Global trends in climate litigation 2025: report launch
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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

Thank you. Welcome. For those who don't know me, my name is Larry Kramer. I'm the president and vice chancellor here at LSE, and it's my privilege and pleasure to welcome you to this very special event hosted by the Grantham Research Institute and LSE's new Global School of Sustainability and timed to be part of London Climate Action Week.

So tonight we're launching the 2025 iteration of our, I wrote felicitously named, Global Trends and Climate Litigation Snapshot Report.

which is now in its seventh iteration. The report provides one of the most comprehensive overviews of global climate litigation and reviews the entire state of the field. Cases seeking more ambition from governments, cases trying to increase corporate responsibility, legal trends in the global south, and the dramatic changes in the political climate of the United States. So I'm

point of personal privilege. Climate litigation is actually a subject near and dear to my own heart. When I joined the Hewlett Foundation in 2012, it was at best in the U.S. at least a fringe issue. In fact, there actually was virtually no climate litigation yet taking place.

And the reason was in the U.S., no one thought litigation had any chance of prevailing, much less moving the needle. And we worried that the Supreme Court might use the litigation to basically roll back the law in various ways, including for the lawyers in the room, the displacement of state law by federal common law that would just that would preempt the field altogether.

So pretty early in my tenure, we were approached by a group of lawyers looking for foundation support for lawsuits brought on behalf of local governments against fossil fuel companies for the damages caused by climate change. So it was tort law arguing that the costs would otherwise be borne by taxpayers. The climate team at the foundation was opposed to funding those efforts. And in what was actually a very rare recurrence, something that I think maybe I did once or twice only in 12 years, I overruled them.

which honestly was something I never did. You practice, if you're anybody who's running an organization, if you want good people to work for you, you don't overrule them all the time. And so I would participate in strategy development, but leave implementation to the staff. But I was a lawyer and I was the only one there. And I had more at that time, you know, 20 plus years of experience working

which was something I did as a regular gig alongside my academic work. None of the staff had similar experience, so I insisted that we fund the efforts.

Now, Sir Hewlett was, as a result, the first climate funder in the U.S. to support climate litigation in a meaningful way. But here's the confession. I actually agreed with the staff that there was almost no chance that any of these suits would prevail on the merits. I supported the effort because I'd worked on tobacco and asbestos litigation in earlier guises and had seen how litigation could become a really powerful communication tool.

In both those earlier contexts, if any of you have ever followed either tobacco or asbestos, getting to discovery made public all sorts of damning information that had been kept secret, but that helped shift public opinion in meaningful ways. So, for instance, the fact that the tobacco companies knew how addictive nicotine was and had been intentionally making cigarettes more addictive all along had a huge effect on what happened in that context.

I suppose another confession I should make at the time I was working at a law firm, we were defending the tobacco companies. I abandoned that after that, actually. Anyway, I thought climate litigation could do the same. So all we would need to do would be to survive the preliminary motions and get to discovery.

And I turned out to be wrong about all that, but in the best possible way, the lawyers were better than me and better than I had understood. And they developed new theories of liability and new approaches and created a whole new field of litigation. The result is that climate litigation is no longer a fringe issue. It has instead become widely regarded as an established method of shaping, testing, and advancing climate action around the world.

And we saw this clearly. And yet I don't know how many of you followed yesterday's U.S. Senate hearings in which Senate Republicans sought to portray climate litigation as basically a subversive effort to help China achieve energy superiority over the United States. Really, it's worth watching, but not if you have high blood pressure.

The argument is basically because Republicans want to keep the U.S. on fossil fuels while the Chinese and, you know, frankly, pretty much the whole rest of the world want to promote renewable energy efforts to stymie the fossil fuel industry helps the Chinese. That's literally what the Senate hearings were. And it's yet another effort to promote an agenda by undermining the rule of law. But it shows the extent to which the fossil fuel industry and those in government beholden to it are beginning to worry about the growing effectiveness of climate litigation.

Just how much that effort has grown and how effective it is becoming are the subject of this report and tonight's event, both of which are part of LSE's broader commitment to producing policy-relevant research that supports more just, effective, and accountable climate governance.

Joining us to discuss the report in the State of Global Climate Litigation is an exceptional panel of experts. I'll start with Dr. Joanna Setzer, who is the lead author of the report, one of two, and a global authority on climate law. And she'll begin with an overview of this year's findings. She's Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute and

where she leads the Climate Change Laws of the World Project. She co-leads the legal stream of the Global School of Sustainability at LSE. We will then hear from online, I think only those of you in the back half can see Mike Girard,

who is the Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Law School and Faculty Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. He'll talk about litigation trends in the U.S., including during the second Trump administration. Professor Jacqueline Peel, Professor of Law and Director of Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne will follow. She's a visiting professor this year at GRI, and she'll cover developments in Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia-Pacific region.

She'll be followed by Dr. Danielle D'Andrade Moriera. Did I get that right? Close. Associate professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and founder of the research group Juma, Law, Environment, and Justice in the Anthropocene. She's a visiting fellow at GRI, and she'll speak about developments in Brazil and Latin America. And finally, Kate Cook, a barrister at Matrix Chambers specializing in environmental, public, international, and human rights law.

She's appeared before the ICJ and other international tribunals, and her remarks will focus on international climate litigation. After they speak, there'll be a chance, we'll go directly for you to put your questions to the panel, and I'll try to ensure a range of questions from both our audience here in the theater and just so you know, we have an online audience, so we'll give them a chance too. And with that, it's my pleasure to invite Joanna to stack tonight's conversation. Good evening, everyone. Wonderful to see you all, and

Absolutely packed room, which is amazing after a busy London Climate Action Week. Thank you so much for coming. I have around 12 minutes to give you the highlights of, if you already saw, a many pages report, not a snapshot, as Jackie said, anymore. But before I start, I wanted to say a few thank yous because this report is really the result of the work of many hands and minds and hearts.

So first, Kate Haim. Kate is the other mother of the report and she's now home with her newborn baby. Kate has done a lot of work before she went on maternity leave and she's probably watching online. Then I want to say thanks to the Sabin Center and Mike Girard is here representing for the amazing work, putting together and maintaining the database, which is the basis for our analysis.

I also want to thank the team at the Grantham Research Institute, in particular Tiffany and Emily and Georgie and all the research assistants, everyone who has helped this report. And huge thanks to all the reviewers, many of you are in the room, for the excellent feedback you gave us. This report gets, it's much harder than any academic publication that I ever read or wrote.

