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THE ROLE OF CLIMATE CHANGE LITIGATION INTERVIEW WITH SOPHIE MARJANAC, CLIMATE ACCOUNTABILITY LEAD, CLIENTEARTH. INTERVIEWED BY ANDY SYMINGTON. SOPHIE MARJANAC Sophie joined ClientEarth1 in November 2015 and is now the Climate Accountability Lead working on a range of climate change litigation and advocacy strategies using the power of the law to align states and companies with the goals of the Paris Agreement. She is the lead lawyer in the Torres Strait Climate Justice Case2. Prior to joining ClientEarth, Sophie was a senior lawyer at Clayton Utz, where she specialised in environmental and planning law. She has also previously worked in native title law in the Torres Strait. Sophie was awarded a Bachelor of Laws with first class honours and a Bachelor of International Studies with distinction from the University of New South Wales in 2009.
What do you feel is the role of litigation in achieving climate justice?
From international and regional down to local law, what is it that you first look at?
Litigation is certainly one lever, one piece of the puzzle. I don’t think it is necessarily the silver bullet; real change comes from social movements more broadly, however litigation can buttress changes in social norms and expectations. When injustice is recognised, the law can provide accountability and harden those social norms through time. We need all types of strategies and tools to achieve the goals of environmental and climate justice and litigation is certainly being tried at the moment, with a huge wave of cases being brought around the world. Obviously, there has been landmark litigation in the past that has brought incredible change in fields such as civil rights – look at the Mabo decision – and we hope that there will be similar cases that bring watershed moments for environmental justice.
Climate change is such a multi-scalar problem; part of the reason that it has been so difficult to tackle is that it goes from the macro down to the micro. International diplomacy and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process really matter to climate change, but so do drainage on floodplains and building standards, for example. I would say that the breadth and diversity and range of climate change litigation is definitely one of its distinguishing features, and our work is very wide-ranging and spans multiple jurisdictions, topics and themes. At ClientEarth we believe that we need to be very broad in our thinking because of the nature of the environmental problems we are tackling.
HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER | VOLUME 29: ISSUE 3 – OCTOBER 2020
