Resource Library

Climate Litigation Databases
The Climate Change Litigation Databases maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University is a database of over 1550 climate litigation cases from 38 different countries. The database is searchable and can be filtered by jurisdiction, principal law, category, and more.

The Climate Change Laws of the World (CCLW) database, created and maintained by Grantham Research Institute at LSE and the Sabin Center covers climate and climate-related laws, as well as laws and policies promoting low carbon transitions in areas including energy, transport, land use, and climate resilience. It also features climate litigation cases from over 30 countries brought before an administrative, judicial or other investigatory body. The dataset does not include the United States.

The Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) also maintains a database of cases, laws, environmental impact assessments, and other resources related to environmental law. Legal and Scientific Resources from ELAW

Annual Reports
Global trends in climate change litigation: 2020 snapshot is a joint report from The Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The report summarizes the state of Climate Litigation in 2020.

The Global Climate Litigation Report produced by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Sabin Center provides an update on the state of climate litigation in 2020, areas future litigation can potentially pursue, and some of the legal challenges that climate litigation regularly faces.

Climate Justice: The international momentum towards climate litigation by Keely Boom, Julie-Anne Richards, and Stephen Leonard provides an update on the state of climate litigation as of 2016, but also looks at climate litigation in the comparative perspective, considering the history of tobacco and asbestos litigation and offering lessons learned from those experiences.

Attribution Science
Climate attribution science studies the causal links between human activity, global climate change, and the impacts of climate change on human and natural systems. Advances in attribution science have been useful in climate litigation because it has developed a greater understanding of the contribution of individual countries and corporations to climate change and how the global phenomenon of climate change is driving impacts felt at a local level. In other words, attribution science allows specific actions to be tied with specific harms, making the case stronger in court for plaintiffs bringing litigation against governments, fossil fuel corporations, and others.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. The IPCC periodically releases reports that summarize the latest climate science. The most recent IPCC report was the |5th Assessment Report (AR5) released in 2014. AR6 is expected to be completed in 2022. IPCC reports can serve as the baseline for authoritative, broadly-accepted science related to climate change in climate litigation. View IPCC Reports

The Climate Attribution Database compiled by The Sabin Center at Columbia University contains 256 scientific resources organized by topic. The database contains resources on how greenhouse gas concentrations impact the global climate system, how changes in the global climate system impact the probability and characteristics of extreme events, how changes in the global climate system affect humans and ecosystems, and how relative contributions of different sectors, activities, and entities have contributed to climate change.

The Climate Accountability Institute has qualified historic and cumulative greenhouse gas emissions for the largest fossil fuel and cement manufacturers, finding that 63% of greenhouse gas emissions from 1751 to 2010 were emitted by just 90 entities. These entities include investor-owned fossil fuel companies like Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil, as well as state-owned enterprises such as Saudi Aramco and Statoil. The Climate Accountbaility Institute builds upon the groundbreaking research of Richard Heede's 2014 report Carbon Majors: Accounting for carbon and methane emissions 1854-2010

Core Climate Agreements
The international effort to address climate change has been marked by the passage of several landmark agreements to address climate change. Climate litigation brought against governments for insufficient targets or efforts to address climate change can rely on international agreements as a standard by which to measure national targets and policies.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed in 1992 and entered into force in 1994. It established the framework under which the international effort to combat climate change has operated. The Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement were agreed to within the framework of the UNFCCC.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 and represented the first international agreement with binding emissions targets with the goal of control anthropogenic climate change, however, the binding emissions targets only applied to 37-industrialied nations. The Kyoto Protocol had two commitments periods, the first from 2008-2012, and the second from 2013-2020. The Kyoto Protocol has been superseded by the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 by 196 countries and was the first international climate agreement to include emission reduction targets for all countries. The Paris Agreement has played an enormous role in climate litigation. Under the agreement, countries are to put forward Nationally-Determined Contributions (NDC's). In cases where NDC's are scientifically insufficient to meet the goal of keeping global temperature increases under 2°C, litigation can be brought to pressure the government to set bolder targets, as was successfully done in Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands. The Paris Agreement has also been used in cases seeking to block fossil fuel projects, as in EarthLife Africa Johannesburg v. Minister of Environmental Affairs, and to hold corporations accountable for the plans to reduce climate impacts as in Notre Affaire a Tous v. Total.

