21/11/2017

Sea Levels Are Already Rising. What's Next?

National Geographic - Simon Worrall

Climate change is battering coasts with storms and floods, but we still haven’t grappled with the risks of what’s to come.
A man walks through floodwaters from Hurricane Irma in Bonita Springs, Florida. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK WILSON, GETTY
President Trump has dismissed climate change as a hoax. But scientists project that, within the next 100 years, rising sea levels caused by climate change will submerge much of southeast Florida—including Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront Florida “White House.” And a new category of exiles will be created, says Jeff Goodell in his new book The Water Will Come—climate change refugees.
When National Geographic caught up with Goodell at his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he explained how water contamination is one of the greatest threats from rising seas; why poor nations are demanding compensation; and how President Trump’s policies are causing people, and states, to push back.
COURTESY OF HACHETTE BOOK GROUP
After Hurricane Irma, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida said: "So many areas that you never thought could flood, have flooded." What does this tell us about climate change and rising sea levels?
What Governor Scott’s remarks say is how poorly we understand the risks of what we face now and in the future. The idea that areas flooded that we didn’t think could flood suggests we don’t have a very good sense of what the risk is along the coastline, especially in Florida where we’re continuing to build out at an incredible pace.
It also suggests we don’t understand the risks we face in a world where climate change is happening. We know that, as the Earth’s atmosphere heats up, climate change is likely to create bigger and more intense hurricanes, which will push more water up onto the land. Combine that with rising seas—and sea levels are rising faster in southern Florida than anywhere on the planet—you get more flooding.
It doesn’t take much of a grasp of science to understand that when the atmosphere heats up, ice is going to melt—just like an ice cube on a picnic table on a hot summer day. That’s what’s happening at the planet’s poles in Greenland and Antarctica. We’re turning up the heat on the planet and as the heat rises the ice is going to melt. A warmer ocean also expands and that is a factor in sea level rise.
The real question is not if this is going to happen. This is a fact. But it’s hard to say where and when. With sea level rise we know it’s going to be an incremental process, which will accelerate as time goes on. But we don’t know how fast the water will come or how high it will go.

Much of your book focuses on Florida. Why is that state at such risk from sea-level rise?
The vast majority of south Florida is less than two metres above high tide. That risk is exacerbated by the fact that it’s on a hurricane track, so you get these storm pulses that come through every year.
New luxury towers crowd Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. Miami and its suburbs face a bigger financial risk from flooding in 2050 than any other urban area in the world. PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE STEINMETZ, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
In Florida, you also have a geology of porous limestone that makes it difficult to build sea walls around places like Miami and Miami Beach because the water will just come through underneath and flood from below. In the Netherlands they’ve built the dikes to keep the water out. In New Orleans, which was flooded severely during Hurricane Katrina, they have also built big dikes.
But you can’t do anything like that in Miami or South Florida. There’s no real technological fix for rising seas there other than elevating structures or retreating.



Sea-level rise causes other negative effects apart from flooding, doesn’t it? You suggest coffins and septic tanks may soon be floating around.
Even small amounts of sea level rise, six inches or a foot, can cause a lot of problems. We’re already seeing that happening in places like south Florida and other places around the world. Anyone who’s been on a boat knows how corrosive salt water is. And as you get more flooding and high tides, you get more corrosion.
In south Florida and other places, septic tanks are also starting to get flooded, so the sewage leaks out into the floodwaters. I’ve waded through floodwaters in Miami where the bacteria content was thousands of times higher than is recommended for public health!
With Hurricane Harvey, we also saw the problems of floodwater pollution where industrial zones leached chemicals into the waters. And many of these chemicals and septic systems that are polluting floodwaters are in lower income, poorer neighbourhoods.
The third problem with even modest sea level rise is the contamination of drinking water supplies. This is especially true in Florida and small island states, like the Marshall Islands, where the drinking water is in aquifers right below the surface. As the seawater comes in, it moves underground and contaminates the drinking water.
I would argue that the contamination of drinking water is going to be one of the first things that force people out of areas like the Marshall Islands and makes it more and more difficult—and expensive—to live in places like south Florida.
People in Houston evacuate their homes after their neighbourhood was inundated during Hurricane Harvey.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE, GETTY
Cities from New York to Venice are gearing up to defend themselves against sea-level rise. Tell us about some of the innovative approaches being considered.
A lot of cities are thinking about how to deal with this but one of the complicated things about sea level rise is that it’s different in every place. One strategy is to build a wall.
That’s what they’re doing in Manhattan with what’s referred to as the “Big U.” On Staten Island, they are developing breakwaters that mimic barrier islands to break up storm surges and create habitats for oysters and other marine life.
In Lagos, a Nigerian architect built a floating school in a slum neighbourhood. It was a very innovative project, using plastic barrels with a simple, two-story, wooden structure on top.
I also talked with architects in Miami who are thinking about building platform cities in Biscayne Bay. Instead of just building walls and trying to defend ourselves from it, the question is how do we live with it in a more elegant, sustainable way?
The inspiration for this kind of thing is Venice, which is an extraordinarily beautiful city. Part of its beauty comes from the presence of water all around but, as we all know, Venice has been sinking for a long time due to groundwater pumping and other issues. It’s been stabilised and they’re now building what one engineer I talked to called “a Ferrari on the sea floor,” a retractable barrier to keep the storm surge out of the lagoon.

