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13 J. Hum. Rts. & Env't 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/jhre13 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 13 No. 1, March 2022, pp. 1-6 Editorial Climate change litigation and human rights: stocktaking and a look at the future This editorial introduces a special collection of articles on the role of human rights law in climate litigation. The collection draws on selected papers presented at the ground- breaking workshop 'Implementing the Paris Agreement: Comparative Lessons from the Global Human Rights Regime', which took place on 6-7 May 2021 at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy. The workshop brought together scholars and legal practitioners in order to share insights and explore the future potential of human- rights-based climate litigation. The idea behind both the workshop and this collection of articles is to take stock of recent developments in climate change litigation in order to ascertain the role of human rights in this rapidly growing area of legal practice. The aim is to identify future pathways to effectively use human rights arguments in cli- mate change litigation at the international, regional and national level. In recent years, litigants around the world have increasingly tried to 'push the boundaries of the law',1 by filing test cases to prompt state and corporate actors to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or to obtain redress for harm to persons, property or the environment associated with the impact of climate change. At the time of writ- ing, this swelling body of climate litigation consists of hundreds of lawsuits raising questions of law or fact regarding climate science and climate change mitigation or adaptation, which have been brought before international or domestic judicial, quasi-judicial and other investigatory bodies.2 While so far relatively few climate cases have been argued on the basis of human rights, rights-based climate litigation is growing. At the end of May 2021, the world's most established climate litigation databases3 listed 112 cases that mentioned human rights.4 In these cases, the applicants typically relied on human rights law alone, or did so in the context of broader complaints based on private or public law, to demand that state or corporate actors mitigate climate change and/or tackle its impacts. This kind of litigation has seen a significant acceleration since 2015, when the Paris Agreement became the first international treaty to explicitly recognize the 1. This expression is borrowed from Annalisa Savaresi and Juan Auz, 'Climate Change Liti- gation and Human Rights: Pushing the Boundaries' (2019) 9 Climate Law 244. 2. This definition of climate litigation draws on David Markell and JB Ruhl, 'An Empirical Assessment of Climate Change in the Courts: A New Jurisprudence or Business as Usual?' (2012) 64 Florida Law Review 15. 3. These are the databases curated by the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School <http://climatecasechart.com/> and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics <http://www.climate-laws. org> accessed 1 June 2021. 4. Annalisa Savaresi and Joana Setzer, 'Rights-Based Litigation in the Climate Emergency: Mapping the Landscape and New Knowledge Frontiers' in this issue. © 2022 The Authors Journal compilation © 2022 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 2JA, UK and The William Pratt House, 9 Dewey Court, Northampton MA 01060-3815, USA