This year marks the tenth anniversary of landmark victories in Urgenda v. The Netherlands Footnote ¹ and Leghari v. Pakistan Footnote ² – two high-profile cases that proved to be the harbingers of a growing wave of claims challenging governmental response to climate change.Footnote ³ Ten years later, climate litigation is booming across the globe.Footnote ⁴ It has become commonplace to see individuals or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) suing government or corporate bodies over their inadequate response to climate change. From a practice that was limited mainly to the United States (US) and Australia until the mid-2010s,Footnote ⁵ climate litigation has grown to a well-established practice around the globe over the last decade. The landscape of these cases is diverse, and so are the types of case.

Against this backdrop, the publication of Litigating Climate Change in the Global South by Jolene Lin and Jacqueline Peel pushes the frontiers of scholarship in this field. Both authors have been spearheading climate litigation scholarship for many years – including well before the wave of post-Urgenda interest in climate litigation among the international academic community – with many of their earlier works having become essential readings in the field.Footnote ⁶ Building on the authors’ more recent collaboration on climate litigation in the global south,Footnote ⁷ the present book makes a landmark contribution to this burgeoning body of scholarship.

The book opens with a detailed discussion of the general role of climate litigation and the book’s methodological pillars in Chapters 1 and 2 before taking a deep dive into practices across a vast part of the world known as the global south, including trends in and features of these cases (Chapter 3), jurisdictions and cross-cutting issues (Chapter 4), key actors (Chapter 5), as well as the impact of these cases (Chapter 6). The authors use the term ‘global south’ to refer to ‘developing countries across the three regions of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific’ (pp. 6–7). The importance of climate action in these countries cannot be stressed enough. Numerous communities in the global south are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, with hundreds of millions of people potentially facing a wide range of threats from sea-level rise, floods, extreme precipitation, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, failure in crop yields, and so forth.Footnote ⁸ All these people represent the tragedy of climate injustice: being the least responsible for climate change, they suffer the most from its impacts.Footnote ⁹

The threats posed by climate change can be even more profoundly felt in communities with pre-existing environmental, social, technical, financial, and other vulnerabilities.Footnote ¹⁰ For example, affected communities may lack the capacity to adapt to climate change impacts because of ongoing military conflicts, political instability, rampant destruction and depletion of natural resources by extractive industry, pervasive and widespread poverty, and related social, economic, and environmental problems.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, it may be very difficult to seek court action even in cases of local environmental pollution such as oil spills as a result of financial and administrative constraints and a lack of lawyers with proper expertise to handle cases related to environmental degradation, let alone such a complex crisis as climate change.Footnote ¹²

That said, it should also be kept in mind that in relation to climate change, the term ‘global south’ encompasses a wide variety of contexts, conditions, and capacities. For example, there is a considerable gap in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between countries in the global south, from some of the world’s largest emitters to the minuscule emissions of small island developing states and least developed countries.Footnote ¹³ Their contributions vary not only in quantity but also in quality. For instance, in South America, the loss of emissions-absorbing rainforests that comprise over 25% of the world’s global forest coverage is one of the key contributors to climate change.Footnote ¹⁴ In fact, the ongoing rapid deforestation of the Amazon has raised growing concerns about the world’s largest land carbon sink turning into a major source of GHG emissions.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the specific circumstances of nearly 80 countries in the global southFootnote ¹⁶ – including the extreme diversity of environmental conditions, legal cultures and other socio-economic factors – it is natural for climate litigation practices to vary across this vast region.

What lessons, then, does the book take from climate litigation practices in the global south, and how can these practices contribute to tackling one of the most pressing planetary crises of our time?Footnote ¹⁷

One of the first things that immediately draws attention is the fact that despite their legal and geographical diversity, climate cases in the global south share some important similarities not only with each other but also with cases in the global north. An example of this is the very common practice of climate cases being ‘peripheral’ – that is, when climate issues are linked with other environmental concerns such as air and water pollution, deforestation, and so forth (pp. 55–8). This strategy has already been tested in the US, for instance, showing that even cases that fail on climate grounds may still have good a chance to succeed on non-climate grounds related to local environmental and health impacts of the contested projects and policies.Footnote ¹⁸

Another significant similarity is that climate litigation in the global south often follows a ‘rights’ pathway, relying on claims based on constitutional rights or human rights (pp. 63–7, 79–81) – a trend that has been gaining momentum across the globe for some time now,Footnote ¹⁹ and has become a prominent feature of climate litigation in Europe as well as in the US and Canada in recent years.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, as Lin and Peel argue, the scope of rights-based climate litigation in the global south is much wider because of a rich tradition of litigating socio-economic as well as Indigenous rights (p. 80). Indeed, various developments in the global south confirm this argument, most notably through the recognition, application, and interpretation of the right to a healthy environment (pp. 141–2).