Aboriginal myths in Australia, as well as Western stories like Gilgamesh, seem to record past changes in sea level. Give us a quick synopsis.
The earliest recorded human stories are about dealing with floodwaters and rising seas. I spent some time talking to anthropologists in Australia who have chronicled some of these Aboriginal stories. They were able to track them back to the end of the last Ice Age, the last warm period, when the seas were rising quickly around the world. They think these stories have been passed down from generation to generation through oral storytelling.
Similarly, many scholars now believe that the oldest written story, the epic of Gilgamesh, was the basis for the flood story of Noah. It again tracks back to this warm period when seas were rising fast.
What’s fascinating about this is that it suggests just how dramatic and central this is to human experience. Both the oldest oral stories we are aware of, and the oldest written stories, deal with floods and coming to terms with the changing border between land and sea.

You call Alaska “the dark heart of the fossil fuel beast.” Tell us about your walk along the shoreline with President Obama and how his successor, Donald Trump, is altering the narrative on climate change.
I’ve covered climate change for a long time and have a very good bullshit detector for people who understand what’s at stake and what’s not. And I was surprised by how well Obama understood what he was talking about and was able to parse the risks and political strategies. His trip to Alaska was part of his push to get a deal done in Paris. He wanted to draw attention to what was happening, using Alaska as a “poster child” for the risks of climate change. The whole state is basically melting like a Popsicle.
If you had told me that the following year Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, who has done more to subvert and distort the conversation about climate change than virtually anyone, would be the secretary of state, I would have thought it more likely that little green men from Mars would be selling chocolate at Yankees games. [Laughs]
But we have a president who doesn’t understand or care about climate change. It’s not benign neglect, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump has an active strategy to undermine not only every accomplishment of President Obama, but to subvert all progress in dealing with climate change, from rolling back coal mining regulations to cutting fuel efficiency standards.
The hopeful side of it is that it’s galvanised a lot of people to become active. A lot of states, like California and New York, are also pushing ahead with clean energy. So there’s a hope that the backlash against Trump will mitigate all the damage that he’s doing. But it’s not a happy moment.

A new category of the dispossessed now exists—“climate refugees.” Which countries are particularly at risk—and should the rest of the world be held financially accountable for them?
The countries that are most vulnerable are places like Bangladesh, India or West Africa. Globally, 145 million people live 1 metre or less above high tide. Small island states, like the Marshall Islands, may not only have to move to escape the rising seas, they’re going to lose their entire cultures as their nations are literally going to be under water.
The central paradox is that the people who are going to suffer most, like the Marshall Islanders or people in Bangladesh, are those who have done the least to contribute to this problem. These are not the people who are driving around in SUVs and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere!
Do I think that richer nations should compensate? I absolutely do!
But that’s not going to happen. The Green Climate Fund is meant to transfer money to help with adaptation and other things, but it’s been very slow to get going. One of the central problems is that the world doesn’t have a lot of empathy for people who are suffering from the consequences of our fossil fuel consumption.
Residents slog through Dhaka, Bangladesh, after a downpour turns a street into a river. PHOTOGRAPH BY JONAS BENDIKSEN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
You end the book with an apocalyptic vision of Miami underwater. How likely—and how soon—might that happen? And what can we do to prevent it?
How likely? It’s a virtual certainty. Sea levels have risen dramatically. The idea that we have a stable coastline is a fantasy of our own imaginations.
The last time the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are today, sea levels were 6-9 metres higher. But even if we all turn in our cars and ride skateboards to work, because of the heat that’s already in the ocean, sea levels are going to continue to rise.
How fast that will happen is hard to say. But a place like Miami is going to go underwater. There is no stopping that. There’s only trying to think about how we reinvent Miami to live with water.
When you look at history, cities come and go. I’ve been to Petra, where there was an amazing civilisation that flourished thousands of years ago. Now, it’s a ghost land.
Maybe Miami will reinvent itself as a lovely, 23rd-century Venice, and maybe it won’t. Maybe it will be a place where people go scuba diving in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel to look at the sharks.