And finally, a big thanks to Gabi Gershny, who did the beautiful illustrations for the report. If you've already seen the report, you'll see it looks pretty this year and it's thanks to Gabi. That's it. Let me start with the highlights. The report is already online, so please also you can use the QR code and I hope you enjoy reading. And let me give you the highlights.

So in one line, if I can give you the summary, and also this will be the outline for my presentation, three words for what is happening in the world of climate litigation. The first, growing complexity. Second, maturing field. And third, an expanding economy.

area, field also in going in different directions. I'll get to those three points before just the numbers. So the Sabin Center collects all the cases. We have now around 3000 cases in 60 countries around the world. We, in the last year, 2024, which is the core of the analysis in the numbers part, around 220 cases.

What we see increasingly is the number of strategic litigation, as we classify, is growing. So of these 226, 80% we consider it as strategic litigation. And by this, I mean when the claimant or plaintiff is not just seeking to win the individual case, but really trying to influence the broader debate, which is a lot of what this litigation is about.

The pie chart here shows the distribution between Global North and South and international. We still have the majority of cases in the Global North, but what we observed is this really dynamic growth of litigation in the Global South. So 60% of cases were filed in the last four years. Good. So to my three points, the first:

complexity. I love the illustration that Gabi did for us because it shows the complexity of challenges coming from multiple directions. Of course, litigation always came from multiple directions. What's quite unique this year is that sometimes the same actor, company, government is suffering litigation from these opposing sides. So you have

Those arguing that the action is insufficient, those that argue that the policy, the project, whatever, will put an end to it.

a burden on fossil fuels or the economy and this is targeting the same actor and the example here is black rock black rock was suffered in a very short period of time first had a letter of complaint filed in before the french financial regulator alleging that black rock

was engaging in green washing practices. So the client earth identified that lots of funds marketed as sustainable that collectively accounted for more than $1 billion were actually investing in fossil fuels, the majority representing new fossil fuel extraction.

One month later, again, BlackRock is dealing with another litigation. This time is a coalition of Republican-led states that filed a lawsuit against not only BlackRock, but also Vanguard and State Street, the three largest asset managers in the U.S., saying that these asset managers were conspiring to collectively cut coal production in the U.S.

So this is kind of the illustration there, the person in between the two. But also we saw this year an increase in the number of non-aligned climate litigation. And here what we're talking about is cases like anti-regulatory, ESG backlash, also what we call green versus green. So when you have competing green and climate oppositions.

objectives or just transition litigation, as well as slap suits, strategic litigation against public participation. So here we, in the 220 something, we found 60 cases that were non-aligned and this accounts for more or less 27%. So things are becoming complicated and even more with the situation in the US. I'm sure we're going to cover this in Mike's presentation.

Second point, maturity. So for the first time this year, we did a new type of analysis, which consisted of looking at all cases that have reached apex courts. So Supreme Courts, Constitutional Courts. And to be honest, before we did this, and thanks for helping, we had no idea how many cases had reached these courts, what they were about.

What was the outcome? And what we found was a group of 276 cases that have reached the highest courts of countries. And the majority, well, if you think the U.S., 117, and then the rest of the world, 159.

Most of these cases have the governments as defendants. And what is also interesting is that out of these, 250 already have outcomes. So really we can start saying something about not only that climate cases are reaching the highest courts, but also what these courts are deciding.

The decisions, they vary very much across regions of the world. And this is why in the graph you see that we considered what is aligned and non-aligned across. And we see quite interestingly that the places where the highest proportionally number of successful cases have been so far are in Latin America and in South Asia, where almost all the cases have been aligned.

Many of these, as you know, have rights-based cases, and we see this in 2024 successes in Supreme Courts in the U.S., in the Montana held versus Montana and the Wahiney versus Hawaii case.

and also elsewhere in the world. So in short, there's much more in the report, but you really get the sense of this growing judicial engagement with the complex legal questions surrounding responsibility and enforcement of climate action. Still on the maturity angle, we have seen Supreme Courts dealing with the exploration of new fossil fuels.

And the photo here is a photo of Finch versus Surrey County. And this is a case where in 2024, in June, the Supreme Court of the UK ruled that the approval of the extension of an oil well in Surrey was unlawful because it had failed to consider the impact of burning oil. So not just the extraction, but the burning, which we called scope three.

Then in April 2025, we saw a similar type of decision from the Supreme Court of Norway reinstating a ban on the development of three oil wells fields in the North Sea because

Again, the Environmental Pact assessment had failed to consider scope three emissions. So what these decisions from Supreme Courts mean is that ultimately you get a message to regulators that they have to consider the impact of burning oil. And if that doesn't fit the carbon budget, well, that's going to be a different story. But you have this obligation of

Discovering what these are and reporting them and therefore also discussing what methods to assess.

So the last part of the maturing argument is that as the field matures, unsurprisingly, we have to turn to a related important question, which is what about the implementation of the judgments? And here we had some really important difficult questions that have been already raised in the case of Klima Syrinen versus Switzerland, where

Following the April 2024 decision of the European Court of Human Rights, there has been, well, not only a backlash, and this is illustrated again in this drawing. So you have the court saying there is some critical lacuna in the Swiss authorities' progress of putting in place sanctions.

a regulatory framework, then you have in Switzerland a backlash, but also still within the case and elsewhere, a discussion of how to quantify the domestic fair share of carbon budget and the adoption and implementation of a binding regulatory framework for emissions reduction.

Something relatively similar is also happening in South Korea with a decision in August 2024, the first successful government framework case in South Korea, where the South Korean Constitutional Court found that the Climate Act in South Korea was insufficiently clear in terms of

The concrete targets and plans for the period between 2031, 2049 sent the government with the homework to improve that by 2026. And now there's this discussion in terms of how to determine what is going to be South Korea's fair share of global reductions. So,

These cases and others, they reflect this challenge of how to enforce, and I think we'll see more of this, how to implement these decisions. Third and last point, the expanding field. And here I'm going to look into the corporate cases.

So far, since 2015, we have more or less 250 strategic cases against corporations. 20% of the cases filed in 2024 targeted companies.

Now, sorry, when I talk about the expansion here, I'm talking about new areas. So we have the, we call this the rainbow graph. It shows that in the beginning, litigation against corporates was targeting the major emitters, so the carbon majors, and we see now

many more colors with more sectors, textile and particularly food and agriculture more recently. So we identify around 40 cases that deal with this link between animal agriculture, emissions, sometimes food retail and different types of cases. Here I'm giving two brief examples. One

The JBS case where the New York general state attorney brought a case against JBS, the largest meat producer in the world, saying that their messaging around net zero by 2040 was misleading.

