In December 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the government must reduce its GHG emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 compared to 1990 levels. In this occasion, for the first time, a court has found that the state had a legally binding obligation to prevent climate change. The case of Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands was filed in 2013 by the Urgenda Foundation, together with around 900 co-plaintiff Dutch citizens, and relied on the Dutch Civil Code together with the European Convention on Human Rights, international agreements - such as the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement - and principles of international human rights law to compel the Netherlands to take action to mitigate climate change. Since 2020, this landmark ruling has influenced stronger climate policies around the world and inspired similar human rights-based cases from Asia-Pacific to the Americas and Europe. While the Urgenda case has raised public awareness of rights and responsibilities related to climate change, the court has been criticised for overstepping its role in the separation of powers and making the IPCC's findings binding on the government, which highlights some practical tensions in addressing climate change through the courts.

Experiences of climate litigation cases such as the Urgenda case show that, despite the legal framework currently in place, climate change commitments are not being sufficiently implemented, as several states and private actors continue to fail to meet their obligations. Since efforts to combat climate change fall short of keeping the Earth within a safe operating space, various civil society actors are engaging with legal tools to sue those responsible for the climate crisis in order to guarantee their rights and a stable climate future. But how can the legal framework help tackle climate change? Why do these legal experiences matter?

While climate change is an ongoing phenomenon of planetary dimensions, climate change risks and responses do not occur in a vacuum: the greatest impacts and negative externalities are unevenly experienced between and within regions, countries and communities. The Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC has recognised that the interdependent vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change is influenced by historical processes related to socio-economic development, inequality, marginalisation and governance. In a scenario of unequal global access to (and distribution of) resources, regions and people with constraints related to poverty, limited access to basic services and violent conflict tend to be highly vulnerable to climate hazards. In this context, effective policies and institutional actions can help to reduce these risks, as they can lay the foundation for overall governance structures which effectively support the transition to climate-resilient and sustainable societies according to schemes of climate justice. As such, legal institutions and frameworks are central to mediating and compensating for the uneven distribution of the adverse impacts of climate change and to building resilience. But how has the international legal order addressed climate change issues so far?

The enter of climate concerns into the legal narrative was marked by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was adopted in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). It followed the growing scientific recognition that anthropogenic activities were increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG, with the First Assessment Report of IPCC in 1990.

• The main goal: stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’. The level of GHG should be reduced within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure food production and economic development to proceed in a sustainabe manner, thus establishing commitments for both mitigation and adaptation. Thus, the obligation imposed by the UNFCCC is of result: stabilising the GHG concentrations, while the legal good protected is the climate system with its ecosystems.
• Developed countries should lead the way: recognising that industrialised countries are responsible for most of the current buildup of GHG in the atmosphere and also have better institutional capacities for reducing their emissions, they were expected to do the most to cut emissions on home ground: to reduce their emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
• Formal attention to the adaptation agenda: while focusing more on mitigation in the beginning, the UNFCCC has acknowledged the vulnerability, especially of developing countries, to the effects of climate change. As such, the Convention gave traction to adaptation efforts, notably after the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), when the Parties started a process to establish funding arrangements for adaptation.
• Keeping track of the progress: the UNFCCC established the Conference of the Parties, its supreme decision-making body, which meets annually to review progress towards effective implementation of the Convention.

The Kyoto Protocol

• Adopted in 1997, at COP3 in Kyoto (Japan), the Kyoto Protocol has operationalised the UNFCCC by setting legally binding limits on GHG emissions only for industrialised countries, placing a heavier burden on them due to the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilites".

• The main goal: to commit developed countries to limit and reduce GHG emissions according to agreed and binding individual targets: 5% reduction in the period 2008-2012 and 18% from 2013 to 2020.
• Complex ratification process: the Kyoto Protocol came into force very late, in 2005, because it was designed to be binding only if ratified by countries accounting for at least 55% of industrialised countries’ CO2 emissions. This led to significant delays as countries such as the United States did not ratify, putting the attainment of the threshold at risk.
• Failure: reports issued in the first two years after the treaty came into force indicated that most Parties would not meet their emission targets - and even if they did, the ultimate benefit would not be significant since the world's largest emitters GHG, China and the U.S., were not bound by the protocol (China because of its status as a developing country and the United States because it had not ratified the protocol).
• The emission reductions required by the Protocol were considered too modest to make a difference to global temperatures, and the  Kyoto Protocol failued to meet its targets.