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An Island Nation Turns Away From Climate Migration, Despite Rising Seas

InsideClimate News - Ben Walker*

The people of Kiribati face a choice: Move to land in another country or try to build resilience off the coconut trade — for as long as their islands are livable.
The new president of Kiribati sees the coconut trade as a way to solve some of his islands' overcrowding problems, but climate change is already affecting the trees — and the islands themselves. Credit: Torsten Blackwood / AFP / Getty Images
AMBO, Kiribati—Taneti Maamau, president of the Republic of Kiribati, leans forward from his office desk at Parliament, clasps his hands, and grins. "We try to isolate ourselves from the belief that Kiribati will be drowned," he says. "The ultimate decision is God's."
As early as 2050, it is estimated that climate change will render Kiribati, a string of 33 coral atolls that necklace the central Pacific, unlivable. And when it does, the i-Kiribati—the name that Kiribati's indigenous residents give themselves—will have to move.
But when and how Kiribati migrates hangs on domestic politics splintered by questions of how best to run an island nation short on time, space and cash.
Maamau's predecessor, Anote Tong, was a leading voice for small island states threatened by climate change, and he drew international financial aid to Kiribati as one of the first communities visibly impacted by rising seas. In 2014, he purchased 6,000 acres of land in Fiji for Kiribati's permanent resettlement. It was to be a model of planned retreat in the face of climate change.
But Maamau now plans for his people to stay. He doesn't deny that climate change is happening, but he subscribes to a belief, common here, that only divine will could unmake the islands. "We are telling the world that climate change impacts Kiribati, it's really happening," he says. "But we are not telling people to leave."
Kiribati President Taneti Maamau. Credit: Rick Bajornas/UN
Maamau argues that if quality of life increases in Kiribati, the islands' capacity to prepare for the myriad costs of climate change will increase with it.
His plan envisions more money coming to the islands from international aid, access to fisheries and increasing tourism, and he's focused on expanding the coconut trade to boost income for his people. But here, too, climate change is already intervening.

'We Will Go Down' 
There is little question that climate change will spell disaster for the low-lying nation. More than 80 percent of Kiribati's scant land surface would be unsuitable for habitation if sea levels rises 2.6 feet or more, a 2001 IPCC report predicted. Already coral die-off, drought and a diminished fishing stock have eroded longstanding traditional practices and indigenous knowledge.
"Whether we like it or not, we are the test case," Tong says. "We will go down."
Tong's land purchase in Fiji was one piece of an ambitious plan for "migration with dignity." Matched with vocational training to encourage work abroad, his efforts were among the first in the world to begin planning for sea level rise and managed resettlement.
Former Kiribati President Anote Tong speaks in Sydney, Australia, about the risks his islands face from climate change. Credit: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images
The country's land in Fiji is being used as farmland for now, though, and Kiribati faces an uncertain future.
No full-scale relocation of Kiribati's population is currently on the table, notes Jane McAdam, a law professor at University of New South Wales in Australia. And no political appetite exists to create pathways for mass migration between countries. "That is why a combination—climate change adaptation strategies, disaster risk reduction measures, internal migration, temporary international migration, permanent international migration, and the creation of humanitarian visas—is vital," she says.
At the UN climate talks last week, Maamau presented a video describing his Kiribati Vision for 20 Years. He talks about investing in tourism and fisheries, and the video describes enticing private high-end resorts to the low-lying remote outer islands, and a plan to raise land in a section of Tarawa, the main island, for new homes.
"We can't do it alone," Maamau says in the video. "We need the cooperation and the help of our developing partners."
Meanwhile, the video also shows why migration might become necessary: the erosion Kiribati is facing from the encroaching ocean, its increasing need for desalination equipment to provide drinking water, and the use of sandbag walls to try to keep tides at bay.

