Studies of climate change litigation have proliferated over the past two decades, as lawsuits across the world increasingly bring policy debates about climate change mitigation and adaptation, as ...well as climate change‐related loss and damage to the attention of courts. We systematically identify 130 articles on climate change litigation published in English in the law and social sciences between 2000 and 2018 to identify research trajectories. In addition to a budding interdisciplinarity in scholarly interest in climate change litigation we also document a growing understanding of the full spectrum of actors involved and implicated in climate lawsuits and the range of motivations and/or strategic imperatives underpinning their engagement with the law. Situating this within the broader academic literature on the topic we then highlight a number of cutting edge trends and opportunities for future research. Four emerging themes are explored in detail: the relationship between litigation and governance; how time and scale feature in climate litigation; the role of science; and what has been coined the “human rights turn” in climate change litigation. We highlight the limits of existing work and the need for future research—not limited to legal scholarship—to evaluate the impact of both regulatory and anti‐regulatory climate‐related lawsuits, and to explore a wider set of jurisdictions, actors and themes. Addressing these issues and questions will help to develop a deeper understanding of the conditions under which litigation will strengthen or undermine climate governance.
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Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
Courts now play an important role in policy debates about climate change. Reviewing the literature on climate change litigation we highlight key emerging, interdisciplinary themes including the role of science, time, place and human rights claims in climate change litigation and explore the relationship between litigation and climate governance.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
In 2015, a Pakistani court in the case of Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan made history by accepting arguments that governmental failures to address climate change adequately violated petitioners’ ...rights. This case forms part of an emerging body of pending or decided climate change-related lawsuits that incorporate rights-based arguments in several countries, including the Netherlands, the Philippines, Austria, South Africa, and the United States (US). These decisions align with efforts to recognize the human rights dimensions of climate change, which received important endorsement in the Paris Agreement. The decisions also represent a significant milestone in climate change litigation. Although there have been hundreds of climate-based cases around the world over the past two decades – especially in the US – past and much of the ongoing litigation focuses primarily on statutory interpretation avenues. Previous efforts to bring human rights cases have also failed to achieve formal success. The new cases demonstrate an increasing trend for petitioners to employ rights claims in climate change lawsuits, as well as a growing receptivity of courts to this framing. This ‘rights turn’ could serve as a model or inspiration for rights-based litigation in other jurisdictions, especially those with similarly structured law and court access.
Abstract
This analysis examines three recent and ongoing Canadian climate change litigation cases: ENvironnement JEUnesse c Procureur général du Canada, La Rose v Canada and Mathur v Ontario. ...Consistent with international climate change litigation trends, these cases are youth-led and rights-based and they advance claims for present and future generations. They present apparently conflicting judicial views on the justiciability of climate change claims and on the use of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to advance such claims. We examine these issues. We also analyse the insights the cases offer into the connections between litigants’ procedural choices and early success, either in withstanding a motion to strike, or in obtaining court authorisation to proceed by way of class action.
•The defendants' stock prices decline after the filing of climate change litigation.•Greater external financial constraints strengthen this negative relationship.•Higher cash flow volatility enhances ...this negative relationship.•The defendants' institutional ownership declines after climate litigation.•The defendants' reputation risk increases after climate litigation.
We document a significant decline in defendants' stock prices after the filing of litigation cases on climate change issues in the US. Economically, we document a 0.5% decline on the filing day and a 2.7% cumulative abnormal decline in the eight days following the filing. Cross-sectional analysis shows that the negative response is more pronounced in firms with greater external financial constraints, higher cash flow volatility, and lower environmental, social, and governance ratings. The difference-in-differences analysis shows a decline in total and responsible institutional ownership and an increase in corporate reputation risk after a climate change litigation is filed.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Abstract
Climate change litigation is a litigation which directly and indirectly related to climate change or climate change policy. Administrative court is one of the forums where parties can ...challenge this issue. The broader competency of the Indonesian Administrative Court based on Government Administration Law, making issues regarding climate change caused by government actions can be resolved in a more favorable manner. This can be achieved through the addition of sustainability in General Principles of Good Corporate Governance. This paper will analyze relevant law and regulations, and cases to explore the advantages of administrative court in climate litigation. This paper provides a suggestion to optimize the role of Indonesia’s administrative court to be in accordance with the need of environmental protection.