 The Paris Agreement

• In 2015, at COP21 in Paris (France), the Paris Agreement was adopted and it marks the latest step in the evolution of the international climate regime, setting a new path for global efforts to combat climate change by establishing agreed safety thresholds (1.5°C and 2°C)  to prevent a continued temperature rise.

In a nutshell, according to the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement, the current climate obligation of the Parties consists both of a) regulation, that is, acting in accordance to the norms of the legal systems; and b) litigation, once there is a violation of the legal system, there must be a reparation. The main climate obligations are thus not to merely reduce the GHG emissions, but to effectively reduce the risk within safety thresholds (of 1.5°C) to be guaranteed as a result. In this vein, the Parties have the obligations to a) reduce the emissions, b) reduce and avoid the damages and the sources of damages; and c) manage the risks for global benefits and according to equity and the common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities of States (moving beyond their previous classifications as ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ countries), considering the highest possible ambition, and using the best available knowledge.

 The First Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement at COP28: are we on the right track to tackle climate change?

• The compliance with the Paris Agreement is supported by a periodical stocktake of its implementation which aims to assess the collective progress achieving  the long-term goals of the Agreement.
• The First Global Stocktake took place in the COP28 in Dubai (UAE), and was focused on climate resilience, curbing GHG emissions, and the mobilisation of funds for the world’s most vulnerable countries. It has found the insufficiency of the efforts made so far, which gives the international community a narrowing window of opportunity to get back on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

First Global Stocktake Recommendations

Mitigation	Adaptation	Finance	Cooperation and knowledge transfer
Scale up renewables and reduce fossil fuel reliance, notably across industry and transport	Support local communities in developing regions and including them in decision-making	Increase the mobilisation of support for climate action in developing countries to meet the collective annual goal of $100 billion	Standardise evaluation of benchmarks for assessing fairness and ambition of countries’ commitments
Address non-CO2 emissions	Promote transparent adaptation reports with clear methodologies and progress demonstration	Reconcile global financial flows with climate goals, as the annual investment requires to limit global-temperature rises is barely met	Strengthen capacity building across all climate-action spheres at local and international levels
	Designed by Freepik

Litigating the causes and effects of climate change

‘We are in the fight of our lives. And we are losing,’ said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres at COP27, as he warned that our planet is fast approaching tipping points and that immediate action is needed from all stakeholders.

This gap between formal obligations and effective action, the worsening impacts of climate change around the world, as well as public awareness of climate commitments has led to a growing wave of climate litigation cases in which diverse groups turn to the courts to hold governments and corporations accountable for inadequate responses to the climate crisis. Climate litigation is traced back to the 1990’s and first emerged in countries of the Global North, mainly the United States and Australia. This litigation has been featured by mitigation-targeted cases and for approaching climate change as a central and direct motivation of the claim.

Current categories of climate litigation

The legal strategies, grounds, and challenges of climate litigation cases vary widely depending on the actors involved, the forum in which they are discussed, and the level of governance at which they are litigated.

Present and future picture

Although the United States remains the jurisdiction with the largest number of cases overall, these lawsuits have increased sharply in recent years. Setzer and Higham, from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, note that climate cases have recently been identified in several new jurisdictions, with the United Kingdom, Brazil and Germany standing out as countries with a high number of cases. There is also a trajectory from the Global South, where these disputes became more prominent in the late 2010s, suggesting that courtrooms are becoming increasingly important for addressing climate change in both the Global North and South. Finally, the Paris Agreement appears to have had an impact on climate litigation, as the London School of Economics Global trends in climate change litigation: 2024 snapshot notes that around 70% of the climate litigation tracked to date has been filed since 2015, the year the Agreement was adopted.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of climate cases have historically been filed against governments, approximately 230 climate-related lawsuits have been filed against corporations and trade associations since 2015, with more than two-thirds filed since 2020, demonstrating that litigation against corporations is on the rise . The growing scrutiny for corporate actors seems to be a trend that is here to stay: as found by the 2025 Snapshot on Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: around 20% of climate cases filed in 2024 targeted companies, or their directors and officers.