Slightly different type of case involving land use is the case of Fallis versus Total, a farmer that says that climate change will affect his farm and therefore he needs to produce and therefore he's seeking compensation from Total, the French company in Belgium. So this is the type of case that Larry was saying that they started funding in the US and that now is evolving into...

different, more complex cases also based on more advanced science.

Now, together with all these polluters cases that we know about, and we've seen an important decision in RWE a few weeks ago, we have in Brazil a new type of case that Daniele will talk about, which are cases involving climate damages for illegal deforestation. Really interesting cases, and she will tell you more about those. So to finish, the question that I always go back to, but that becomes ever more important. So

This year, we're celebrating the 10 years anniversary of the first decision in Urgenda, in Ligari, and the illustration here shows some of these landmark cases around the world that we've seen in this last decade. With litigation growing in complexity, maturing and expanding in different directions, it's really important to understand the whole story about climate litigation and its impacts.

the legal impacts, what the decisions mean for other cases, but also the impacts outside the courts, something that Jackie had already written about in 2015 and that we still have to understand better and continue doing because these are impacts that occur across time. So to conclude, over this last decade,

courts and the law have become one piece of the complicated puzzle of climate governance. It's good that the IPCC already recognized this, but there's still more to come, especially with the political headwinds, with the risk of ambition dropping, with implementation failing, and importantly, with the physical risks, with the transition risks growing.

It's become more important that the rule of law is held and that we understand the impacts of these cases and hopefully that we can continue advancing in protecting the environment and the climate. Thank you.

So we'll hear next from Mike Girard, who is with us online. And it'll take a sec, I think, to switch over. They have to turn off our microphone so you can hear him. Thank you for calling, Mike. So, Mike, give it a shot whenever you're ready. Wait, not yet, though, if your mic is still on. Mike, which one? I think he's muted. No, because we need to... And highlight some important decisions.

And Donald Trump tries to dismantle the U.S. system of environmental regulation and much else. He's getting tremendous pushback in the courts. More than 300 lawsuits have been filed in the U.S. courts against the Trump administration over a manner of actions.

The others have enjoyed quite a few early successes. In fact, ourselves, May 30th, the Bernal Court should win against the administration in 76% of the cases that have been decided.

This was mostly because the administration was very softly following the administrative procedures that had to go through, and in some cases because the administration was well beyond the power to oppose it. Some of these other old faces have been reversed, at least as a preliminary phase by the inter-duty developers.

And we don't know how the Supreme Court will ultimately rule the cases that reach that level. Many in the U.S. civil community have mobilized to resist the administration.

Another important category of cases is the lawsuits being filed mostly by states, counties, and cities against the fossil fuel companies seeking money damages for climate change. These cases began back in 2004, initially under Commonwealth of Other Resources Authorities, in the face of Larry Berger, who was the CEO of Alkhanaz-Romea. Recently, the papers were turned on deception by the companies.

My capital are now floating for such cases. For several years, they were held up by the issue of whether they belonged in federal court or state court. It was finally resolved that they belong in state court, which is the venue that the plaintiffs prefer.

Three of these cases have survived mentions to dismiss that went either way after the state Supreme Court. These were the ones in Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Colorado. And Cremation was one major defense that was based by the oil properties of SOPAR and recently three states have been forced, that has been unsuccessful as a protest. In one of the cases that went blocked by the Soviet economy of Haider-Libinburg-Wagen,

There would be rare properties of any allied business group tried to go to the US Supreme Court to send complaints to the outside. It will shut out all these cases. The Supreme Court refuses to take that case. That suggests that the Supreme Court may not interfere with any of these cases, and at least one of them has actually gone through a trial and gone through a state court and a power process and is already at the US Supreme Court.

The struggle was actively underway in the cases of Massachusetts and Hawaii, although the feelings of that discovery have happened in other. There will be further motion of that in those cases, but at least in Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Colorado, it looks like these cases may be getting further. Now, just as Trump is to assert a federal constitutional right to a premium value of about $500,000,

As Joanna mentioned, there have been important victories in two states that have the environmental rights provisions in those state constitutions. In Montana, Ruth Plymouth provided a trial that was held in the summer of 2023. The trial, of course, found that the provision of Montana still grabbed the global consideration of climate change and made a state energy policy wider-linked to the state constitution.

in december 2024 the montana supreme court of hell on a glad charles quote decision in that case just held process mount hans um shortly afterwards the montana supreme court used that president to find that greenhouse gas emissions must be considered with making decisions on air pollution for us

In Hawaii, in the case of Olamide versus Olamide Auto Transportation, U.S. plaintiffs claimed that the state's policies were too friendly to motor vehicles rather than to mass transit and bicycles in violation of the environmental rights laws of the state's constitution. In the case of the tribe, the government of Olamide had to settle it.

in which the state and region reevaluate its constitution policies and take numerous other actions to address the concerns of the players. So that was totally a victory for the players. And the other land would have our court in UNICEF, but its state constitution would not create an enforceable individual right to an alpha provider.

kind of cases are now pending in Pennsylvania and New York under the environmental rights provisions of their state constitution, so I will change. And I'll give you a little bit of environmental advice, and we'll see how that turns out.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued one decision that had a negative environmental impact. On May 29th, the Supreme Court decided a case called Seven-County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, ILF. They considered an 88-mile long rail line that would carry air from a remote part of Utah to a place where it would interconnect with the National Rail System.

and then allow the oil to go to the final reason the world's united taxes a federal agency called the surface transportation would have concluded the environmental impact statement under the national environmental policy act and approved the rail line

U.S. part of the rules for the District of Columbia Circuit involves the approval because it said the EIS should have looked at the Austrian contextual project, the world world what would happen, and the downstream impacts, the refining and the use of the oil and other results to enhance the asset wishes. The U.S. Supreme Court

it said that the service transportation board had no control over either the upstream or downstream refineries so it did not need to look at their impacts including the climate effects the supreme court also held on the court to the greater japanese state agencies for uh when they uh looked at what the agencies have done on the depot

So this may make it harder for people to use Nika to fight a heart attack syndrome. And as I said, it was quite different from the outcomes that Jolani talked about with the insurgencies, so in any case, in any way, and it always fits. So the U.S. has seen some big moves, some depletes, and a great deal of ongoing litigation with those outcomes to predict. Thank you.

So thank you, Mike. And so we'll just go, you know, right down the line, Jacqueline, then Danielle, then Kate. Okay, well, thanks very much. And thanks to Joanna and LSE for inviting me to be part of this event. And it's a delight to be here in London for Climate Action Week. I also just want to say what a great report this is. I don't know that the more it's on Instagram. I think it's on. Just me believing. Lean closer. Can the people back here? Okay.

