“CLIMATE JUSTICE. The transnational power of climate litigations”

Climate change is now a well-known phenomenon as it is at the centre of numerous scientific discoveries, policies and public debates. The general concern raised by the scientific community led to the creation of a set of international conventions and treaties that now represent the foundation of international climate change law. However, the causes of global warming with human activities led to policies aimed at regulating the emission of carbon fossils into the atmosphere. National authorities, focused mainly on the economic effects neglecting human safety, resulting in massive human rights violations. Still, the most vulnerable are populations of developing countries, which lack the resources and tools to defend themselves from climate disasters. This unequal distribution of climate burdens and injustices led to organized movements and protests based on climate justice claims to ask for a fair and right distribution of burdens and benefits of climate change. These movements resulted in a growing body of climate cases brought to courts by victims. Indeed, climate change litigations gained importance in the past decade as they can advance or delay effective action on climate change. This role was also recognized by the IPCC due to the ability to modify climate governance across nation-states and because they can enforce climate commitments made by governments. Among these climate cases, strategic cases are gaining importance as aimed at bringing major changes in society and the behaviour of governments, pushing for advancing climate policies or creating public awareness. Thus, climate change has become an important arena for the development of transnational environmental law as it contains complex local links that engage with the global system. The object of this work is this “transnational” nature which allows climate litigation to go beyond state borders employing several actors at different levels favouring dialogue between courts and policymakers. Therefore, this study assesses the transnational power of climate litigation seen as a tool to trace legal changes and their effects on national laws and legal principles. In doing so, the project explores several cases (such as the Urgenda case in The Netherlands, the Klimatzaak case in Belgium, and the Giudizio Universale case in Italy) to appraise their common threads and innovative legal grounds. The goal is to understand if climate litigation can create new legal standards or draw new interpretations of old legal principles that will be applied at the national and international levels (if possible). Several crucial principles are covered, such as the separation of powers, the intergenerational equity principle, the right to a stable climate and the actio popularis, as well as the role of emergent actors, such as citizens or younger individuals. The work concludes that climate litigations favoured the climate constitutionalism notion which is gaining greater momentum with important legal consequences and underlines the complexity of the justice system. This complexity should require an ad hoc constitutional framework able to capture the legal responses to the climate crisis -after all, almost no constitution speaks of climate change.