Youth plaintiffs in the Juliana v. United States constitutional climate change lawsuit participate in the People’s Climate March, Washington DC, 2017.
More and more citizens and non-governmental organizations around the world are going to court to seek climate change justice. The unprecedented extent of these disputes deserves to be highlighted. This relatively recent type of litigation is forging public opinion, and constitutes a form of pressure on states and industries that is forcing them out of their inertia.
The years go by and new records are set for rising temperatures. Greenhouse gases (GHG) continue to increase, and populations the world over are more and more concerned and discontented about the lack of responsiveness of states to the climate change crisis. As a result, the number of lawsuits against climate change inaction is rising sharply.
The first case of this kind in the world was filed in 2013, in the Netherlands. The Urgenda Foundation (link is external), a Dutch environmental group, sued the government for “the failure of the Dutch state to take sufficient actions to prevent dangerous climate change”. At the time, the Netherlands was one of the most polluting countries in the European Union, and the Foundation demanded it take action to reduce the country's emissions by twenty-five per cent to forty per cent by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels).
On 24 June 2015, the District Court of The Hague ruled in favour of Urgenda – a judgement confirmed on 9 October 2018 by the Hague Court of Appeal, based on scientifically established facts and in line with the traditional principle of a government's duty of care. The court ruled that Dutch GHG emissions must be reduced by at least twenty-five per cent. Recognized as the world's first climate liability lawsuit, this ruling sets a precedent that has since inspired other legal actions around the world.
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