The phenomenon of ‘climate change litigation’ has come to the fore in recent years as campaigners and activists have become increasingly frustrated at a perceived lack of action on the part of the ...international community and individual states in terms of getting to grips with the climate change problem. Existing legal mechanisms available to private parties and other bodies, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been used as a means of endeavouring to hold governments and polluters to account for the effects of climate change. The physical impact of climate change on life and property has been thrown into sharp relief by floods and wildfires in all parts of the globe. One aspect of climate change litigation focuses on the role that tort might play in attempting to secure compensation for at least part of such losses. No one would pretend that actions of this nature can actually solve the problem, but they may serve to shame polluters and so forth by establishing an actual link between their activities and the tangible consequences of climate change. However, such actions raise formidable causation difficulties which have, until recently, rendered such claims outlandish and highly speculative. Nevertheless, developments in extreme weather event attribution may be about to reduce the conceptual and theoretical barriers to bringing such claims. In this article it is argued that, from a UK perspective, existing causality tests may be capable of accommodating such evidence, although, one must be aware of countervailing policy considerations which may inhibit the courts from adopting such an approach.
In a recent very influential court case,
Juliana v. United States
, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth used the “storyline” approach to extreme event attribution to argue that greenhouse warming had ...affected and will affect extreme events in their regions to such an extent that the plaintiffs already had been or will be harmed. The storyline approach to attribution is deterministic rather than probabilistic, taking certain factors as contingent and assessing the role of climate change conditional on those factors. The US Government’s opposing expert witness argued that Trenberth had failed to make his case because “all his conclusions of the injuries to Plaintiffs suffer from the same failure to connect his conditional approach to Plaintiffs’ local circumstances.” The issue is whether it is possible to make statements about individual events based on general knowledge. A similar question is sometimes debated within the climate science community. We argue here that proceeding from the general to the specific is a process of deduction and is an entirely legitimate form of scientific reasoning. We further argue that it is well aligned with the concept of legal evidence, much more so than the more usual inductive form of scientific reasoning, which proceeds from the specific to the general. This has implications for how attribution science can be used to support climate change litigation.
“The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).
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CEKLJ, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Questioning law’s response-abilities in the face of climate change, this article examines the litigation strategies that claimants and their attorneys have been deploying in the so-called “coal- ...fired power plant trials” in Japan. It first assesses the extent to which litigants have been able to articulate the socio-ecological challenges specific to the Anthropocene, before contemplating whether such strategies can ultimately open up a new litigation imaginary based on different chronotopographies.
On November 30, the Brussels Court of Appeal rendered a landmark decision in the climate case brought by “Klimaatzaak” (“climate case” in Dutch) against Belgian public authorities (the federal and ...the three regional governments). In this decision, the court found the federal authority and the Brussels and Flemish regions’ climate action to be in violation of Articles 2 and 8 of the ECHR and of their duty of care, and imposed a minimal GHG reduction target to be reached by Belgian authorities for the future. In their blogpost, Alice Briegleb and Antoine De Spiegeleir provide a clear overview of the case, exploring its previous stages and insisting on the continuing failures of the Belgian climate governance and its complex federal structure. We focus on our part on how the decision makes it clear that the climate justice movement is now confronted with the tension between the legally required and the ethically desirable parameters of climate effort distribution.
To stabilise climate change, fossil fuel businesses must accept responsibility for their part in the deterioration of environmental circumstances. Unfortunately, the regulatory structure is ...inadequate, making it challenging to hold fossil fuel businesses accountable. There is a significant increase in lawsuits against fossil fuel companies to make them accountable for their pollution. This study analyses litigations to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for climate change. We illustrate the present disadvantages, which can only be altered by crafting considerable modifications to business conduct's legal and ethical framework. The Social Contract Theory of Thomas Hobbes could be used to describe how businesses may be held accountable in the contemporary global economic system by re-engaging the social contract between citizens and government. This study contributes to the literature on climate change by stressing the convergence between fossil fuel firms' legal and ethical responsibilities to achieve genuine emission reduction through negotiating a new social contract.
•Our study demonstrates the inadequacy of climate change litigations with the following arguments.•Current market economy system fails to extend adequate agency to corporations to address climate change as their problem.•Companies employ shortcuts to navigate stringent legal systems by transferring rather than reducing polluting actions.•Litigations do not contribute substantially towards mitigating climate change as successful litigations are rare.•Most climate change cases are pending due to inadequate legislation and legal framework across jurisdictions.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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