I also just want to congratulate you on the report. It's such an enormous resource for all of us in the climate litigation community, and I hope it continues long. It's obviously getting quite long and beyond its snapshot title these days. I wanted to focus in my remarks on two questions. One, recent cases and trends in the hotspot climate litigation jurisdiction, which is my home country of Australia,

And then some of the developing case law focused on corporations, which Joanna highlighted as an expanded area, an expanding area and contributions that are coming from the Australasian region in that respect.

So Australia is second only to the US in terms of the number of cases that deal with climate change. And like the US, it's been a hotspot for this kind of litigation since the earliest emergence of the cases in the 2000s. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is Australia has an abundance of climate issues. We're a large per capita consumer of fossil fuels. We have outsized exports of fossil fuels.

We're an arid continent prone to disaster, making adaptation a really important issue. And we also have competing approaches to climate management, a settler state and also First Nations approaches to caring for country. The second reason is that Australia has been, no doubt about it, a policy laggard in terms of addressing climate for many decades.

This may be starting to turn around, that we may be seeing an end to the endless climate policy wars. And certainly the Australian government is hoping with its bid for COP31 in 2026 in conjunction with the Pacific, that that will be a sort of new image and hopefully a new policy environment for climate policy. But that laggard status has meant that there's been a turn to the courts really to try and find other solutions for action on climate.

We also have an incredibly vibrant civil society, as you do here, and a great ecosystem of environmental public interest law firms who take a pragmatic, creative approach to developing cases. And I'm looking at some of the brains trust from the Australian cohort seated in the last couple of rows.

In terms of the recent cases and overall trends, I think we can say Australia is following the global crowd in some respects, but bucking the trend in others. One of the ways that they're not following along is that we're not among the countries driving the apex court trend that Joanna observed in her remarks earlier.

And part of that is it's an illustration of where you don't have the right kind of legal context for those cases to make their way to apex courts. In Australia, we lack a national human rights framework or protections, and our framework, climate law, doesn't have a lot by way of avenues for pursuing accountability. On the other hand, I think Australia has long been at the forefront, for better or worse, of judicial decision-making on scope standards.

three emissions associated with fossil fuel projects. We've got a long history of these kinds of cases. They continue and recent cases are testing the limits really of climate attribution science and also the capacity to use protections for our Indigenous communities and particularly to ensure appropriate consultation of those communities to block projects.

And Australia's also been a very active space in the corporate space of climate washing or greenwashing cases with a climate focus, both in terms of enforcement by our regulators and also by civil society actors. And one of the most interesting recent cases I think here is the Parents for Climate versus Energy Australia case.

which reached a settlement just in May 2025, essentially acknowledging that carbon offsets, for example, from forest preservation are not equivalent to direct emissions reduction from fossil fuel use in meeting companies' carbon neutral commitments.

So on that corporate climate litigation side, I think the Energy Australia case is an example of this category of corporate climate litigation, which we're really seeing consolidate. It's not yet dominant in terms of the case law, but it's certainly a building area and it's building globally. Our understanding of what exactly falls into corporate climate litigation, I think, is still evolving, but it definitely covers cases against corporate defenders like

like the polluter pays and corporate framework cases that the report identifies, and also those which traverse private law, corporate and commercial law. So it's really extending to a different group of lawyers and advocates than perhaps we've seen in a lot of climate litigation cases in the past.

In New Zealand, the Supreme Court decision in Smith and Fonterra has also been attracting a lot of attention. It opens a crack in the very hard nut that is climate-related tort cases.

mainly just by saying that the claims that were being brought there in negligence, nuisance and a sort of novel climate system taught shouldn't be blocked at the outset from proceeding. So it's not exactly the same as a ringing endorsement of those arguments, but definitely allowing them to proceed, which is a good sign. One aspect that's catching my eye with recent cases, and I'll end on this comment, is the move to hold companies accountable.

for particular climate impacting projects, but also for the climate performance of existing

their entity-wide strategies. So their net zero targets, their transition plans, their offsetting requirements or offsetting strategies. And I think this is a really interesting development, this shift from project-based litigation to looking at corporate strategy and of the whole entity, because it puts really squarely in focus the question of what's an acceptable business model or strategy and

in today's increasingly climate-constrained world. And it's an area where I expect we're going to see much sharper and sharper focus in coming years. Thank you. Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSE IQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event. Thank you, Professor Larry Kramer for the introduction. Good evening to everyone.

Thank you so much, Ana, for inviting me to be here today. It's a great pleasure. Well, I'll cover climate litigation in Brazil with a focus on damage-based claims, which are the most recurrent types of cases we have there. Climate litigation in Latin America, and particularly in Brazil, has constitutional rights and environmental laws as central legal bases that begin to be applied also to tackle climate emergencies.

Brazil is the jurisdiction in the Global South with the highest number of cases, of reported cases. We have now 134 cases registered in the Brazilian climate litigation platform. And we are actually right now working and trying to figure out how to include a set of 195 cases registered

filed it in the end of last year, and all of them are damage-based claims related to deforestation in the Amazon region. But I'll come back to these cases soon.

Well, in the last few years, there was not only an increase in the number of cases, but also a shift in how the climate-related issues are mobilized in Brazil. These claims started to engage with laws and facts related to climate change in a more explicit, direct, and central way. Although, it's important to highlight, the climate issue still comes together with other environmental matters. Among the systemic cases,

most of them challenging setbacks in environmental and climate policies, especially during the last government between 2019 and 2022. We see the strategic use of constitutional lawsuits filed directly before the Supreme Court and strong constitutional arguments truly stand out. There are significant victories in most of these cases.

And these outcomes, they confirm the reach of our constitutional rights to a healthy environment, bringing climate change protection into Brazil's constitutional guarantee of a healthy environment. Actually, these new judgments strengthened a long line of precedents that began with environmental litigation when environmental litigation first evoked the constitutional rights to a healthy environment.

So decades of case law, now we put Brazilian courts to treat constitutional safeguards for the environment as a frontline instrument against the climate crisis. Now we're seeing a rise in the number of cases filed against the private sector, including many, many individuals.

Although these cases challenge specific acts or enterprises and usually have direct impacts restricted to the particular case in question, they do provide strategies and arguments that can be replicated in other cases having a potential butterfly effect.

Indeed, a significant and growing number of these cases include at least one measure addressing reparation of climate damage. And this trend indicates not only the expansion of climate litigation in quantitative terms, but also the increasing centrality of damage-based claims within the broader climate legal landscape in Brazil.

