thus, if successful, could amount to massive compensation for the structural harm posed to the region by Shell’s decades-long operations.Footnote ¹⁴³

The rise of global value-chain laws – the 2017 Duty of Vigilance Law in France,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ the 2023 Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz (Supply Chain Due Diligence Act) in Germany,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ and the 2024 EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence DirectiveFootnote ¹⁴⁶ – offer new openings for transnational legal mobilizations against lead and parent companies for the climate-related harm of their value chains. In France, numerous cases have been filed that seek to expand the accountability of carbon majors and other prominent economic actors operating in the country. Examples include a complaint against Perenco, the French oil company, for its alleged contribution to environmental harm and pollution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo;Footnote ¹⁴⁷ a complaint against the French supermarket chain Casino for its involvement in the cattle industry in Brazil and Colombia, which contributes to large-scale deforestation and destruction of carbon sinks;Footnote ¹⁴⁸ and a complaint against the French energy provider EDF for its involvement in a large-scale wind turbine project in Oaxaca (Mexico), a project which allegedly infringed the land rights of the Union Hidalgo Indigenous Zapotec community in the area.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ These cases offer new articulations of the responsibility that powerful economic actors based in global core economies and historic metropoles hold for the harm caused by the economic activities of their subsidiaries and supply chains in the (post-)colonies and the global periphery. Collectively, they illustrate new ways of imagining lawful forms of responsibility and liability for climate harm in the contemporary context of global capitalism. In this mode of production, the alienated communities bear the burden of environmental ruin and vulnerability to changing climates, partly as a result of the actions of powerful entities that extract surplus value, often located far from the hidden abode of extraction.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

4.1. Decolonial Encounters with Legal Liberalism

Firstly, it is noteworthy that all of the cases brought here rely fundamentally – albeit in different ways – on liberal legalism.Footnote ¹⁵¹ One might argue that litigating is a classically liberal mode of disputing conflicts. Regardless, these cases rely on the liberal notion of the individual legal subject, the corporate legal subject, rights, and – more specifically – human rights and liberal notions of property rights and interests. In Greenpeace Netherlands (Bonaire), for example, we find a liberal understanding of discrimination in climate adaptation policymaking, which avoids engaging with the historical legacy of slavery and underdevelopment in Bonaire and their impact on climate vulnerability.Footnote ¹⁵² In doing so, the cases inadvertently reify conceptual categorizations that have proven problematic in their facilitation of the extractive compulsion underpinning the climate crisis, ‘the capitalist world-ecology defined by an onto-epistemology of masterful “humans” who relate to the “nonhuman” through subjugation, control and exploitation’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Criticism of reliance on such legal concepts amid attempts to radically decolonize and transform worlds has previously been expressed in the context of the Rights of Nature movement,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ with some offering alternative conceptual registers for action that move beyond the problematic legal categorization of subjecthood.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Nonetheless, as the cases discussed in this article demonstrate, it is also difficult to envision how litigating – as a political act – could be conducted without reliance on some part of facets of the modern liberal legal conceptual order implicated in the injustices motivating the litigation and broader decolonial political movements. In the course of litigation, there are often opportunities to subvert and question the legitimacy of such concepts, but avoiding them altogether seems impossible or, at the very least, implausible.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

It could be argued that the commitment to a long-term emancipatory strategy from below is not a capitulation to legal liberalism but the principled opportunism manifested in a tactical intervention.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In that sense, engaging with the legal liberal tools for decolonial aspirations does not simply reduce law to an instrument for advancing social goals, but rather sees it as both a means and an end in itself, a pragmatic and complex view often discussed in the socio-legal literature on legal mobilization.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