Building Resilience for What Little Time Is Left 
Since his electoral win in 2016, Maamau's government has pushed policies focused on Kiribati's social woes.
And there are many social vulnerabilities: paltry sanitation, unemployment, and escalating costs of living on South Tarawa, the country's rapidly urbanizing administrative hub, to name a few. There, half of Kiribati's population of 114,000 cram along a spit of land hardly wider than the length of a soccer field. Despite brackish water and disease, i-Kiribati from other islands flock to South Tarawa for work, school, and the perceived ease of a more Western lifestyle.
Maamau sees an expansion of the islands' coconut trade and manufacturing as one way to stop the migration to South Tarawa and help the population pull itself out of poverty.
The president of Kiribati sees the coconut trade a way to help his people escape poverty, but that won't protect them from the rising seas. Credit: Lorrie Graham/AusAID
Kiribati has long provided a healthy government subsidy for copra, the chopped and dried flesh of the coconut used in oils, creams and pig feed. The subsidy transfers cash right to the hands of Kiribati's residents: anyone can split open a coconut, lay out its meat to steam in the equatorial sun, and sell the hardened shards to the state for a guaranteed price. So lucrative is the subsidy that it serves as a "de facto social protection program" on Kiribati's isolate outer islands, where steady employment is scarce.
People living in Kiribati rely on freshwater wells, which can become contaminated by saltwater. Credit: Lorrie Graham/Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Tong had set the subsidy to $1 per kilo of copra. Maamau, once in office, doubled it.
Maamau says a doubled copra subsidy will line the pockets of those who need it most and spur migration back to Kiribati's outer islands, where coconuts are plenty. If Tarawa's population were to drop, its social vulnerabilities, like disease and informal housing, could be improved, he says.
McAdam agrees that the effort could help alleviate pressure on Tarawa. Migration between islands "not only provide financial support to those who move, but also to family members who stay behind," she says. With a smaller population, people might be able to stay in Tarawa longer than would otherwise be possible, given resource constraints.
But remedying Tarawa's social vulnerabilities this way won't ease exposure to climate shocks. In fact, as hundreds of people return to cut copra on outer islands torched by drought, Maamau's subsidy throws more i-Kiribati to the frontlines of climate change.

Coconuts on the Front Lines
On Abaiang, the next island to the north of Tarawa, Maamau's cash-for coconuts scheme hasn't played out as planned. The coconuts are succumbing to climate change.
Isolated, scarcely populated, and lush with greenery, Abaiang couldn't be more different from Tarawa's crowds and dust.
"On the outer island, there is no company, no private sector," says Maaruan Itakei, former mayor of Abaiang. The copra subsidy, he says, is often the sole means to pay for schooling and for goods like rice, sugar and medicine. Most other goods on Abaiang, where families eke out a subsistence lifestyle, come cash-free.
"The coconut tree is very important for us," Itakei explains. "There is no tree, no money."
Drought and sea level rise are already damaging the coconuts that people rely on for income. Credit: Jodie Garfield/AusAID
Human settlement on Abaiang is possible only because of an underground freshwater lens that is susceptible to contamination. Times of drought turn fresh groundwater too salty to drink. Times of flooding do the same. Soil quality is poor, stubbing out any chance for flourishing agriculture. And as on Tarawa, most groundwater is undrinkable as is: animal detritus, debris and e.coli often infect open wells.
Abaiang's villagers say it's getting worse. In a 2016 study released by the government of Kiribati, every single village in Abaiang reported drastic shifts in the prevalence, timing and force of extreme climate events. Across three decades, rainfall decreased and drought and saltwater intrusion—the result of extreme high tides—flared up with greater frequency.
Abaiang's trees now produce smaller coconuts, and less of them. The same 2016 study found that heightened drought and tidal flooding had warped the size and shape of coconuts themselves.
Change has not gone unnoticed. "The trees never grow; they're very brown," says Itakei, gesturing toward the frames of trees curving above his home. "Our coconut trees have become too small. It's very difficult to get copra. Our coconuts are getting too small."
Fewer coconuts, shrunken in size, hits Abaiang's pocketbooks. Less copra means less cash to go around. And paired with the enormous spike in demand churned up by Maamau's subsidy, diminished supply has coaxed ferocious competition for coconuts—so much so that Abaiang's copra cutters even fell green, unripe crop.
On Abaiang, coconuts are succumbing to the effects of climate change and homes have been moved further inland to escape erosion. Credit: AusAID
For these grinding alterations, Itakei blames drought. "We believe that if you are now in Abaiang, it's changed. No more rain. Empty water tanks still empty." Now, he says, he and his family draw their water from a well contaminated by salt.
The price of the subsidy might also undo Maamau's ambitions. It accounts for 14 percent of Kiribati's expected annual expenditure. Paul Tekenane, CEO of Kiribati Copra Mill Ltd., estimates that the country buys copra from its citizens at twice the price copra receives on the world market.