As I said, we currently have 130 climate-related lawsuits recorded in our platform. Of these, 54 seek to establish civil liability for harm linked to climate change. 40 of them specifically seek climate damage, arguing in addition to other environmental harm dimensions,

the injury to the climate system must be assessed and repaired. It's the so-called direct climate damage, like we call that in Brazil. The remaining cases still challenge activities that increase GHG levels, yet framing the injury more generally as environmental damage, not seeking for compensation specific of the climate dimension.

The focus of these 40 explicit climate damage cases, most of them filed by the federal public prosecutors, is deforestation in the Amazon region, which mirrors Brazil's emissions profile. Land use change accounts for 46% of the country's gross GHG emissions. And only one of these 40 cases contests a coal-fired power plant's environmental permit. Again, it failed to address its GHG emissions.

All these cases rest on Brazil's environmental strict liability framework. They invoke the wide definition of polluter.

joint and several liability, the polluter-pays principle, and the principle of full reparation, which goes beyond restoring the land to encompass monetary awards, including collective moral damage. Defendants include both direct polluters, those who clear the forest, for example, and indirect polluters further along the deforestation chain, such as those that store timber without a permit.

Liability suits in Brazil concentrate on direct climate harm, that is, damage arising from the increased GHG concentrations and the destabilization of the climate system.

Claims for losses linked to or that result from intensification of climate impacts, loss and damage cases, and in Brazil, indirect climate damage, have yet to reach Brazilian courts. In short, Brazil's emerging climate damage cases grow out four decades of pioneering environmental legislation and clay case law.

The solid Brazilian environmental liability framework and its unique traits now serves as the springboard for adapting familiar environmental principles to the specific challenges of climate change, proof that the country offers a fertile ground for this new wave of legal action. Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Good.

It's great to be here. I'm Kate Cook, and I would like to echo what's been said about the report. It's absolutely a fantastic resource and particularly beautifully presented this year. As has been said, I acted as counsel in the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion Proceedings and in the ITLOS, International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, proceedings on behalf of Mauritius, but I will be speaking in a purely personal capacity today.

So I've been asked to talk about the international advisory opinions. I will focus on the ICJ and ITLOS this evening, but we can talk about the others in Q&A. They're all important. First of all, why do they matter? What are their implications? They are advisory, but...

I think they are also incredibly important because they are authoritative interpretations of key areas of treaty law and customary international law. They will have an impact on domestic cases, but the way in which they do will depend on the national jurisdiction concerned, the particular issue in the case that you're looking at.

I think they will have the most impact where they will reach similar conclusions on certain key issues. So if ITLOS's comments on climate science are echoed or reinforced by the ICJ and picked up as well by other tribunals, that will carry huge weight. Outside the courtroom, I think they can exert a

normative pull on decisions made in government, perhaps behind closed doors, doesn't mean government will follow them, but it puts more pressure, hopefully, on them to accelerate state action. And I think they also are relevant to the context for investment, both state investment and private investment, both in fossil fuels, particularly in relation to the ICJ opinion when we get it, and in relation to renewables.

But more fundamentally, I think all of these opinions, as well as the other cases in the report, but given that these are international, have implications for the political and social legitimacy of state action on climate change. I think that is the most important contribution to our current world. I think standing behind all of the requests for advisory opinions is one large question.

which is, is there a coherent and effective body of international law with which to address climate change?

Coherence and effectiveness necessarily means addressing head-on the current real-world gaps that we face and that we know about, the gaps that hinder us from reaching our climate goals. Those gaps include the greenhouse gas emissions gap, the fossil fuel production gap, the climate finance gap, and the adaptation gap, as well as what the IPCC has recently referred to as an implementation gap.

Parties to the climate treaties have acknowledged these situations in the recent global stock take. So the question is, do these existing and in many cases worsening gaps, which currently put us on a path to potentially three degrees or more of global warming, do they reflect or stem from gaps in the international legal framework?

Or do they result from a failure by states to meet their legal obligations and act in accordance with established principles? Or is there some awful combination of those two? In other words, is there a justice gap or a compliance gap, or both?

Does international law require states to take us off this trajectory towards climate breakdown and prevent vulnerable ecosystems and vast numbers of human lives, as well as some entire states, being effectively written off? So I think the ICJ's advisory opinion will throw light on where we are in that regard, as will the others, and as has the ITLOS opinion to some extent.

I want to touch briefly on two big themes that I think are the ones to look at in the round when these opinions emerge. The first is climate science. The majority of participating states before the ICJ affirmed the central importance of the best available science, in particular as represented in the IPCC reports.

Most, if not all, states say that they are following the science. But what does this mean in terms of closing those real-world gaps? Crucially, following the science does not just mean accepting that climate change is real, or even just accepting that greenhouse gas fossil fuel emissions are the primary source of it.

It means acting within the diminishing timescales indicated for deep emissions reductions. It means acknowledging that overshoot of the temperature goal is likely to result in forms of harm that are irreversible on human timescales and include crossing planetary tipping points.

and that this will entail losses on a vast scale that could have been averted. It means acting to remain within the rapidly diminishing global carbon budget on the basis that every increment of warming matters. The best available science informs due diligence. ITLOS has already made that clear.

And that is due diligence under the treaty regimes, the climate treaty regimes, as well as UNCLOS, as well as customary international law. Customary international law is particularly important because that would cover non-participants in various treaty regimes or those who withdraw from them.

And it also covers obligations that precede the Paris Agreement and the Climate Change Convention. So the question of historic accountability, not so historic really, but accountability for pre-climate treaty emissions. So those are some of the things that the science is also relevant to many other branches of the law, but we can talk about that in Q&A later.

It's also important to acknowledge what the science tells us and what it does not. It doesn't tell us how to equitably address the climate injustice that we face.

Now, equity cannot expand the global carbon budget or change the laws of physics or alter the pathways that we need to adhere to. But it does provide a basis for developing proper mechanisms for redress, for supporting adaptation and mitigation and transfer away from fossil fuels. And that is another big issue before the ICJ.

Participants put forward different solutions, but it is important that equity now takes on a substantial and concrete real-world meaning if we are to achieve justice and we are to close the gaps.