These climate cases are starting to uncover the impacts of climate litigation on firm value, with Sato et. al finding a causal link between the filling or an unfavourale court decision in a climate case and the reduction of firm value by -0,41% on average. As stakeholders increasingly scrutinise companies for their (un)sustainable practices, initiatives such as the Corporate Climate Litigation Toolbox, led by Ivano Alogna at the British Institute for International and Comparative Law aim to provide a comparative analysis and the best ways to usefully implement the corporate climate litigation experiences in heterogeneous legal systems.

Climate litigation has also emerged as an important legal tool for addressing climate-related issues in coastal zones. Although still in its incipient stages, this type of case typically addresses the discrepancy between climate targets established in international agreements and their domestic implementation by governments, violations of human and fundamental rights due to the impacts of climate change, breaches of mitigation obligations through the granting of new licences for fossil fuel activities, and liability for damage to investments in flood-prone areas. In Europe, climate cases in coastal areas have already been seen in countries such as France, Norway, Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. They are also likely to increase in the coming years as scientific predictions point to more intense and frequent climate-related events, and attribution science is rapidly advancing.

This landscape shows that climate litigation has been used as a frontier solution to change the dynamics of the climate struggle: in 2022, the IPCC firstly recognised the influence of climate litigation in the outcomes of climate governance, identifying these lawsuits as a relevant avenue for actors to influence climate policy outside of the formal UNFCCC processes. In this landscape, vulnerable groups such as children and youth, women, local communities and indigenous peoples are playing a prominent role in addressing intersectional vulnerabilities and driving climate governance around the world through the courts.

Participation

Another way of engaging with climate action is through experiences of direct participation through citizens’ assemblies, which bring ‘everyday’ people into policymaking, and constitute a powerful tool of democracy in allowing the citizens to deliver reflective and informed proposals to the politicians.

The Convention citoyenne pour le climat – a leading experiment of climate participatory democracy in France
In 2019, 150 citizens from diverse backgrounds and regions, overseen by a committee of experts, have composed a representative panel of diverse French citizens to directly engage in the preparation of the law. They drafted 149 proposals aimed at reducing national GHG emissions by at least 40% by 2030 in a spirit of social justice and submitted it to the government in middle 2020. This deliberative process was a key driving factor to the enactment of the Loi climat et resilience in August 2021, a norm which integrates environmental values, focusing on education, public services, urban planning, building renovations, consumption patterns, and sanctioning mechanisms.
One of the strengths of this experience is that the Assembly has provided a unique insight into citizens' perspectives on the problem: ‘Citizens have put forward proposals that might otherwise have never become law, either because they had ideas that might not have come up without public consultation, or because they set different priorities than experts or administrators would have done’, observes Delphine Hedary, Councillor of the French Council of State who was in charge of the legislative committee for the Citizens’ Climate Convention in 2020-2021, and lecturer at the FERS School. Despite the importance of this democratic exercise, this initiative also highlights the limited effectiveness of such conventions. Although the government initially promised to adopt the assembly's proposals 'without filter', 53% of the 149 proposals were either rejected or not implemented, 37% were modified or watered down, and only 10% were accepted without modification. Therefore, while citizens' assemblies can generate bold policy ideas, they remain largely symbolic without political will.

The Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss 2022-23 – the case of Ireland
In February 2022, the Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss was formally established with 100 members. During a year-long iterative process, the members of the Assembly have considered issues of biodiversity emergency, the drivers and threats involved with biodiversity loss, as well as the opportunities related to policy coherence and strategic synergies with other areas to deliberate on how the State can improve its response to biodiversity loss, coming up with 159 recommendations. So far, work is underway to expand the resources of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, implement Nature Restoration Law with a national plan and a national fund for Climate and Environment has been newly-established.

