Earth Today | Courtroom lessons for climate justice

AS CLIMATE change litigation increases, not only in number but also in scope, geographic reach and the engagement of a diverse set of actors, there are a range of lessons to be learnt, according to a 2025 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report on the subject.

These lessons include the use of scientific evidence and climate attribution science in order to inform outcomes.

“Plaintiffs who effectively link emissions, policy inaction or corporate conduct to identifiable climate-related risks may be better positioned to overcome admissibility challenges and support claims of state or corporate responsibility,” revealed the report titled Climate change in the courtroom: Trends, impacts and emerging lessons.

The report is the result of collaboration between UNEP and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in the United States.

Another important lesson, it said, concerns the use of human rights law to “frame state obligations to mitigate and adapt to climate change”.

“This rights-based approach enables litigants to ground climate claims in well-established legal frameworks, expanding access to justice and reinforcing the normative weight of climate obligations. It has proven particularly effective in jurisdictions where constitutional or regional human rights protections explicitly recognise the right to a healthy environment or can be interpreted to encompass climate-related harms,” the report said.

“Courts in such jurisdictions have been more willing to impose positive obligations on governments to prevent foreseeable environmental degradation, protect public health and ensure intergenerational equity,” it added.

TRANSJUDICIAL DIALOGUES

Also important, the report said, are transjudicial dialogues, as well as framing remedies to support enforceability and feasibility.

On trans-judicial dialogues, it said: “climate litigation has not only developed within domestic court systems but has also facilitated the spread of legal ideas across borders, challenging traditional notions of domestic legal insularity”.

“While ‘transjudicialism’ has often been measured by how courts refer to, cite or are influenced by decisions from other jurisdictions, some scholars have looked beyond this traditional view to investigate how climate cases have shaped legal reasoning in litigation elsewhere, particularly through less visible channels, such as legal education, advocacy networks, and shared reliance on international instruments like the Paris Agreement,” it added.

As for the framing of remedies, the report noted that “Judicial outcomes may be affected if the remedies sought are too vague, overly broad or challenging to implement within a specific governance framework”.

“Lessons from well-documented cases show the importance of carefully tailoring remedies, balancing ambition with specificity and administrative feasibility,” it said.

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