UN report see increase in climate change court cases
We're used to seeing activists take to the streets to make the case for more action on climate change. Now we're increasingly seeing debates about the climate responsibilities of government taking place in the courts. A new report from the UN's environment programme has found the number of climate change court cases has more than doubled since 2017.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 The headline message is that people are turning to the courts to help combat the climate crisis.
00:08 And as we show in our report, the numbers are significant.
00:12 Climate litigation worldwide has more than doubled in the last five years.
00:18 Over 2,300 reported cases around the world, most of those in the United States of America.
00:24 But an increasing trend, we're seeing more litigation in other countries, including Australia.
00:31 What's the nature of these cases, the legal grounding that they're being based on?
00:38 It very much depends on the case in question, but there's a wide variety of legal grounds
00:45 on which these cases are brought.
00:47 In our report, we categorise them into six areas.
00:50 I won't go into them, but just to highlight perhaps two that are emerging as key grounds
00:56 of action.
00:57 The first is human rights.
01:00 Over 80% of all countries around the world now recognise the human right to a healthy
01:06 environment in some way, shape or form in their legal frameworks.
01:10 Just last year in the General Assembly in New York, the UN declared for the first time
01:16 a human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
01:19 So that's just one ground that we're seeing a body of cases now being brought around the
01:25 world, developing countries, developed countries, including Australia, on the basis of human
01:29 rights.
01:30 A second area that we're seeing a significant development and relying on different grounds
01:38 are cases against corporations.
01:41 To date, most cases have been against governments, but as our report shows, there's a shift now
01:48 to also bring litigation against corporations.
01:51 And some of the grounds include claims against greenwashing claims.
01:57 There are cases challenging the approval processes for projects in the way that corporations
02:02 and indeed governments have undertaken those.
02:06 And then others, including even challenges against directors' duties and claims that
02:13 directors are breaching their duties by not taking into account climate change to the
02:17 extent required under law.
02:19 We've seen some examples of that in Australia cases, litigation taken against superannuation,
02:24 pension funds, as well as the energy company AGL.
02:29 That's just a few of the, I think it was 127 cases that you've catalogued in Australia.
02:36 It's interesting to see the way that activists and campaigners and groups concerned about
02:42 the climate are using the courts to take on corporations.
02:45 Have any of them actually been, how successful have they been to date?
02:51 Well again, it very much depends on the case and what the definition of success looks like.
02:58 We don't track that directly in our report, but there has been analysis by some of our
03:01 partners and other institutions that show that approximately 50% of these cases have
03:07 direct judicial outcomes that could be said to have a quote unquote positive climate outcome.
03:14 Often though, it depends on the case and sometimes just bringing the action is considered success
03:20 by the plaintiffs.
03:23 But what is clear is that these cases, many of them are shifting behaviour, are shifting
03:30 policies by government and by corporations in a more climate positive fashion.
03:36 Do you think it's likely that in the future we'll see more groups seeking compensation
03:41 for harms they suffer as a result of the effects of climate change?
03:46 Absolutely.
03:48 I think this is one of the key emerging trends that we're seeing in climate litigation.
03:55 To date it's been quite hard to prove causation.
03:58 How do you link one particular entity to a particular harm?
04:02 But there are developments in attribution science and there are increasing attempts
04:06 by NGOs and other plaintiffs to seek to do just that and to seek financial compensation
04:13 for perceived or actual harms by certain entities.
04:19 So there have been approximately two dozen such cases to date.
04:23 Many of them are still pending, so it's too early to sort of know which way this will
04:26 go, but I definitely think it's a frontier of future climate litigation.
04:32 [BLANK_AUDIO]