Climate Litigation Against Governments
Climate change litigation has expanded dramatically since 2015. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School tracks climate cases globally and has documented over 2,000 climate-related legal proceedings filed across more than 65 countries. This litigation increasingly holds governments accountable for inadequate climate action and forces courts to engage with questions of governmental duties regarding climate change.
Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands (2019) is the most influential government climate case to date. Urgenda, an environmental NGO, sued the Dutch government arguing it was legally obligated under Dutch civil law and the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically Articles 2 and 8 — the rights to life and private life) to take more ambitious climate action. The Dutch Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions, ruling that the Dutch government had a legal duty to reduce Dutch greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% below 1990 levels by the end of 2020 — well above existing policy commitments. The court found that inadequate climate action created a real threat of violation of citizens' fundamental rights. This was the first case in which a court ordered a government to more aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on human rights obligations.
The Urgenda framework — connecting climate inaction to human rights violations — has been replicated in subsequent cases across Europe. The German Federal Constitutional Court's 2021 decision in Neubauer v. Germany found that the Federal Climate Protection Act was partly unconstitutional because it provided insufficient 2030 targets, effectively deferring too much emissions reduction to post-2030, thereby imposing excessive burden on future generations' freedom. The court ordered the Bundestag to legislate more ambitious near-term climate targets — which it did.
In the United States, where constitutional rights jurisprudence differs from European human rights frameworks, government climate cases have taken different forms. Juliana v. United States (filed 2015, still ongoing as of 2024) is brought by young plaintiffs arguing the federal government's affirmative promotion of fossil fuel development violates their constitutional rights to a climate system capable of sustaining human life. The case has faced significant procedural hurdles — the Ninth Circuit issued conflicting rulings on whether plaintiffs have standing — reflecting the threshold doctrinal challenge of gaining judicial access in climate cases.