Local climate litigation represents a frontier remedy to transform the dynamics of the battle versus climate alter. This World Climate Litigation Report: 2023 Standing Overview reveals that individuals are ever more turning to the courts to fight the local climate crisis. As of December 2022, there have been 2,180 weather-relevant cases filed in 65 jurisdictions, which include global and regional courts, tribunals, quasi-judicial bodies, or other adjudicatory bodies, these kinds of as Special Techniques at the United Nations and arbitration tribunals. This signifies a steady raise from 884 situations in 2017 and 1,550 cases in 2020. Kids and youth, women’s teams, neighborhood communities, and Indigenous Peoples, among the many others, are having a popular function in bringing these circumstances and driving climate adjust governance reform in much more and more nations around the world all around the environment.
This report, which updates former United Nations Environment Programme studies printed in 2017 and 2020, provides an overview of the recent point out of local weather transform litigation and an update on international local climate modify litigation traits. It gives judges, legal professionals, advocates, policymakers, scientists, environmental defenders, local climate activists, human rights activists (together with women’s legal rights activists), NGOs, companies and the global community at big with an crucial source to have an understanding of the existing condition of international weather litigation, which include descriptions of the crucial concerns that courts have confronted in the program of climate modify conditions.
This report even more demonstrates the importance of an environmental rule of legislation in combating the triple planetary crises of local climate alter, biodiversity loss and pollution. Access to justice enables the protection of environmental legislation and human rights and encourages accountability in public institutions. The report was introduced in conjunction with the anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s recognition of the human right to a clear, healthier and sustainable surroundings (A/RES/76/300), as the majority of circumstances brought just before the courts demonstrate concrete inbound links involving human rights and weather modify. The UNGA resolution, which recognises that local weather alter impacts have damaging implications on the satisfaction of all human legal rights, is possible to drive further motion on local weather transform in the long term.
Connected publications
The Environmental Rule of Regulation: 1st World Report
International Weather Litigation Report: 2020 Position Overview
The Standing of Weather Change Litigation: A International Evaluation