Climate Litigation Goes South

Executive Summary

Climate litigation stopped being a northern sport. The cases that now move policy are being filed in Lahore, Bogotá, Brasília and New Delhi — and they are winning on terms the North never set.

The geography of the docket is the story. Climate litigation began as a device of wealthy, legally dense democracies — a Dutch foundation suing a Dutch oil major, a Swiss association of older women suing Switzerland, a cohort of American youths suing the federal government. That work mattered, and it still dominates the raw counts. But the cases that are changing what governments may build, burn and budget are increasingly filed where the harms are worst and the institutions weakest — and where, for precisely that reason, a courtroom is sometimes the only functioning lever a citizen has.

Three channels carry the southern docket. The first is enforcement: courts ordering governments to implement laws and policies they wrote and then shelved. The second is rights: courts reading a right to a stable climate into constitutions that predate climate change, and occasionally going further, into rights of nature. The third is projects: single rulings that block a coal plant, cancel an exploration licence, unfreeze a climate fund or halt deforestation. All three channels converged in 2024 and 2025, when a wave of advisory opinions — asked for by small island states and Latin American governments — gave the domestic judges a shared vocabulary and a higher floor.

Read those four figures together and the implication is uncomfortable for anyone who still treats courts as an afterthought in climate policy. Litigants are winning most of the cases they bring, in more countries every year, and the biggest non-Western docket belongs to an emerging economy where the judiciary has repeatedly ordered the executive to spend money it controls and stop permitting projects it wanted. Climate policy is being set in courtrooms, whether or not that is what courts are for.

1. The Docket Moves South

The headline numbers still describe a northern phenomenon. The growth, the novelty and the consequences no longer do.

The best single picture of the field is the 2024 snapshot from the LSE Grantham Research Institute and the Sabin Center's climate case database, which together count 2,666 climate cases globally. About 70 per cent of them were filed after the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 — the litigation wave is younger than the treaty it polices. Around 230 new cases were filed in 2023 alone. Cases now exist in 55 countries, with Panama and Portugal joining in 2023.

The distribution, by contrast, is still lopsided. Roughly 87 per cent of cases sit in developed countries, 8 per cent in developing countries, and the remainder in international or regional bodies. The United States alone accounts for 1,745 of the total; the United Kingdom has 139; Brazil 82; Germany 60. On those numbers, climate litigation looks like an American export the rest of the world is only beginning to receive.

But the raw count is a lagging indicator, and the marginal case is what matters. Two things changed at once around the middle of the 2010s. The Paris Agreement gave judges a textual hook — every country now has a nationally determined contribution, which means every country now has a measurable promise that can be enforced against itself. And the early southern cases began to win, which is the best possible advertisement for the next filing. A plaintiff in one country could now cite not an aspiration but a judgment.

The claim this report makes is that the marginal case has already migrated. The most consequential climate judgments of the past decade — the ones that changed a country's energy mix, its forest cover, its budget or its constitution — were not handed down in The Hague, Strasbourg or the American circuits. They came from Lahore, Bogotá, Pretoria, Mombasa, Brasília and New Delhi. A Dutch court can order a multinational to steepen its emissions trajectory; a Brazilian court can order the treasury to spend a dormant climate fund, and the second ruling moves more carbon in the near term.

2. A Farmer in Lahore

Every significant southern climate case descends, in one way or another, from a single petition filed by a farmer who wanted his government to keep its own promises.

In 2015, Ashgar Leghari, a farmer from Punjab, petitioned the Lahore High Court. His complaint was not that Pakistan lacked a climate policy. It was that the policy existed and nothing had happened. Pakistan had adopted a National Climate Change Policy in 2012 and a framework for implementing it, and had then, in Leghari's telling, failed to build the institutional machinery either document required — no commission, no authority, no one whose job it was to act. He alleged that the failure violated his fundamental rights, because the state's inaction left him exposed to the harms its own policy said it would address.