One branch of the law that I think can help us do that is human rights law. If you look at the granular assessments in recent reports by human rights bodies, and in particular the amazing work done by a range of special rapporteurs, they have drilled down into what it means in operational terms to implement human rights in a way that addresses the climate challenge, but also protects the

respect for basic rights for people around the world, and particularly those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. And I think it's important to see what all the advisory opinions say about that. So finally, I think we need to ask ourselves, to paraphrase Frederick Jameson, are we in a situation where it is easier to imagine a three-degree world of climate breakdown

than it is to imagine transitioning away from fossil fuels and meeting our climate goals. To the extent that that is even potentially true, this throws a huge shadow over international law and everything else. But it is to be hoped that these international advisory opinions, because this is crunch time, will actually throw back some light on those shadows. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you to all the speakers and Mike also for the comments. And let's we'll open the floor to questions. Just a couple of things. For those of you here in the theater, raise your hand. Someone will bring you a microphone when you're called on. You know, give us your name and affiliation. We don't need more than that.

and try and ask one short question. And I do want to emphasize that we got a lot of people, so, you know, not a long preface statement, if you could just get to the question. For those of you who are online, you can submit your questions through the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. And also please let us know your name and affiliation. We're particularly keen to hear from students and alumni. And just so you all know, the event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast subject to no technical difficulties.

So with that, and we have the microphones on the side, let's start over here. Hi, my name is Sue Willman. I'm a solicitor at King's College. Thank you all for your really important work. My question is, given the number of armed conflicts that are currently waging in the world and the increasing expenditure on weapons, do you have you

observe any climate litigation related to militarization or do the panelists think that may be a fruitful area to prevent even further climate harms in the years to come? Any of you, whoever wants to take that? Do you want to collect a few before? No, no, let's do them. Anybody?

I'm not aware of cases, but it is certainly being talked about. I think you've raised an important issue. I think there's always a sensitivity, given the awful human cost of armed conflict, especially at the moment, in raising the issue of climate impact. But I think all of these things...

matter to people, you know, real world people, real world lives and the survival of various populations. So I would imagine that it's something that will emerge. You know, I'll just note in peacetime, the U.S. military was one of the most forward thinking on coming up with climate mitigation efforts. And then, of course, that all reverses as soon as you get into conflict and it goes in the other direction. Let's go over here. Thank you, Nasser Kalaoum, commentator on these issues.

I have an attachment to Brazil, and I'm sure you are aware about your colleague Adriana Elson-Abden-Noz. And Adriana Elson-Abden-Noz, there is an organization about the environment attachment to the presidents. And it appears in Sharm el-Sheikh and the COP conferences and G20 or whatever. So my question to you,

And the change in kind of like a political wing in Brazil, do you think the current administration of President Lula, it gives him power, the kind of cases that you spoke about, with a view not to clash with international business because he needs investment?

Actually, we have seen a big shift in climate litigation profile in Brazil during the last federal government. We had systemic cases brought against especially the federal government because of the setbacks that we saw back then. And then when Lula was elected, it was like a big hope and

everywhere that he was going to shift this way of doing politics. And actually, it's impossible to compare the way it's working. We had like a really dismantling of our environmental policies and climate policies. Now we do not have that. But actually, it's not easy for the federal government to balance those interests. So we are facing this.

setbacks by the parliament. We have just seen the Senate passing a bill. It's still waiting to be finally enacted, but it was a bill dismantling the environmental licensing system that we have there. So it's something that's

Actually, although we cannot compare one government with the other, it's going to be a huge setback if we have this environmental bill on licensing. It's probably going to be questioned before the Supreme Court.

And actually, I don't know if I answered the question yet. Let's take an online question.

Sure. We have two questions submitted online, one anonymously submitted and one by Jenny Leach. So I'll just go ahead and combine them. What risks do you see for the business sector regarding anti-climate litigation in the U.S. and globally? For example, have you seen any litigation against companies arguing potentially misleading or exaggerated content in their annual sustainability reports? Anybody? Go ahead.

Yeah, so there's – I think that's one of the real areas of impact of

of the cases that we're seeing with the corporate climate litigation, even though it's not a large body of cases so far, it does have a very significant impact on the business sector, not just the companies that are targeted through the cases, more generally flowing through the sector. So I think it's because it's being recognised that it is creating a liability or litigation risk

And that, along with other sorts of risk, is being factored into decisions about how to approach these questions. So I think, yes, absolutely. And some of the cases, particularly around greenwashing or anti-greenwashing climate washing, are definitely taking on this kind of

these kinds of claims about whether or not companies are making valid and defensible and credible statements about what they're going to achieve through their climate actions and their corporate climate targets. And I want, Mike Gerard, I don't know if you want to say something on that question. So wait one second while they make the microphone work.

Can you hear me now? Yeah. So, we've done quite a bit of free and well-suited litigation on the value space, but it's not about the corporate sustainability reports. It's more about advertising and other public state. Great. Thank you. So, let's take one way in the back there. Woman with her hand up. Obviously, someone with their hand up.

Hello, I'm an alumni. I currently work in impact investing and the entire debate around kind of like the BlackRock client, also the equity side was super, super interesting. So thanks for that. I have two questions. On the first one, I was just wondering, not to be kind of like doom and gloom, but do you think there might be any spillover of the kind of rising anti-USG sentiments in the U.S.

I've seen kind of like a number of the asset managers that I work with that have exposure to the US but are Europe-based that are actually starting to step down from some of the Climate Action 100, Nature Action 100 initiatives. So yeah, just your thoughts on that. And the second question is more related to the equity points that we were touching on towards the end on the theme of just transition. So how do you kind of

This is just something I've been kind of struggling myself in terms of navigating how we can enable this transition to a low-carbon economy, whilst also enabling the global South to, to some extent, use their own resources, whilst maybe enabling leapfrogging with technologies or sharing kind of like knowledge with upskilling communities, et cetera. But it seems that the progress has been very, very slow. So if you have any kind of insights or words of hope, that would be much appreciated. Sure.

So the first, you snuck two questions in there, cheating. The first question that was about the U.S. So, Mike, I don't know, did you catch the question? Just what kind of, are you seeing a stepping back? Yeah, I think part of the question was a little bit about what's happening in the U.S. Let me just say one thing about what's happening in the U.S. is that although the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is revoking its regulation on climate disclosure for state of California,

which is the fourth largest economy in the world, as its own rules are highly disclosive, which aren't yet in effect, but they will, and will affect many companies that also operate in Europe and elsewhere. So the Senate government has gone out of touch with this, but probably when there's some other states, I was just looking at just at employment in the super-Electorate.

And both of your questions, yeah. Yeah, if I could just briefly comment on the spillover question. I think that there is a concern of that risk emerging and effectively that greenwashing cases produce a pattern of green hushing on the part of corporate actors, winding back targets so that they are less or climate commitments so they're less likely to be targeted in litigation.

