Climate Change Blog

Since 2 December, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been hearing oral submissions in the long-awaited advisory opinion proceedings on the obligations of...

On 18th July 2024, attentions were drawn to the sentences received by five Just Stop Oil activists, including its co-founder, Roger Hallam, for the...

Human Rights and Climate Change under the ECHR. By William Upton KC and Jemima Lovatt On the 9th April 2024, the European Court of...

In a case concerning the UK Government’s approval of UK Export Finance’s investment in a liquified natural gas project in Mozambique, the Court of Appeal has held that if the Government’s interpretation of the Paris Agreement is “tenable” the courts will not interfere.

Our latest climate law blog considers the proposed new climate clauses in the LURB, and recent local and national planning decisions involving emissions reduction targets. With COP27 in the news, the contrast between international aspirations and domestic realities is more than usually evident.

The disconnect between overarching carbon reduction requirements in the CCA 2008, and national planning policy (and, ultimately, national and local planning decisions) continues to inspire litigation. No claim has yet succeeded.

How the Government’s Net Zero Review, its response to the CCC Progress Report, and its revised Net Zero Strategy required by the High Court, will interact remains to be seen.

The Sixth Carbon Budget covering 2033-2037 was brought into force on 24th June 2021.

The High Court judgment in the Heathrow third runway case is arguably the most extensive judicial reasoning on current UK climate change law to date.

The outcome from an intense set of intergovernmental negotiations in Nairobi was dimly predictable and all-too-familiar.

The UK will become the world leader in carbon emissions reductions to 2050 if advice provided to the Government by its Climate Change Committee is accepted.

In November 2018, the UN Secretary-General published a report on the hotly anticipated topic of a Global Pact for the Environment.

Following the somewhat unlikely example of the US leading the way in 'People's' climate litigation, a similar action in Europe has just received the green light from Europe's highest court.

In a revised version of the draft earlier mentioned in this blog, details of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest analysis of the impacts of different degrees of warming have just been leaked into the public domain.

In 2005 the world watched with eager anticipation as the EU initiated the world’s largest carbon pricing scheme, describing it as “a cornerstone in the fight against climate change.

Two recent items of international climate change news have placed into stark focus one of the issues set to take centre stage later in the year.

An interesting feature of 2018 is that adults and children are divided by the millenium in which they were born. It is perhaps fitting that the judgment in the Greenpeace Nordic and Nature and Youth v Ministry of Petroleum and Energy (referred to by the claimants as The People v Arctic Oil) was delivered in the first week of the new year.

As highlighted in other recent posts on this blog, from the Netherlands to the USA to New Zealand, there is a clear trend for citizens to feel emboldened to take governments to court for a lack of action on climate change.

As the dust settles from COP23, it seems clear that action on climate change remains insufficient to prevent dangerous levels of global warming. If political ambition is lacking, can litigation come to the rescue?

Say “commitment gap” in the context of the climate change regime, and most people will probably think of the recent report by UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme) highlighting the gap between Parties’ commitments under the Paris Agreement (the NDCs) and the emissions reductions required to meet the 2-degree temperature goal.