The court agreed, and the remedy it chose became the template. In Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan, the Lahore High Court held that climate change was a serious threat to fundamental rights and that the government's delay in implementing its own policy violated them. It did not write a new law and did not set a national emissions number. It ordered the government to implement what it had already adopted, created a Climate Change Commission to do it, and put named officials under judicial supervision to report on progress. The institutional gap was the finding; the institution was the remedy.

That is a different theory of judicial power from the one that animates the famous northern cases. Urgenda asked a court to tell a government to do more than its statute required; Leghari asked a court to make a government do what its own cabinet documents already promised. The first invites the objection that judges are legislating. The second lets judges posture as the least ambitious branch in the room — and still move policy.

Portability followed almost immediately, because every developing country has the same raw material: a national adaptation plan, a climate framework law, an energy policy or an NDC that is honoured mostly on paper. Where the paper exists, a court can enforce it without reaching for a new constitutional theory. That is how the Leghari move travelled to Kenya, where a tribunal cancelled the environmental licence for a coal plant the national energy plan had already outgrown; to South Africa, where courts held that climate impacts must be considered before a coal plant is authorised; and to Brazil, where the supreme court ordered the executive to spend a climate fund it had simply stopped spending.

The template also explains the headline success rate. The LSE–Sabin snapshot finds that around 70 per cent of concluded cases between 2016 and 2023 ended in favour of the claimants — a striking number for a field routinely described as a long shot. Enforcement claims win because the defendant has already conceded the premise. The state signed the policy; the court is only asking it to keep the signature.

3. Twenty-Five Children and a Rights-Bearing Forest

Colombia's Supreme Court went further than enforcement: it declared the Amazon a subject of rights and made the government answer to the people who will inherit it.

In 2018, twenty-five young Colombians sued their government over deforestation in the Amazon. Their claim was that the state's failure to stop forest loss violated their rights to life, health and a healthy environment — and that the state's own commitments, made at Paris, were being ignored in the territory where it mattered most. The Supreme Court of Justice agreed, in a judgment whose reasoning travelled as far as its holding.

The court in Future Generations v. Ministry of the Environment held that the Colombian Amazon is a subject of rights, entitled to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. It ordered the government to formulate an intergenerational pact to reduce deforestation to zero, and it did so in the name of future generations — a standing innovation that dissolved the usual objection that climate harm is too diffuse to be anyone's injury. The judgment was not a declaration that the state should do better. It was an order to produce a plan, with named ministries responsible and a court watching.

Two features made Bogotá consequential beyond Colombia. The first was the rights-of-nature holding, which connected a Latin American legal tradition — Ecuador's 2008 constitution, Bolivia's Ley de la Madre Tierra, the rivers given legal personality in India and New Zealand — to climate specifically. The second was the intergenerational-pact remedy, which recognised that the plaintiffs were not suing about the past at all. They were suing about the future, and the court answered in the same tense.

The limits should be stated in the same breath. Colombia's deforestation did not stop in 2018. The intergenerational pact was produced, partially implemented, and periodically criticised for lagging its targets; the Amazon continues to lose forest to ranching, coca and road-building. What the judgment changed was not the outcome but the machinery — a plan that did not exist, oversight that did not exist, and a legal basis for further claims that now does. In the southern docket that is what winning looks like: not a solved problem, but a lever that did not exist before.

4. The Constitutional Turn

India's Supreme Court wrote a fundamental right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change into a constitution that never mentions the climate — then showed how hard the right is to use.

The most watched southern judgment of 2024 began with a bird. The great Indian bustard, a critically endangered species with fewer than 200 individuals left, is vulnerable to collision with the overhead power lines that cross its habitat in Rajasthan and Gujarat, partly because it lacks frontal vision. In 2021 the Supreme Court had restricted the installation of overhead lines across some 99,000 square kilometres of priority and potential habitat, and had directed that lower-voltage lines be buried. The government asked the court to reconsider: undergrounding high-voltage lines was technically infeasible, and the restrictions were impeding the expansion of renewable energy that India's own climate commitments require.