Or green rinsing, which is a kind of slow rocking of your target over time. Those, of course, could be other forms of greenwashing on another view. But there is that kind of risk. And I think this points to a question around strategy and how these cases are framed and who they're taken against. So in Australia, we have seen our regulators take

targeting perhaps not the worst actors for some of these kinds of issues, which may be sort of discouraging the leaders from putting their necks out and going a bit further. Whereas cases that are clearly targeting some of the laggards, the leaders can see that there's a big gap between the sorts of behaviours that they're engaged in and what the laggards are. So I think there's a strategic question underlying some of that as well.

And yeah, Joanna, just from the overall perspective. Yeah, I wanted to add to this, the spillover question. So I think the different types of possible spillovers, one is that we'll see that reflected in legislation. So we're already hearing a bit about the omnibus in Europe. And so there could be that angle that could be the spillover in terms of less ambition, but also there could be a spillover in terms of litigation strategies and on what

Jackie was saying about the green hushing and at the same time, litigators understanding the new context in which we are. I wouldn't be surprised. We're only mid of the year, but by the end of the year that we'll see perhaps less of the litigation challenging the

washing ambition and more litigation trying to hold on to the existing renewable subsidies or just trying to hold on what exists, maybe being less harsh against companies. So that might be something we might see in the next year's report. But still, I think it's early in the year. Thank you.

So, you know, I think we should reward people. If you're a teacher and everybody always sits in the back, so we should give a slight reward to people who have the brave sit in the front. Hi, thank you for taking my question. I'm Amy Rose, the Global Director of Litigation, Governance, and Legal Services at Client Earth, a global legal environmental organization. And I was wondering, given the right-wing political shifts that we have seen in the last year,

in elections, are you expecting or predicting a shift from courts, for example, becoming either more reluctant to even engage with these claims, more hostile to them, or more deferential to governments and the whims of public opinion, shall we say? Anyone? Please. Just, I mean...

I do domestic litigation as well. I think we have so many moving pieces at the moment, it's difficult to know. But I think all of this picks up on what's going on in the real world. If people mobilize to advocate for their interests...

that becomes part of the social picture. I did want to pick up on the equity point just because I think it's really important. Equity is a broad principle. It's obviously closely aligned to justice, and this does pick up on your question as well, but it needs to be given concrete form. As far as the ICJ proceedings are concerned, one opportunity would be to sort of reinforce the references that are

equity in the treaties in terms of support and fairness. Participants have put forward specific iterations of equity, fair shares, debt relief, and so on. I have no idea whether the court will go there, but certainly fair shares is becoming much more common currency. But the other aspect to this is accountability.

I mean, equity is really about money. It's about finance flows in large measure to do the things that we need to do and to stop doing the things that are making things much worse. And if there is not accountability for the harm done by fossil fuels, we can't fix the problem. And there isn't an equitable legal landscape. So I think you've highlighted that equity is really...

at the heart of this. And we don't have time to go into all the details, but if you look at the ICJ proceedings, there were many, many iterations of what equity means in real legal terms that I think many of them were meaningful. We'll come back, but online, do we have another...

Yes, we have a lot of questions coming in from the online audience. Just one. Which I think is quite interesting. Do you think people start seeing more professional liability claims for not taking climate change into account?

Yeah, I can start with that. So we have already seen the first cases this last year, one in particular involving the consultancy firm McKinsey. And the question is whether that would extend even to lawyers. So there are many professionals advising companies that potentially that have the knowledge of the science, have the knowledge of the transition, and therefore should be advising their clients, businessmen,

both in terms of investments, but also in terms of their advertisements. And if not doing that, there is potentially a risk for them to be litigated. I don't want to punish the middle either. So we're going to get the microphone into the middle here somehow.

Thank you very much. William Wilson from the climate website, the Borrowed Earth Project, and also from the Office for Environmental Protection. Can I just ask if you're seeing a difference coming through from developments in attribution science in the impacts of the courts where you're working?

Yeah, I can speak to that. And others as well. Go ahead, Stavros. It's a good question. Thank you. Yeah, very good question. That is an area that is evolving. The science is evolving, but I think more importantly even is how the science has been translated into the cases.

The lawyers need to understand the science and explain that. The judge needs to understand that and embrace that. So the issue is more in the translation from science into law than the science itself. We have a colleague in the team, Noah, who is sitting there, who has been doing a lot of work on that, really understanding where the challenges are and how much it has advanced. It has advanced. It can advance even more.

Anyone else want to? I'd just say the main question that remains is sort of an anti-drop in the ocean kind of argument. So can we link a particular company or a particular project to a certain level of increased impact from climate change in the context of a global problem? So that's the holy grail that we're trying to reach with climate attribution science is

in this case law. But to Joanna's point, I think there is still an educational piece

for climate scientists who are fronting up increasingly as experts in hostile cases to understand what that process involves and how to present the science in a way that makes sense for the law and equally for lawyers to understand the limitations of the science and the way that it's being developed. So I think it needs to go in both directions to really make improvements in that area.

And Mike, since by the way, you could use the little hand thing. I don't know if you want to say anything about any of the last couple of questions, but I thought I'd give you a chance.

The attribution has been very helpful in some of the cases under the Indigenous Species Act, where the claim is that certain species are facing future dangers, especially in the Arctic. The cases, but some of the other point cases, and we'll be getting into the perception cases, have not been yet found to be important, where attribution will be limited. And when they get to that point, it will be for us to see what it is. Can I add one point? Please.

Just to add to this, I mean, the science is evolving, but we don't need to wait for that to get justice because we also have the question of historic knowledge and the forensic examination of what was known by states and fossil fuel companies going back to the 1960s. This was examined by...

by Vanuatu and others in the ICJ proceedings. And I think that sits alongside this issue. What was known? Did people know that they were taking big risks with the climate system? And how does that fit into the justice landscape? So I think the two things have to be seen alongside each other. Thank you. And let's go back there.

Thank you for all your perspective, Tim. My name is Kat Kulpes. I'm an innovation consultant. It's hard to hear you. Sorry. I'm an innovation consultant, so I'm particularly interested in how companies and organizations and individuals actually take the opportunity when you have disruptive events like litigation.

cases that you're describing. My one question is around AI, which is running in direct opposition to climate change policy, where AI is incredibly energy hungry and resource hungry. And in order to be AI competitive, you have to be almost anti-climate and anti-environment. So how do companies actually balance that? And have you seen that coming through in litigation cases?

Short answer is no, not coming through in litigation could come through in the future. It really depends on where the energy is being sourced from for these big AI expansions. So the issue at the moment is whether that could be powered by renewable energy rather than fossil fuel energy. And certainly if you were going down a fossil fuel path for big AI data processing centres, for example, then I think you'd have questions about the accountability for the associated emissions.

