Citizens from around the world are increasingly holding governments and businesses accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions by filing lawsuits that frame climate change impacts as human rights violations, according to a recent episode of Mongabay’s Against All Odds video series.

César Rodríguez-Garavito, chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law, who’s featured in the video, says the climate movement has seen groundbreaking victories in recent years with cases filed by both the youth and elderly women.

Between 2005 and 2024, more than 300 cases were litigated on behalf of ordinary citizens experiencing the impacts of climate change.

One of the successes came in 2024, when an international court for the first time formally acknowledged climate change as a human rights issue, Rodríguez-Garavito says.

The European Court of Human Rights in April last year ruled in favor of KlimaSeniorinnen Switzerland, a group representing 2,500 women aged 64 and older, who argued the Swiss government’s inadequate actions had put them at risk of dying due to heat waves made more intense and frequent by climate change.

The court recognized that climate protection is a human right and that the government violated such a right by not taking the necessary steps to combat climate change. The court ordered the Swiss government to hasten and expand its efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

“It’s boosted the efforts of climate activists around the world who are taking note of the fact that judges are updating their doctrines to address and meet the challenges of climate change,” Rodríguez-Garavito says.

Another lawsuit with a successful outcome in April 2024 was the world’s first youth-led climate case seeking climate action within the transportation sector. Native Hawaiian youth filed the case against the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation to get the state government to change its transportation policies and hold it accountable for climate change impacts that have harmed their well-being.

The court ruled that the transportation department would need to invest in modes of transportation that don’t rely on fossil fuels by 2045. This includes promoting bicycle lanes and electric cars and buses.

Rodríguez-Garavito says this case was one among many in recent years showing that “young people would be the ones who would suffer the worst consequences of climate change in the second half of the 21st century and beyond.”

“The law is ultimately a way to tell stories, to frame them in the language of dignity, in the language of justice,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “And many activists and litigators pursue lawsuits mostly because they want to energize and they want to invoke emotions in the general public that remind us all that we’re connected with the more-than-human world,”

Watch the full Mongabay video here.

Banner image of César Rodríguez-Garavito, chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the NYU School of Law. Image © Carmen Hilbert.