BY DIRRIBA TESHOME
The United Nations Environment Programme Sabin Center for Climate Change Law has recently finalized the first report since the 2017 report. It has stoked critical issues regarding the climate change law implementations.
The 2020 status review of the Global Climate Litigation indicates that the planet earth climate change law is on a good truck of implementation although it still in crisis due to the lack of full attentions on its applications inconsistencies.
United Nations Environment Programme, Executive Director Inger Andersen, said on the report: “Our planet continues to navigate a climate crisis.
As reported in the United Nations Environment Programme’s 2020 Emissions Gap Report, despite a brief dip in carbon dioxide emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is still heading for a temperature rise of 3°C this century.
This is far beyond the Paris Agreement goals of limiting global warming to well below 2°C and pursuing 1.5°C. This would amount to an untenable future for people and planet.”
The Global Climate Change Litigation Report – Status Review offers an indication of the current state of climate change litigation around the world; she added noting, “However, there is hope.
More and more governments are progressively committing to net-zero emissions goals by around mid-century. Businesses are accelerating efforts to transition and align their operations with the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
Children and youth are requiring a safe climate and are obliging positive change, helping demonstrate that climate change is at the forefront of a global environmental rights movement. And judiciaries around the world are increasingly playing a critical role in addressing climate change, she further noted.
The Global Climate Change Litigation Report – Status Review provided an overview of the present state of climate change litigation around the world. “It updates our 2017 report on the same and finds there has been a rapid increase in climate litigation. In 2017, there were 884 climate change cases brought in 24 countries. In 2020 the number of cases has nearly doubled with at least 1,550 cases filed in 38 countries.” He justified the outputs of the report.
According to her, this growing tidal wave of climate cases is driving much needed change; the report shows how climate litigation is compelling governments and corporate actors to purse more ambitious climate change mitigation and adaptation goals.
“The key emerging trends in these cases, including the role of fundamental human rights connected to a safe climate and cases that bring to life the right to a healthy environment we now see in the constitutions of over 100 countries. Cases are forcing greater climate disclosures and ending “corporate green washing” on climate change.
It reports how people are holding their governments to account, seeking to keep fossil fuels in the ground and challenging non-enforcement of climate-related laws and policies.”
As countries urgently seek to access and distribute much awaited COVID-19 vaccines, is necessary to remember that the future impacts of climate change will far outstrip the devastation of the current global coronavirus pandemic.
Environmental rule of law – supported and achieved in part through strong and independent judiciaries– contributes as an effective vaccine against future zoonotic diseases and pandemics. The role of judiciaries in combating climate change, therefore, cannot be overstated, she emphasized.
Climate ambition in countries around the world remains inadequate to meet the challenge of climate change. As a result, individuals, communities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business entities, and subnational governments have turned to the courts to seek relief through the enforcement of existing climate laws; integration of climate action into existing environmental, energy, and natural resources laws; clear definitions of fundamental climate rights and obligations; and compensation for climate harms.
As these actions become more frequent in their occurrence, and more numerous overall, the body of legal precedent grows, forming an increasingly coherent field of law.
A rapid increase in climate litigation has occurred around the world. The 2017 Litigation Report identified 884 cases brought in 24 countries, comprised of 654 cases in the United States of America and 230 cases in all other countries combined.
As of 1 July 2020, the number of cases has nearly doubled with at least 1,550 climate change cases filed in 38 countries (39 counting the courts of the European Union). Those cases include approximately 1,200 filed in the US and over 350 filed in all other countries combined, specified in the report.
Key trends include: ongoing and increasing numbers of cases relying on fundamental and human rights enshrined in international law and national constitutions to compel climate action; challenging domestic enforcement (and non-enforcement) of climate-related laws and policies; seeking to keep fossil fuels in the ground; claiming corporate liability and responsibility for climate harms; addressing failures to adapt and the impacts of adaptation; and advocating for greater climate disclosures and an end to corporate green washing on the subject of climate change and the energy transition.
Summaries of significant cases appear throughout the report providing context and examples of those issues and the trends they comprise.
The report also detailed five types of climate cases those suggest where global climate change litigation may be heading in the coming years. First, plaintiffs are increasingly filing consumer and investor fraud claims alleging that companies failed to disclose information about climate risk or have disclosed information in a misleading way.
Second, recent years suggest a growing number of pre-and post-disaster cases premised on a defendant’s failure to properly plan for or manage the consequences of extreme weather events. Third, as more cases are filed and some reach a conclusion, implementation of courts’ orders will raise new challenges.
Fourth, courts and litigants increasingly will be called on to address the law and science of climate attribution as cases seeking to assign responsibility for private actors’ contributions to climate change and cases arguing for greater government action to mitigate both advance and proliferate.
Finally, litigants are increasingly bringing claims before international adjudicatory bodies, which may lack for enforcement authority but whose declarations can shift and inform judicial understanding.
Although climate change cases are premised on a broad range of legal theories, and are brought before many different courts, tribunals, and other for a throughout the world, such cases often face common core legal issues.
As cases move through the process of litigation, parties are advancing sophisticated arguments about how to link a specific greenhouse gas emitter’s actions to global climate change and how foreseeable, climate-driven extreme weather events can be linked to specific harms suffered by plaintiffs.
In summing up, the amount of climate change lawsuit is snowballing; the range of legal theories is mounting. And it has become clear that climate cases can contribute in meaningful ways to compel governments and corporate actors to pursue more ambitious climate change mitigation and adaptation goals, as stated in the report.
As the intercontinental public advances deeper into the third decade of the millennium-a critical decade in which nations must reverse course to intensely decrease greenhouse gas emissions, endorse reforms to realize the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and also respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic-climate litigation will continue to have an important role to play.
The Ethiopian Herald January 31/2021