And if I can add, the other side of this is also to an extent AI can be used in advancing climate action, for policymaking, for the science. So it is there for that as well. And we're seeing an increased use. Our database now is powered by AI. We're using that also to improve education. So there are also...

other angles to be considered but yes you're right we haven't seen one of those cases yet yeah and let's get the mic down here um i'm itan monet a high school senior in texas um i had a question on instability in the u.s because they have pulled out of we're ignored into now for trees like the icj they're not a part of boom clothes so they can't

be forced to listen to that decision. But yet, through Chagrin reference, it's not agency interpretation anymore. But also in seven-county, the Eagle, it was agency interpretation that was decided. So do you get international courts to decide? You mentioned there was a way to get non-signatories to have to listen, or how do you domestically choose which arbitration should enforce U.S. climate policy during a Trump administration? That sounds like one for me. You're in high school? No.

There are layers and layers to what you just asked, and I'm certainly not going to say anything about a US store, which Mike can address. But I think in some ways it does come back to the science, because...

When the courts say that climate science is part of the law, you may not be a party to the treaty. You may decide not to accept the prevention principle in customary international law, but you can't actually change the laws of physics. So there must come a point in political life where people are experiencing real world impacts,

And they ask themselves, do we want to be represented by anyone, whoever they are, wherever they are, who doesn't accept the basic climate science? Let alone the equity questions that we were just looking at. I mean, I think that's where I would start if I was in court. It's like, this is the science.

And this is what these bodies have said about it. But in the end, it's about basic rationality. Are we hurtling towards breakdown or do we want to preserve the planet that we all share with all the other people who are on it? That's it. Mike, do you want to weigh in here?

For many years, the US force has generally ignored or been hostile to international or foreign law. And now we have a national administration that is hostile to international law. I've said not only to the Christian states, so the chief price price, I would say, are some of the state courts, especially the most states that have environmental rights provisions in their constitutions.

Yeah. Thank you. So let's see, I'll give you, if you'd like, we'll work backwards. If you're one last comment you want to share with the audience and then we'll bring the event to a close. Um,

I've been doing this... It's like getting cold called on in London. I've been an environmental lawyer for over 30 years, and I feel like I should apologize because it just does look so dire sometimes. But there is so much energy, you know, across all generations, genders, demographic backgrounds to deal with these problems. And I do...

honestly feel that we have an opportunity. It's not a foregone conclusion to rebuild solidarity across our societies. We are all in this together. Some of the rich and privileged may think they can insulate themselves from this crisis, but who wants to live in a world where you're insulated while billions of people around you suffer?

That might sound a bit rosy, but I think it has real world resonance. And what I do see is different constituencies of people turning to the law as well as politics and other areas of social life to express themselves and to come together. We cannot solve this unless we do that. You can say international law is flawed or doesn't work or is tilted. But in terms of climate change,

international cooperation, and this goes into domestic cases as well, is the only way we can solve the problem. And it does provide us with an opportunity to really fight for a fairer world that we will all benefit from. So that's where I'd like to leave it. Nina? Actually, I'd like to bring some ideas from Brazil, from the development of environmental law. We usually say that we had to fight against

many difficulties and traditional orientations that we have that were incompatible with environmental demands and the complexity that environmental issue brings to us and also climate with hyper complex issues. And we say that our environmental law was disruptive.

And I think that's something and we could like we did achieved many changes with this disruptive way, this subversive way of seeing the law. And I think that the challenge that we are facing now in terms of climate, not only, of course, in Brazil, but globally.

globally, we could like get this inspiration probably trying to face with, to be more open to disruptive changes. That's it. So three short points to leave you with. One is I remember a time like Larry when talking about climate litigation was your crazy stuff. Climate was about treaties. I think now climate change litigation is mainstream now.

Second, I think climate change litigation is becoming a really important part of what we do in terms of implementation and accountability. It's part of that general trend in climate to move from making commitments to actually doing things. And finally, I think climate litigation is biting. We wouldn't see resistance to it if it didn't have any impact. So that's why I'd say keep going because it's actually making a difference.

Thank you. Well, look, I really enjoyed the panel. I really enjoyed...

I won't say I really enjoy writing the report because sometimes I hate writing it because it's so much going on, but I love how much is going on. I think that it is extraordinary how really it used to be a few people, it's still not thousands that have thought of these cases, brought these cases, and the judges who are engaging with these cases.

It is quite remarkable how a movement of legal mobilization was created in a short period of time. I think it does have the limitations that the law has, that courts, we know, you know, I was a lawyer. I decided not to be a lawyer anymore because I couldn't believe that it could take so long and have to wait and be so expensive. But so that is always also there. But

But the power of these cases to tell stories, I think that is really important.

what I find most remarkable, the creativity around the cases, the translation of the science through the cases, and a movement that started from really nowhere into what has created, as Jackie was saying, a risk, even when the litigation doesn't exist, the risk of a case is changing the dial. So, yeah, I'm... I want to give Mike a shot also.

Civil society in the U.S. and academia continue to be very vigorous in fighting back against the Trump. We survived the first Trump administration. We'll fight for the second Trump administration. There'll be a lot of times, but I think progress is in our future.

I do think it's worth remembering that the Romans survived Caligula. I'm going to take a chair. I want to offer an observation, Mayona, at the end, mostly from a lifetime of thinking really about the role of courts. So you can think of trying to achieve social change at the retail level and at the wholesale level. For climate, we obviously need change at the wholesale level. There's a rhetoric that's emerged over the last decade or so, which drives me crazy that we're losing, we're losing, we're losing, and we're not.

The advances that have been made are incredible. And the change, if you look at it over time, is actually when you think of the fact that the entire global economy ran solely on fossil fuels as recently as two decades ago. And where we have come since then is quite remarkable. But we are not winning fast enough. So that, I think, is a fair representation. And so we need to employ every tool. The thing about courts is they work really well at the retail level.

And as we learned in the civil rights movement, for instance, in the United States, they don't really work at the wholesale level. But the beauty of litigation is it can and often does, and I think in this case can, help change the attitudes that are necessary to make the change that's going to be needed at the wholesale level, which is...

at the end of the day, is going to have to turn on the political will generated from the populations in all of our nations to produce change at the governmental level that we need. And it's a really important tool, like a really powerful tool, much more so in many ways than people realize. And a lot of the movement building that takes place or itself can be a part of developing a movement. So stick with it. And thank you, everybody.

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