Climate Litigation

312 posts

Governmental Climate Duties in Comparative Perspective: Civil, Common, and European Legal Traditions

Climate change presents one of the most disruptive challenges for contemporary legal systems. One aspect of climate change as a legal problem that is especially disruptive concerns the determination and extent of the duties of governments to address its causes and consequences. In this post, I analyze landmark climate litigation […]

The Role of International Human Rights Law in Climate Reparations 

As the climate crisis accelerates, it has become increasingly clear that its consequences are not distributed equally. Marginalized and vulnerable communities, particularly Indigenous peoples, low-income nations, and small island states are disproportionately affected despite contributing the least to climate degradation. This disparity has spurred calls for climate reparations: a framework […]

Reparations for Specially Affected States: Genocide-Enabled Domination and the Caribbean’s Path to Redress

Contemporary debates on reparations and climate justice often remain siloed, addressing either historical injustices such as slavery and genocide or emerging crises like climate-induced displacement, food and water insecurity, and disproportionate exposure of marginalised communities to extreme weather events. Against this siloing, we advocate for a framework that enables a […]

Climate Change in the Courtroom: UNEP and Sabin Center’s Global Climate Litigation Report 2025

  Today, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School have released the Global Climate Litigation Report 2025: Status Review. This fourth edition of our joint survey builds on earlier reports published in 2017, 2020, and 2023, continuing our collaborative […]

Repairing the irreparable: addressing non-economic loss and damage in climate reparations 

As climate change effects are revealing themselves at a rampant pace, there is no denying that mitigation commitments and adaptation policies are insufficient. Consequently, loss and damage is gaining traction in the climate governance agenda, but this complex notion is still in the process of being outlined. One particularly challenging […]

Looking for an African perspective on the ICJ’s Climate Advisory Opinion

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Africa has the lowest per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of any region in the world but is already facing widespread and devastating climate impacts. Despite contributing so little and suffering so much, the continent receives only a very small proportion […]

Cooperation Without Justice? On the Elusive Differentiation of Responsibilities in the ICJ’s Climate Advisory Opinion 

Climate change is both a global crisis that binds humanity to a shared fate – a “common concern for humankind” – as well as the revealer of historical inequalities on the international stage, rooted in colonial legacies. Every country is vulnerable to the destabilization of the climate system and must […]

Computer screen with image of the new Climate Litigation Database website

Relaunching the Climate Litigation Database: Tracking the Law in a New Era

When lawsuits first began to raise climate change issues in the late 1980s, the cases were rare and experimental, with litigants testing out ways to draw on the growing body of climate science to argue for legal obligations to address “the serious and imminent threat to our environment posed by […]