When the Tide Rises, No Means of Escape
In South Tarawa, meanwhile, Bibari Binaatak has seen early warnings of the risks ahead. She remembers being caught unaware when the sea flopped to land one afternoon in 2014. Binaatak had been chatting with a neighbor when she noticed fast-moving waters foaming on shore. Hoping to beat the rush of detritus she jogged back to her home, flood water swirling at her ankles.
It was too late. Floodwaters as high as 2 feet smashed through a loose fence jumbled together with sheets of corrugated tin siding. The water stayed for hours. With no high ground, and with no evident means of escape, Bibari did what she could. She grabbed whatever valuables were in reach, took a seat on her buia—a platform elevated above the ground that's often used like a porch—and waited for the floods to fall.
High tides and storm surges can inundate the islands of Kiribati, as waves from Cyclone Pam did in 2015. Credit: Plan International Australia via Getty Images
Binaatak's home is in Betio, a warren of informal housing, factories, and military leftovers abandoned after World War II. She lives in a shack of scrap and tin, near shoreline blooms of garbage and the hulks of rusted ships. She depends on remittances sent from her grandson, who works on a fishing ship—though she was once employed as a typist by Kiribati's government before retiring.
"It's a big worry, how you will survive, what you will do to prepare yourself and your family," she says. "Maybe we will prepare a boat."

No Easy Solution for Vulnerable Islands
For a small island nation marooned in the Pacific, battered by drought, and confronted with the possibility of its eminent unmaking, there exists no easy solution.
To swap one island's vulnerabilities for those of another might work temporarily. But even a move to other island nations—like Fiji—won't free Kiribati from the risks of climate change. Fiji has also relocated communities because of coastal flooding, and much of its main island, Viti Levu, was severely damaged by a tropical cyclone in 2015.
Kiribati's jumbled push to balance climate shocks and social harms fires off a warning for other countries that will soon have to do the same.
"On something like this," Tong says, "we've got to be brutally realist. We have no choice. We've got to be very harsh—realistically harsh."
Much depends on it.

*Ben Walker is a 2016-17 Thomas J. Watson Fellow who has been reporting on climate change and mass displacement in locations around the world.

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Arctic Climate Change Being Felt Farther South, Scientists Say

CBC News - The Canadian Press

'Most people don't understand how bad it is,' researcher says
An international summary of five year's worth of research on Arctic climate change concludes the top of the world is getting warmer faster than anyone thought. (David Goldman/Associated Press)
An international summary of five year's worth of research on Arctic climate change concludes the top of the world is getting warmer faster than anyone thought.
And if it all sounds interesting but a little far removed from southern concerns, David Barber has news for you.
"There are very clear linkages there and they've been occurring consistently for the last 10, 15 years," said Barber, one of Canada's top ice scientists and a prominent contributor to the report.
"Most people don't understand how bad it is."
The report completed for the Arctic Council, the group of eight countries that ring the North Pole, was released last week. It represents the work of 90 scientists from around the world and summarizes the most recent research from 2010 to 2016.
"Cumulative global impacts related to Arctic change are expected to be large," the document said. "Adaptation costs and economic opportunities are estimated in the tens of trillions of U.S. dollars."
The report concludes the Arctic continues to warm at twice the pace of mid-latitudes and is likely to see warming of up to 5 C as early as 2040.



