Climate litigation manuals

Note: This page is out of date. For a full list of climate litigation resources, please see Resource Library


 * Climate Change Litigation Guide (Action4Justice, 2020) A comprehensive resource with lots of links and detail on different pathways. It also includes a Climate Litigation Matrix that can help identify what claim is right for you and templates for when you have decided.

Guidelines for activists and lawyers on how to use the Necessity defense as it relates to climate change, explaining what criteria are to be met in order to ensure that the action is adequately justified.
 * CLIMATE NECESSITY DEFENSE CASE GUIDE A Guide for Activists and Attorneys (Climate Defense Project, 2019)

Brief manual for lawyers that provides four categories ("mitigation claims", "adaptation claims", "claims for damages" and "informed claims for decision-making") that can be claimed, thus presenting a table identifying the possible objectives, defense and legal basis for claims in each of these four categories.
 * Climate Litigation Primer (Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide 2018)

Document that exposes the problem of climate change, what demands can be made to the government, and develops the procedural line of the trials. Likewise, it develops the human rights violated by the omission of the authorities in the face of climate change, and points out the importance of knowing how to identify what human rights may or may not be enforceable in the courts depending on the domestic law of each country. For this it makes a brief analysis of how these human rights have been or not enough to argue in local courts. It also points out the arguments on the part of the state to justify its lack of action, given the demands (they argue that there is very little damage caused by the country compared to the rest of the world). It offers various methodologies for the analysis of legal strategies.
 * Holding your Government Accountable for Climate Change: A People’s Guide (Greenpeace 2018)


 * The Climate Necessity Defense (Climate Disobedience Center, 2016)