That said, the landscape of climate litigation across the global south is far from even. Similar to the initial dominance of the US and Australia of climate litigation in the global north, litigation in the global south has witnessed the emergence of Brazil, India, and South Africa as ‘frontrunner’ jurisdictions (p. 97). There are multiple reasons for the dominance of these three countries in the climate litigation docket. For instance, India’s proactive judiciary has a track record of generous interpretation when it comes to environmental rights and obligations. Coupled with broad standing rules, this creates a favourable environment for individuals and NGOs to seek court action (p. 98). In South Africa, a functional legal system with a rich network of environmental laws and an active civil society have similarly allowed the country to develop a body of climate litigation that surpasses that of any other country on the continent (pp. 109–10). The presence of an active civil society has also favoured the kick-start of climate litigation in Brazil, as has the role of public prosecutors in charge of enforcing environmental laws. This combination has led to the emergence of high-profile cases focusing on an extremely acute contributor to climate change (and other environmental problems) in the region – deforestation (p. 117).

While these factors may be more predominant in the above-mentioned three countries, they are not necessarily unique to them, as the emergence of similar cases elsewhere in the global south has shown (pp. 130–44). Nor are these the only factors that play a decisive role in the development of climate litigation in the global south. For example, the activities of environmental NGOs – both domestic and global – have been pivotal to many climate cases, given the resources available to them, including technical as well as legal expertise (pp. 148–58, 182–89).

Finally, it is important to recall that if climate litigation is to lead to any tangible change – in other words, impact – it should go beyond mere courtroom findings and validation of relevant rights and obligations on paper. However, assessing such impact poses considerable difficulties arising from, among others, the context (such as socio-political factors and existing laws and institutions) of the litigation in question (p. 210), the usually lengthy timeframes of such litigation (p. 217), and the unique perspective that different stakeholders and commentators may have on what counts as ‘success’ or ‘failure’. These complex factors call for a nuanced approach to assessing the actual impact of climate litigation, particularly when it comes to high-profile cases such as Leghari (pp. 218–22). Curiously, it seems that the impact of climate litigation may be easier to assess when it comes to cases that are much narrower in scope – for example, challenges related to environmental impact assessments of individual projects, where setting aside the approval for such a project would directly contribute to preventing any GHG emissions that would result from it.Footnote ²¹

The sharp rise in the number of climate cases in recent years – as well as the growing importance of these cases – underlines the need for large-scale, critical research like Jolene Lin and Jacqueline Peel’s new book to help academics and practitioners in navigating relevant developments in their own jurisdiction and abroad. After all, the causes and manifestations of climate change require a global and coordinated response. Unfortunately, as various climate cases from around the globe demonstrate, the legal frameworks for addressing this global crisis are typically insufficient, outdated, or absent altogether.

In this ‘climate’ of insufficient – or outright damaging – regulatory responses, policymakers, courts, lawyers, NGOs, as well as law scholars and students may well find themselves searching for useful practices in foreign jurisdictions. Anyone who ventures into these foreign legal developments is usually bound to face the formidable challenges that such an enquiry inevitably entails. Legal professionals are usually trained in the law of a specific jurisdiction and consequently develop assumptions about the nature of law and legal institutions that are conditioned by their place of study. Various related challenges such as language barriers make this enquiry even more difficult to undertake. All of this makes the present book an invaluable resource.

Moreover, the book identifies and gives due consideration to local and national practices in countries – or even more broadly, entire continents and parts of the world – that have traditionally been overlooked and disregarded in international policy and scholarship. As a result, valuable experiences have remained unknown to the rest of the world. The tragedy of this disregard is even more obvious when it comes to environmental problems that have been neglected for decades. For example, how many environmental and human rights lawyers and scholars around the globe are aware that plastics pollution was identified as a potential violation of human rights by domestic courts in India, Nepal, and Uganda as early as the 2000s and early 2010s?Footnote ²² Yet, the impacts of plastics pollution on human rights were practically absent from discussions until some years ago when the issue started garnering attention at the international level.Footnote ²³

While the new book makes a landmark contribution to the existing scholarship, as Lin and Peel make clear from the very beginning, the aim of the book is to ‘start and continue a much-needed conversation’ on climate litigation in the global south rather than be its ‘last word’ (p. 16). There is indeed a very ample space for such a conversation, for instance, the need to develop a robust assessment of climate litigation impact (p. 240), the relationships between climate cases and those that focus on related crises such as plastics pollution and biodiversity loss,Footnote ²⁴ emerging trends in litigation,Footnote ²⁵ and many more. In the authors’ words, for this field of study the future seems bright (p. 241).