In M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, decided in March 2024, a three-judge bench led by the Chief Justice did two things at once. It held that Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution — equality, and the right to life — carry a right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change, describing the right to a clean environment and the right against climate harm as two sides of the same coin. And it then used that right, in the same breath, to loosen the protection of the bustard: a general prohibition across 99,000 square kilometres could not stand, the transition to renewable energy was itself a climate measure, and a seven-member expert committee would decide how to balance the bird against the grid.

The judgment is the cleanest available illustration of the southern climate docket's central tension. A court can announce a right in a paragraph. Exercising it requires choosing between two goods — a species and a transmission line — that the right itself was meant to reconcile, and the court's answer disappointed conservationists who had won the earlier order. The new right was historic; its first application was to recall an injunction. Both things are the story.

The holding still matters for what it enables. India now has a constitutional basis for challenging state action that deepens climate harm, anchored in the same articles that underpin the rest of Indian fundamental-rights law, and the court expressly tied it to India's international obligations and the precautionary principle. Litigants have already begun to build on it. The judgment also illustrates the risk commentators flagged immediately: that the climate right can be deployed against conservation and community claims, because the renewable infrastructure the right favours has ecological and social costs of its own. A right to be free from climate harm is not a right to be free from the transition.

The constitutional turn is broader than one bench. Courts from Pakistan to Nepal, Kenya to Mexico have located climate obligations in constitutional guarantees of life, dignity and a healthy environment. What makes the turn structural is its reversibility: an executive order can be unwound by the next government, but a constitutional reading is available to every future plaintiff until a court unwinds it. In systems where the legislature is slow and the executive is captured, that is a durable transfer of power.

5. Coal, Forests and the Purse

The least celebrated southern cases decide concrete things: a coal plant, a seismic survey, a deforestation plan, a budget line. They are where litigation touches emissions directly.

Table 1 — The project docket: rulings that decided something

Selection, not census. Each ruling changed a permit, a plan or a payment rather than only declaring a principle.

The pattern across these cases is that courts in emerging economies have become a de facto stage of project approval. A coal plant in Kenya or South Africa now runs a judicial gauntlet as well as an administrative one, and the questions asked in court — was climate assessed, were the affected people consulted, does the project fit the country's own energy plan — are questions the permit office was supposed to ask and did not. The court is not substituting its judgment for the regulator's so much as operating as the regulator's audit function.

Brazil's climate-fund ruling is the most instructive of the set, because it reaches past permits to money. The Climate Fund is a budgetary instrument created by law and financed in part by oil royalties; under the government that took office in 2019 it sat effectively paralysed. The Supreme Federal Court held in ADPF 708 that the executive may not, by omission, neutralise a policy the legislature created, and ordered the fund's resources back into operation. The holding treats a dormant budget line as a constitutional injury — which matters because most of the South's climate commitments fail for want of spending rather than want of law.

6. Three Benches, One Wave

Between May 2024 and July 2025, three international courts issued advisory opinions on climate change — and all three were moved by coalitions from the developing world.

Advisory opinions are not judgments in the ordinary sense: they bind no party and order no remedy. What they do is state the law authoritatively, at a moment when every domestic court in the world is being asked to state it for itself. The three opinions handed down in fifteen months did exactly that, and their cumulative effect is a floor under the domestic dockets — a shared vocabulary of state obligation that a judge in Bogotá or New Delhi can now cite instead of inventing.

Table 2 — What each bench held

None of the three is binding in the sense of a contentious judgment. All three are already being cited into domestic proceedings, which is how advisory law becomes operative law.

The regional wrapper matters as much as the opinions. Latin America's Escazú Agreement, in force since 2021, guarantees access to information, participation and justice in environmental matters and protects environmental defenders — the procedural rails on which litigation runs. Where the rails exist, cases follow; where defenders are killed for filing, the docket stays thin. The advisory wave and the procedural treaty are the same project seen from two sides: building the legal infrastructure in which a farmer in Lahore does not need a once-in-a-generation court to be heard.