Similar experiences have also taken place in Italy. The Bologna Climate Assembly, for example, was dedicated to rethinking a new model of city in the context of climate change. Its recommendations were delivered to the Municipal Council, which voted on a resolution regarding them.

The importance of education and training programmes on climate change and its effects, especially in collaboration with developing countries, has been acknowledged and reinforced both by the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.

Climate change poses relevant questions to those who are investigating the scientific underpinnings of climate change and trying to bridge the gap between this knowledge and the structures of legal systems: how can laws be made consistent with climate science? how can causation be established between GHG emissions and specific climate-related harms? what legal remedies are available to vulnerable communities to claim their disproportionate affection by climate change? what legal strategies are most effective in holding governments and corporations accountable?  

It is in this context, where legal frameworks and socio-political arrangements are addressing the adverse effects of climate change, that the high-level training course FERS School on ‘Law, Finance, and Litigation’ has addressed the legal instruments, financial mechanisms and litigation experiences aimed at regulating climate change, its risks and future consequences. Recognising the relevance of the human and social sciences in addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, the School, held in Bertinoro (Italy) in Autumn 2024, was dedicated to enhancing the skills of young researchers and professionals from transdisciplinary fields to gain a comprehensive understanding of climate law and policy, the climate finance landscape and the climate litigation scene. This initiative aimed to build a new generation of practitioners who understand the main potentials and shortcomings of legal norms, actors and mechanisms in the financial sectors, as well as the pitfalls and achievements of courts in promoting accountability of public and private decision-makers and reshaping climate governance.

Given the ever-growing intersection of climate change issues and legal frameworks, the Advanced Training and Education Center - ATEC is leading education activities and research initiatives on the field of climate law and litigation.

In addition to the FERS School in October 2024, legal issues related to climate change have been addressed in the European Climate Risk Assessment, led by the European Environment Agency. The report approached climate litigation as a legal tool for social justice on the continent, as these cases highlight the disproportionate impact of the adverse social and economic effects of climate change on individuals and communities that have contributed the least to the phenomenon, and seek to promote just legal responses to climate change. With a particular focus on adaptation-related cases that seek compensation for adaptation efforts that have caused harm, or those that seek to hold decision-makers personally accountable for failing to manage climate risks, the report highlights climate litigation as an important legal avenue that enables a bottom-up approach to decision-making and facilitates vulnerable groups' access to multi-level governance structures.

The development of sea level rise as an emerging legal issue before the courts has also been addressed in the First Assessment Report of the Knowledge Hub on Sea Level Rise, a joint initiative by the Joint Programming Initiatives Connecting Climate Knowledge for Europe (JPI Climate) and Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans (JPI Oceans) and endorsed as a UN Ocean Decade project.

In this report, one of the contributions from ATEC's researchers highlighted the potential for sea-level rise to be litigated in the courts, mainly in relation to the violation of human and constitutional rights claimed by vulnerable groups, in cases challenging environmental approvals granting permission for new fossil fuel projects, and as an emerging concern for the private sector due to liability for damage to investments in flood-prone areas. Finally, ATEC is also leading a research initiative in collaboration with The Clinic of Environmental Justice and Ecological Transition of Sciences Po Paris on the project ‘Sea Legal Rise’, which is producing a legal toolkit for the civil society on the role of climate litigation in addressing climate change issues in European coastal zones. The project was presented in the 7th European Climate Change Adaptation Conference (ECCA 2025), which took place in Italy in June 2025. It was the first time that the largest European conference on adaptation addressed the legal aspects of climate change, emphasising the importance of climate justice in adaptation efforts and the role of climate law in this context. Finally, this year's conference also welcomed Nic Balthazar, film maker of the courtroom drama 'Duty of Care', which tells the story of Roger Cox, the Dutch lawyer who initiated groundbreaking climate litigation against the government and oil giant Shell.

Following this path, ATEC's research avenue on climate law and litigation is exploring new initiatives in collaboration with national and international partners, and upcoming activities will be announced soon!

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