By then, the report says, summer sea ice is likely to be a thing of the past. Glaciers and ice caps will continue to melt and contribute to continually rising seas.

Larger impacts
Melting permafrost will affect everything from resource development to freshwater flows to climate feedbacks from the release of stored carbon.
Then there's this: "There are emerging impacts of Arctic change on mid-latitude weather/climate."
Barber's already seeing it.
Last spring, he was on an Arctic voyage on the Coast Guard's research icebreaker, the Amundsen, when the trip had to be cancelled because the ship was pressed into weeks of search-and-rescue duty. Massive chunks of sea ice up to eight metres thick — ice that had migrated all the way from the Lincoln Sea north of Ellesmere Island — were threatening the maritime crab-fishing fleet
"It should not have been there," Barber said. "It was sinking little fishing vessels. It was causing problems with tankers stuck in the ice."
While the effects of climate change are already being felt across the landscape in the Arctic, such as on wildlife, the effects will stretch down into the rest of Canada soon. (Martin Harvey/WWF)
Breakdowns in the normal weather patterns in the High Arctic were allowing heavy, dangerous ice to drift further south.
"We expect this to happen more often in the future."
Barber said at least 15 new academic papers add weight to the theory that the loss of sea ice is causing changes in the upper atmosphere that disrupt southern temperatures and rainfall.
'These things are costing us.' - David Barber, glaciologist
Barber is already advising southern agencies on questions such as how future rainfall patterns might change how much electricity can be generated from hydro dams.
"I just came from a meeting with Manitoba Hydro where this was the main topic of discussion."
Global air currents are increasingly disrupted. At one point last winter, Barber said, the North Pole was 29 C warmer than average. Air from California was being drawn to the top of the world.
Climate change in the Arctic is well underway and can't be stopped. But the report says if nations meet their greenhouse gas reduction targets under the Paris agreement, changes in the Arctic will stabilize to a new normal some time around 2040.
"We should have started 20 years ago," Barber said. "We didn't get our act together and we're still dicking around trying to figure out how to price carbon.
"These things are costing us. And they're costing the stability of our planet."

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Climate Litigation Needs To Become A Mass Movement