7. What a Court Can and Cannot Do

The doctrine has been written. The question that now decides outcomes is whether the judgment gets executed — and on that score the South's courts face the same weak state that made them necessary.

A court can order a government to implement its climate policy. It cannot staff the implementing ministry. It can cancel a coal plant's licence. It cannot build the gas plant or the transmission line that takes its place, and it cannot guarantee the replacement is cleaner rather than merely delayed. It can unfreeze a climate fund. It cannot make the treasury disburse it on time, or stop the next government from freezing it again.

This is the enforcement deficit, and it is the honest centre of the field. The LSE–Sabin success rate says claimants win; it says nothing about what happens to the win. Colombia's deforestation continued after 2018. Pakistan's climate commission was created and then had to be reconstituted and pushed. India's bustard remains under 200 birds, and the expert committee's balancing act is still being litigated. A judgment is a necessary condition for policy change and never a sufficient one. In the South the gap between the two is where the political economy lives.

A deeper limit remains, and it is structural rather than administrative. Courts decide cases; they do not decide energy systems. When a court blocks a coal plant on climate grounds, the alternative is whatever the government next proposes — which may be a gas plant, a diesel fleet, or nothing, in which case the blocked capacity returns as load-shedding that hits the poor first. When a court pushes a renewable transition forward, as in Ranjitsinh, it may push the transition over a species or a community. The southern docket's hardest cases are not about whether climate is a right. They are about what happens when two goods the court has both promised to protect collide, and the court has to choose with a budget it does not control and an administration it cannot run.

None of this is an argument against the docket. It is an argument for reading it accurately. Climate litigation in the South is not a substitute for a functioning regulator, a funded ministry or an honest utility. It is a pressure that works on those institutions, and works best when they exist in some form to be pressured. Where they do not, the court becomes the institution — and a court asked to be a ministry will eventually be blamed for the ministry's failures.

8. The Next Docket

Five directions will shape the southern docket over the next few years. All five are already visible in filings.

8.1 From governments to companies

• The South's first wave sued states, because states are the defendant with the written promise. The second wave is suing companies — and the advisory opinions give it fuel, since the ICJ held that states must exercise due diligence over private emitters and that fossil-fuel production, exploration licences and subsidies may themselves be wrongful acts.
• Expect the parent-company cases that began in the North to be filed where the assets are: against extractive and power projects in their home jurisdictions, where the harm, the community and the court are all in the same country.

8.2 Adaptation and loss and damage become justiciable

• Most climate cases are still about mitigation. The advisory wave — full reparation for breach, special protection for the vulnerable, obligations to prevent displacement — gives adaptation and loss-and-damage claims a doctrinal path they lacked.
• The ICJ's reparation holding and its recognition that small island states are specially affected are the raw material for the first wave of claims that a failure to finance adaptation is itself a breach, not merely a political disappointment.

8.3 The procedural rails fill in

• Escazú's access-to-justice guarantees are the template; the Inter-American Court's strengthening of collective standing and its direction to combat climate disinformation extend them. Where standing is collective and information is a right, the docket grows — and so does the protection of the people who file.
• The murder rate of environmental defenders remains the counterweight. A right to file is worth little where filing is lethal, and the cases that matter most are often the ones that cannot be brought.

8.4 Transition projects get litigated from both sides

• Ranjitsinh is the preview: the climate right will be invoked both for and against renewable infrastructure, mining for transition minerals, and transmission corridors. Courts will be asked to referee the transition's own environmental and social costs.
• The workable answer is procedural, not doctrinal — earlier consultation, real impact assessment, benefit-sharing — and the courts that impose those duties will do more for the transition's legitimacy than any number of declarations.

8.5 The advisory wave keeps rolling

• Vanuatu and its allies are already pursuing a General Assembly resolution to give the ICJ opinion greater effect; the Inter-American opinion binds the interpretation of the American Convention across the hemisphere; the ITLOS opinion is being read into ocean governance negotiations.
• The practical consequence is a ratchet: each domestic judgment that cites an advisory opinion raises the cost to any state that argues the law is silent.