Defending Climate Activists and Protestors
Climate litigation is just one of the many levers necessary to address the global challenge of climate change. Protest and civil disobedience are also levers that can be used. When they are, the activists putting their bodies on the line for the planet need a strong defense in court. The Necessity Defense is one defense that has been successfully used, both to gain acquittal and to draw attention to the threat of climate change.

The Climate Necessity Defense Case Guide - A Guide for Activists and Attorneys created by the Climate Defense Project outlines a number of cases in which the Necessity Defense has been invoked to defend climate protestors and activists who have been charged with criminal offenses for their work.

The Climate Necessity Defense - A Tool for Climate Activists created by the Climate Disobedience Center in 2016 is a step-by-step guide for activists considering invoking the necessity defense to justify civil disobedience as a part of their climate activism.

Disinformation Campaigns by Industry
The fossil fuel industry has a history of funding public relations campaigns to sow skepticism about climate change. . These outward facing public relations campaigns were in direct conflict with conclusions drawn by the fossil fuel industry through its own internal research as early as the 1970's. Through investigative journalism, discovery, and Freedom of Information Act requests, thousands of internal fossil fuel industry documents are available online. Evidence of public disinformation campaigns has been used to bring lawsuits in New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia.

Fossil Fuel Industry Documents is an archive of documents created by fossil fuel companies and associated groups which illustrate the industry's influence on climate science research, regulation, and policies affecting public health. The archive is accessible online and is hosted by the University of California San Francisco.

Smoke and Fumes is a collection of documents created by the Center for International Environmental Law outlining the connection between disinformation campaigns undertaken by the fossil fuel industry with those undertake by the tobacco industry. The connection between the tobacco industry and fossil fuel industries disinformation campaign is highly relevant for climate litigation because of the success of bringing lawsuits against the tobacco industry in the United States.

How-To Guides
These guides provide information on how to bring climate litigation. They serve as an excellent starting point for thinking about bringing climate litigation.

Liability Roadmap provides a guide to holding polluting corporations liable for their role in causing the climate crisis.

Action 4 Justice Climate Litigation Guide provides information on bringing a variety of climate litigation claims and lists a variety of resources and organizations that work to bring climate litigation. The guide also includes a Climate Litigation Matrix that can help identify what claim is right for you and templates for when you have decided.

Climate Justice from Greenpeace provides an introduction on crafting a human rights based climate lawsuit.

Holding Corporations Accountable for Damaging the Climate provides information on seven countries with laws and a legal that are seen as particularly open to climate litigation seeking damages against corporations. The seven countries are India, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya, and Nigeria.

National Climate Laws and Commitments
Climate Watch offers data and visualizations on a country's current and historical greenhouse gas emissions, Nationally Determined Contributions, and climate vulnerability.

Climate Action Tracker provides resources to assess how a country's policies and commitments stack up against the need to limit global temperature rise to less than 2°C in accordance with The Paris Agreement. The Climate Action Tracker considers both whether national and globally aggregated commitments are sufficient, as well as whether a country's current policies and actions are in accordance with its pledged emissions reductions. Understanding whether a country's Nationally Determined Contributions are sufficient and whether the country is on track to meet those commitments is an important part of climate litigation, both against governments and against corporations seeking to expand fossil fuel infrastructure at a time when drastic greenhouse gas emission reductions are needed.

Other Resources
Climate Litigation Strategies created by Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW), provides an introduction to climate litigation.

The Science Hub for Climate Litigation created by the Union of Concerned Scientists seeks to bring together science and the law, to help inform climate litigation, catalyze legally relevant scientific research, and connect legal team with experts in relevant technical fields. The guide also includes links to numerous helpful resources on climate litigation.

The Climate Necessity Defense Case Guide - A Guide for Activists and Attorneys created by the Climate Defense Project outlines a number of cases in which the Necessity Defense has been invoked to defend climate protestors and activists who have been charged with criminal offenses for their work.

El aporte del derecho procesal constitucional al litigio estratégico sobre el cambio climático: comentarios a los casos urgenda y juliana (Silvia Bagni, 2019)(in Spanish) Academic document which explains the experience of two strategic litigations against climate change (Urgenda and Juliana), listing the arguments and showing the applicable national and international legal frameworks for this type of litigation.

Webinars
Climate Change in the Courts was a webinar hosted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature - World Commissionon Environmental Law in June 2020. The webinar features Joana Setzer of the Grantham Research Institute; César Rodríguez-Garavito, visiting professor at the New York University School of Law; Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Center; and Tessa Khan of the Urgenda Foundation.