Governments, fossil fuel companies and airlines are increasingly being met with climate lawsuits. This wave of litigation has become a truly global movement. But is the legal action helping bring a notable difference and fight the climate crisis?
In 2015, Dutch government lawyers stumbled upon a lawsuit of a kind that had not been seen before. Interestingly, the Dutch environmental advocacy non-profit Urgenda was suing the state for not doing enough to protect its citizens from the emergency.
Surge In Lawsuits Covering Broad Ground
The Dutch lawsuit introduced one of the first ripples in what has become a tsunami of climate litigation in recent years. Since Urgenda started winning its case on successive rungs of the Dutch legal system, the surge in lawsuits across the globe has covered broad ground.
The litigation covers claims from inadequate state carbon reduction targets and strategies, to climate-related damages, and corporate inaction and misinformation. Now, there are more than 2,500 lawsuits recorded globally, and the wave shows no sign of stopping any time soon.
Joana Setzer, assistant professorial research fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), is confident that the wave of climate litigation is having a positive impact.
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Climate Litigation’s Impact On Public Policy
The lawsuits are setting precedents for climate action across the globe, as per a report by the Sabin Center and UN Environment Programme. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change described the legal action as one of the ways climate policy is being shaped.
The LSE’s latest annual report that analysed 549 lawsuits outside the US suggests 55% of cases have had a climate-positive ruling. Of these rulings, the finding was usually in favour of the claimant against a company or public authority. Some of these cases had a clear impact, too.