When social movements use mobilization tactics, the structural challenges they face are similar to those encountered in legal mobilization.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As such, legal mobilization ‘envisions law as essentially neither just a resource nor a constraint for radical action, but rather encourages us to focus on how, when, and to what degree legal practices can be both at the same time’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In summary, engaging in legal mobilization within the terrain of liberal legalism requires a certain degree of awareness when translating the tools provided by the status quo, and careful navigation of litigation aligns with managing the risks associated with extralegal tactics.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The decolonial ethos often becomes entangled in the legal structure that it seeks to transform but, to do so, it must initially approach it with a level of awareness that moderates the expectations of social movements.Footnote ¹⁶²

4.2. Too Little, Too Late? Minimalist Remedies for Structural Harm

The remedies pursued in the decolonial cases described above vary immensely, including declarations of rights violations resulting from climate harm;Footnote ¹⁶³ injunctions against the construction of oil and gas infrastructure projects;Footnote ¹⁶⁴ injunctions to seize the financing of oil and gas extraction activities;Footnote ¹⁶⁵ monetary damages for interference with the enjoyment of property rights and other tort claims;Footnote ¹⁶⁶ orders against private corporations to develop new corporate policies to mitigate their contribution to the climate crisis;Footnote ¹⁶⁷ and orders against national governments to develop climate adaptation plans.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Transcending this diversity, however, is a lack of structural reparation for climate-related harm and injustice experienced by the communities bringing the cases and whose interests underpin them.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

At times, the interests in the cases are limited to small groups of individuals within broader affected communities, as in Lliuya v. RWE Footnote ¹⁷⁰ and Four Nigerian Farmers and Milieudefensie v. Shell.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Where class action or public interest proceedings are possible, the remedies sought are logically incapable of resolving the demands of the climate crisis for the plaintiff communities. As such, when viewed in isolation, the claims assert incomplete demands for decolonial political movements engaged with climate injustice. In this respect, the ambitions of these claims substantially differ from the pursuit of structural forms of reparation.

While most courts tend to take a narrow view of reparations, emerging structural remedies related to climate change warrant consideration as alternatives and as means to advance decolonial climate litigation. For example, the IACtHR, in its advisory opinion on the climate emergency, highlighted that climate change stems from interstate disparities and inequalities between social classes, with the most vulnerable suffering the greatest impacts.Footnote ¹⁷² The Court noted that deep-seated poverty and marginalization must be central to effective climate policies, particularly in adaptation strategies, thus paving the way for structural reparations that address issues of race, class, gender, and ecology collectively.Footnote ¹⁷³ If applied to a specific case on climate justice, the IACtHR could include, in a single award for reparations, different aspects of public policy, from free healthcare to infrastructure investment in Indigenous territories. It could thus address a structural problem that will require follow-up for compliance.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

To reflect on the scope of reparations for climate-related harm that some post-colonial states are considering, it is useful to examine their claims before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) during the hearings leading to the advisory opinion on climate change issued in July 2025.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Antigua and Barbuda, the African Union, Brazil, Colombia, and Vanuatu called for broad atonement, including technology transfer, capacity-building, and debt relief.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ These could be seen as structural remedies aimed at addressing the colonial roots of current power imbalances. Others emphasized the connection between compensation and loss and damage, highlighting the need to address both tangible and intangible losses, such as emotional suffering, and promoting non-monetary redress for human mobility caused by climate change.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Therefore, even within constraining remedial frameworks, tactical and imaginative litigation could contribute to decolonial praxis – not by a transformative act of anti-colonial worldmaking through a reparative order,Footnote ¹⁷⁸ but by making the possibilities visible and actionable in ways that can resonate beyond the courtroom.

4.3. Tensions between Collective Struggle in Individual Climate Lawsuits

Building on the previous point, decolonial climate cases seem to embody a discrete and plausibly uncoordinated political agenda. This is unsurprising given the complexity of political struggles over climate justice, which are shaped by divergent priorities, local contexts, and overlapping systems of oppression. Some cases focus primarily on the urgent reduction of GHG emissions, while others foreground struggles against ongoing land dispossession during the renewable energy transition, the discriminatory distribution of environmental risks under carbon capitalism, or the inequities embedded in climate adaptation and development planning.