Slate - Ketan Jha

Europe is leading by example.
Our Children’s Trust
Things are not going well for the Earth. It goes well beyond the Trump administration’s decision to eventually leave the Paris Agreement and Scott Pruitt’s purge of the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific experts.
Even non-American efforts to curb climate change aren’t going so well: Newly released data from the World Meteorological Organization reveal a record increase in average global concentrations of CO2 between 2015 and 2016.
The United Nations Environment Programme recently issued its annual synthesis report on the emissions gap, which is the difference between country-specific plans and reductions suggested by scientific consensus. One of the salient findings is that domestic carbon-reduction policies for the 168 countries that have ratified the Paris Agreement amount to just one-third of what is necessary to limit global temperature rise to the Paris boundary of “well below 2 degrees Celsius.”
At the same time, and perhaps in response, litigating to protect the climate is on the rise. If climate litigation is construed broadly, the past 20 years have seen 654 cases tried in the United States and at least 230 in other jurisdictions.
Is readying our collective casebooks and heading for the courthouse actually the best solution? Litigation, after all, is typically an inefficient method of achieving policy reform. The flagship public-interest law efforts during the civil rights movement provide instructive lessons here, particularly when academics and activists are increasingly extending historical parallels between environmental protection and racial justice to climate change.
 Even where many of the necessary conditions for successful legal reform strategies are present—as with some of the landmark cases tried by NAACP lawyers—there is a strong argument that lawsuits constrained by narrow legal doctrines and limited remedies will rarely be able to produce the kinds of sweeping economic changes required to combat the approaching climate catastrophe.
And yet, even though the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the parent treaty to the Paris Agreement) was drafted 25 years ago, we still do not have coherent global or local plans to limit destructive warming. The Paris Agreement was certainly the right direction after international law’s failure to achieve binding targets, but bottom-up targets only work when national commitments are extremely ambitious. So, in sum, it seems that litigating to reform energy policy is both utterly inefficient and entirely necessary.
These climate cases are not new, but the types of claims at stake are changing. The first wave of momentous actions in the United States chiefly involved efforts by state governments to compel either the executive or private entities to take action, either by forcing agencies to regulate emissions or forcing companies to steadily abate them.
Other legal actions by local interest groups and environmental nongovernmental organizations sought to make agencies take climate change into account in relation to species-specific issues, such as the effect of global warming on food security for grizzly bears. More recent American suits tend to tackle specific deregulation plans or administrative omissions and delays. Success rates for local issues vary, and they are a vital part of an effective mass litigation strategy.
However, since an ambitious suit calling power companies to account was unanimously shot down in the Supreme Court in 2011, high-impact litigation efforts slowed considerably while temperature-rise projections accelerated. The early American cases failed to unify scientific narratives, the stories and voices of people affected by climate change, and opportune legal moments.
Climate litigation in other countries, however, tells a different story. Here, it is a story about seizing the law as a means of collective action instead of leaving an elite cadre of lawyers to represent the concerns of a few activists and scientists. That narrative begins with the Urgenda case.
A Dutch NGO, headed by one of the professors who first suggested the 2 degrees Celsius target, enlisted almost 900 claimants and alleged that government action was insufficient. Urgenda argued, among other things, that even if the Dutch government was bound by EU emissions targets, commitment did not immunize them from legal liability resulting from human health risks posed by climate change.
In 2015, the court ordered the government to cut its emissions by 25 percent by 2020.
The argument advanced by Urgenda is particularly relevant in light of the new emissions-gap data—governments cannot rest on the laurels of existing targets to deflect the need for comprehensive action.
Even still, the global impact of Urgenda is as much about the form and optics of litigation as the substantive arguments. Urgenda paved the way for multiclaimant lawsuits that highlight the importance of climate action by giving platforms to those who stand to suffer disproportionate harms. Put differently, this nascent wave of climate litigation is about forcing governments to see climate change as a collective human-rights issue and to take action that reflects the dire picture painted by scientists about climate risks to human health.
A similar claim filed by 450 Swiss women, all at least 65 years of age, is currently pending. Like Urgenda, the claimants argue that existing legal targets are insufficient to safeguard their rights under both the European Convention on Human Rights and Swiss constitutional law.
In Belgium, a lawsuit that closely mirrors Urgenda advertises that citizens can become claimants through their website in just two minutes. That case now has nearly 32,000 co-claimants. The NGO responsible for the claim, Klimaatzaak, has enlisted a range of celebrity ambassadors to bolster its legal campaign through social media.
A group of Portuguese schoolchildren, all from a region plagued by destructive forest fires, is suing 47 countries in the European Court of Human Rights to compel similar emissions reductions in the first instance of multistate climate litigation. In just over a month, they have raised about $35,000 from more than 700 donors through CrowdJustice, a platform that connects ordinary people to public-interest lawsuits.
In the United Kingdom, where I’m based and also the ancestral home of the American common law, our case at Plan B.Earth implores the British government to amend their carbon targets to reflect the need for a net-zero emissions policy. The claimants, aged 9–79, include a rabbi concerned about the imminent humanitarian crisis, university students scared for their future, and a supporter with Mauritian heritage who represents the risk of small island states being submerged. In parallel to Urgenda, the U.K.’s current targets fall short of what climate science tells us is necessary to stop dangerous warming.
These European suits bolster the case for unifying social movements mobilized around climate change with legal ones: We can fight political reluctance with grassroots legal actions around the globe. Environmental lawyers in the United States are not oblivious to this opportunity: Juliana v. United States broke new legal ground by enlisting youth plaintiffs, attempting to repurpose a Roman legal doctrine of contested historical provenance, and alleging a constitutional right to a stable climate.
In the first rejection of the government’s argument to throw out that case, Judge Thomas Coffin referred to Urgenda as proof that courts can redress climate change.
Old uncertainties about the climate system are fading. Litigation in Australia has helped force the financial sector to consider climate risks that the oil industry has known about for decades. Litigation in Pakistan has helped remedy profound governmental inaction even where legislation had already been passed.
These cases make clear that for all the cozy rhetoric, Champagne, and cheering, legislative and executive branches are not doing enough. We need more legal actions engaging citizens in every country to pressure governments to secure a habitable planet for future generations. A number of these lawsuits could be a hollow hope, but they might be all we have left.

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