Companies worldwide have faced mounting legal pressure to reduce their impact on global warming as activists use litigation to fight climate change, according to a new report Thursday.
The 2021 ruling in the Netherlands against multinational oil giant Shell, which was ordered to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45 percent by 2030, has become a milestone in climate litigation. Other cases are based on the principle that the “polluter pays” or seeks “turning off the taps” to new fossil fuel projects by targeting the flow of financing to extractive industries.
While historically, most lawsuits have been filed in the United States, accounting for 1,745 cases, action has been increasingly launched in other jurisdictions. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is due to give an advisory opinion this year on a country’s duties when “responding to the climate emergency under the framework of international human rights law”, following a case brought by Chile and Colombia in January 2023.