These diverse agendas reflect what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe as the ‘incommensurability’ of decolonial struggles – different communities articulate justice in ways grounded in their own histories, epistemologies, and relationships with land and nature.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The unifying thread across these cases is their shared framing of the climate crisis within the structures of historic and contemporary racial capitalism, as well as the processes of subjugation, dispossession, and exploitation that sustain it.

An illustrative example is the intervention by the State of Palestine – an occupied territory the population of which faces the risk of genocide – in the ICJ proceedings on states’ obligations in the context of climate change. Palestine underscored how unlawful occupation, armed conflict, and systematic land grabbing intersect to intensify the climate crisis, including through the destruction of Indigenous flora and agricultural systems and the imposition of ecologically damaging land-use changes.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This intervention demonstrates how climate litigation can situate climate harm within broader patterns of settler-colonial domination and environmental apartheid.Footnote ¹⁸¹

The apparent incoherence among demands across cases should not be mistaken for political fragmentation. Rather, it reflects the pluralist character of decolonial movements and the specific histories of injustice to which they respond.Footnote ¹⁸² As Zapatistas often demand, a ‘world in which many worlds fit’ – recognizing multiple worlds and ontologies – necessarily involves legal and political strategies that resist being reduced to a single doctrinal agenda.Footnote ¹⁸³ In this light, litigation can be a site where different strands of resistance converge, even if they do not coalesce into a unified programme. Climate litigation, despite its doctrinal constraints, can still serve as a platform for reframing state and corporate accountability in ways that expose climate coloniality and articulate redistributive and reparative demands.

Ultimately, the plurality of claims within decolonial climate litigation should be understood as both a challenge and a resource. It complicates the notion of a singular ‘movement’ but also mirrors the multifaceted nature of climate coloniality itself.

4.4. Global North’s Resources for its Own Dismantling?

Many of the cases examined here involve some degree of support, assistance, or even leadership from organizations and movements based in the global north. This support can take multiple forms: strategic and legal advice, campaign coordination, communications support, and direct financial aid. While the specific details of such involvement are often confidential, our familiarity with the proceedings indicates that global north civil society and social movements have played a meaningful role in shaping aspects of this litigation. This reality complicates claims to the cases’ decolonial character, as it raises persistent concerns about asymmetries in agenda-setting, decision-making, and narrative framing.

Critics have argued that such dynamics risk reproducing forms of ‘white saviorism’, whereby global north actors – however well-intentioned – retain disproportionate control over the political direction of campaigns, often privileging strategies and framings legible to Western legal and policy institutions.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Similar concerns have been raised in broader debates about transnational advocacy networks, where resource imbalances and donor priorities can subtly reorient grassroots struggles to fit the expectations of funders or audiences in the global north.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ In the context of decolonial climate litigation, these risks are particularly acute, given the historical role of Northern states and institutions in producing and sustaining the climate crisis.

By employing the concept of strategic essentialism – where internal differences are temporarily minimized and unity is emphasized to reach political objectives – there can be merit in selectively leveraging the resources and platforms of dominant actors, as long as ultimate decision-making power remains with those most empowered and affected.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In this sense, global north resources can be deployed in the service of dismantling the very systems from which they derive, though only when power is consciously redistributed and Southern leadership is foregrounded.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Partnerships that are genuinely horizontal, transparent in their governance, and accountable to frontline communities can transform potential liabilities into strategic advantages, amplifying demands for climate reparations, recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, and the dismantling of the structural inequalities of carbon capitalism.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

From a pragmatic perspective, we treat these dynamics not as categorical disqualifications of the decolonial potential of a case but as analytic matters of concern. A decolonial praxis of climate litigation must remain alert to the dangers of co-optation while also recognizing that the redistribution of resources – from the global north to the south – can contribute to material and political gains in the struggle against climate coloniality. The challenge lies in ensuring that such support strengthens, rather than supplants, the agency of the communities whose futures are most at stake.