Climate Litigation: Suing for Climate Justice
C
Cassandra Maclachlan
limate change is real and it’s happening now. Nine out of ten of the hottest Australian summers on record have occurred within Anjali Sharma’s lifetime. She’s only in Year 10. This record-breaking streak culminated in the catastrophic bushfires of late 2019, prompting Sharma and other concerned students to launch a class action against the Australian government. Just a few years prior, another youth-led climate case was underway in Pakistan. Ashgar Leghari, a law student from a drought-stricken farming family, asserted that, by not taking sufficient adaptation measures, his government was failing to uphold his constitutional rights. Although separated by time and geography, these cases share a key commonality: their necessity despite the existence of international climate change treaties. Before our applicants were born, the world’s nations signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Ed.3 2020
Climate Change (‘UNFCCC’). Its stated goal: the safe, equitable and timely ‘stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere’. However, emissions have since only continued to accelerate to unprecedented levels. Amidst this chronic inaction, climate litigation has emerged as an invaluable tool to agitate for climate justice. Climate justice? Climate justice is as broad as it is complex, but a formulation useful to the climate litigation discussion is one advocated by Dr Jeremy Baskin, Senior Fellow of the Melbourne School of Government. It demands
“Nine out of ten of the hottest Australian summers on record have occurred within Anjali Sharma’s lifetime. She’s only in Year 10.
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