New DS Report (!) – Courtrooms and Climate Change: The Current State of Play – Global attention to the question of climate change, including climate displacement, has expanded dramatically over the 15 years since Displacement Solutions initiated our efforts to find concrete, rights-based and land-based solutions to this crisis. One area, in particular, that has seen considerable advancement in recent years is the growing scope of judicial attention to various aspects of the climate change question, spanning international, regional and national institutions. More than 1,500 cases have been filed addressing various aspects of the climate crisis over the past several years, and as a result, a rapidly growing body of case law is emerging from judicial organs that collectively give a sense of which climate change issues adjudicative bodies are willing to address, as well as the extent to which such judicial (and quasi-judicial) decisions are having a real world impact on the environmental and human impacts of global warming and all of its effects.
Our new 218-page report – Courtrooms and Climate Change: The Current State of Play – explores some of the leading cases decided thus far and how judges and lawyers in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, New Zealand, Colombia, Pakistan, the US, and others are increasingly addressing these themes within the courtrooms of the world. It examines various legal regimes where these issues are addressed, and provides an overview of what we see as the groundbreaking cases that have been decided in courtrooms across the world. We obviously could not include coverage of every case, but have selected fourteen cases that we see as the leading cases in national, regional and international settings that we see as influential in determining the scope of future efforts in this regard as of 2020. Many extremely important cases are still awaiting judgements in a range of countries, and it is hoped that these and the countless others that will be filed in the future will assist in improving the odds in our collective fight against global warming.
Given the rapidly worsening climate crisis (to site just one example – recent reports point to over one billion people being forced to live in insufferable heat within 50 years), we hope this publication will be of interest to readers, and encourage you to be in touch with us to let us know how we can improve our efforts to assist climate displaced persons everywhere. You can download the full report here: dis6357_courtrooms_and_climate_displacement_v4_1
