In 2022, the United States Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), appropriating an unprecedented amount of money for climate spending programs. One of the IRA’s flagship investments was the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a $27 billion program comprised of the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), the Clean Communities […]
Climate Litigation
314 posts
Amid the Trump administration’s cancellation of billions in federal funding for climate action, the Sabin Center has covered the numerous cases that have been brought in federal district courts to challenge federal grant cancellations. Among those cases is Climate United Fund v. Citibank, a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]