8.6 Conclusion

Climate litigation went south for a reason. The countries with the weakest executive climate machinery and the most exposed populations are exactly the countries where a courtroom is the cheapest functioning lever — cheaper than a ministry, faster than a parliament, and available to a farmer in Lahore in a way a cabinet meeting is not. The result is a docket that is small in stock, fast in flow, and outsized in consequence: it decides projects, unlocks budgets and writes rights, in the places where the climate's next two decades will be won or lost.

The temptation is to read the wave of victories as proof that courts can carry climate policy. They cannot, and the enforcement deficit says so. What courts can do is force the institutions that should carry it to keep their own promises — and the southern docket's real achievement is not that it invented a right to a stable climate, but that it made the state's existing commitments impossible to ignore. The binding term is not the doctrine. It is the delivery.

References

Every quantitative claim above is attributed inline. The principal sources are collected here.

• LSE Grantham Research Institute / Sabin CenterGlobal trends in climate change litigation: 2024 snapshot — 2,666 cases; 55 countries; about 70 per cent filed since 2015; about 230 new cases in 2023; the 87/8/5 per cent developed/developing/international split; country totals (US 1,745; UK 139; Brazil 82; Germany 60); and the roughly 70 per cent claimant success rate among concluded 2016–2023 cases. Case database at climatecasechart.com.
• Lahore High CourtLeghari v. Federation of Pakistan (2015) — failure to implement the National Climate Change Policy held to violate fundamental rights; a Climate Change Commission ordered into existence and placed under judicial supervision.
• Supreme Court of Justice of ColombiaFuture Generations v. Ministry of the Environment and Others (2018) — the Amazon declared a subject of rights; an intergenerational pact ordered to halt deforestation.
• Supreme Court of IndiaM.K. Ranjitsinh & Ors v. Union of India (2024 INSC 280) — the right to be free from the adverse effects of climate change read into Articles 14 and 21; the 2021 bustard injunction recalled and a seven-member expert committee constituted. Commentary: Verfassungsblog and the Oxford Human Rights Hub.
• South Africa and KenyaEarthlife Africa v. Minister of Environmental Affairs (Thabametsi, 2017); Sustaining the Wild Coast v. Minister of Mineral Resources (2022); Save Lamu v. NEMA (2019) — the project docket: climate assessment made mandatory, a seismic survey licence set aside, a coal plant licence cancelled.
• Supreme Federal Court of BrazilPSB et al. v. Brazil (ADPF 708, 2022) — the executive may not neutralise the Climate Fund by omission; its resources ordered back into operation.
• ITLOSAdvisory Opinion, Case No. 31 (21 May 2024) — anthropogenic greenhouse gases are pollution of the marine environment; stringent due-diligence obligations under Article 194 UNCLOS, informed by the 1.5°C goal and best available science. Requested by the Commission of Small Island States.
• Inter-American Court of Human RightsAdvisory Opinion OC-32/25, "Climate Emergency and Human Rights" (2025) — a climate emergency; an autonomous right to a healthy climate; nature as a subject of rights; the prohibition of massive, irreversible environmental damage as jus cogens. Requested by Chile and Colombia.
• International Court of JusticeObligations of States in Respect of Climate Change, Advisory Opinion (23 July 2025) — binding obligations from the Paris Agreement, customary law and human rights; NDCs at highest possible ambition; full reparation for breach where causation is shown. Requested by the UN General Assembly on Vanuatu's initiative.
• ECLACRegional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters (Escazú) — in force since 2021; the procedural rails for environmental litigation in Latin America and the Caribbean, including protection for environmental defenders.
• H HeuristicsEarlier reports in this series: the polycrisis and the four goods, the economics of prevention, and adaptation and development convergence, which together frame the institutional gaps this docket is being asked to fill.