‘Climate justice should be classed with human rights’

Environmental lawyer Michael Gerrard teaches at

Columbia University

. He tells

Times Evoke

about existing legal redressals to address climate change:
I founded and direct the

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

at

Columbia Law School

. Its three principle purposes are to discuss legal techniques to fight climate change, train the next generation of lawyers to use these and develop legal research tools for lawyers, judges, applicants and scholars around the world.



A profound injustice underpins the quest for climate law — the countries least responsible for climate change are its greatest victims. Currently, the

Paris

Climate Agreement of 2015 is the most important international agreement on climate change — however, this depends on each country using its own laws to implement it. The Paris agreement required each country to make its own pledge for how much it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Almost every country did — but the pledges do not add up to nearly enough. Many countries aren’t even meeting the pledges they made. But there are no binding legal provisions to this — the only really binding portions concern reporting and monitoring. The requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not enforceable.

Again, there are no real legal provisions to ensure the transfer of climate funds and technology from rich economies to developing ones. This depends on the countries involved fulfilling their commitments. In an ideal world, it would be desirable to have an international court of climate rights — however, I find it hard to envision a situation where the largest emitting countries would agree to be bound by the rulings of such a court.





We also have ‘the children’s crusade’ or lawsuits brought by young people seeking to make their governments take stronger action on climate change. Some have been successful in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Colombia, where the courts ordered governments to take more action to save young people from becoming climate victims.

Today, the existence of several small island nations in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the

Caribbean

is threatened by sea level rise. But there aren’t any explicit laws to protect them or ensure their citizens could move to other countries. There is an effort to get the issue of these countries’ rights and the obligations of certain developed nations before the International Court of Justice now. The world needs to build an infrastructure of climate justice swiftly — but this is more a matter of politics than law. We need governments to accept the importance of the problem and how essential it is for them to act.



While the legal situation can seem discouraging, there are causes for optimism too. The scientific evidence of the negative effects of climate change is mounting strongly — the current heatwaves over India is one example. We are hopeful that such evidence will spur greater action by those in power. Meanwhile, the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine is leading to accelerated efforts to reduce fossil fuel use.

A very powerful climate justice case is

Urgenda

(2019) where the Dutch supreme court ruled that as a matter of inter-national human rights law, the Dutch government was obligated to significantly reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Climate justice should be classed with human rights now — and increasingly, the courts of some countries are recognising that.