Australia has emerged as an attractive jurisdiction for climate
litigants as climate change weather impacts more individuals and
society.
(AP Photo/Omar Havana)
The latest MJA-Lancet Countdown report
tracking progress on health and climate change in Australia shows
dangerous heat exposure has risen by 37% in the past 20 years.
The 2025 edition has revealed that while
Australia’s dangerous heat exposure has escalated in the past two
decades, the country now has the second-highest number of climate change
cases globally.
Lead author and Macquarie University
Professor Paul Beggs said Australia’s health-damaging heat
“substantially” increased in frequency since the 1970s.
“Courts have closely examined detailed
evidence about how climate change directly and indirectly affects
people’s health, especially for vulnerable groups,” Beggs said.
“Health was raised as an issue in eleven Australian climate cases between 2014 and 2023.”
The Countdown report was first published
in 2017. It provides an annual assessment of connections between health
and climate change in Australia and New Zealand across the domains of
health hazards and impacts; adaptation planning; mitigation actions;
economics and finance; and public and political engagement.
In 2021, Australia’s health care sector
produced greenhouse gas emissions that rose to their highest level in a
decade. The report concluded this was likely attributed in part to the
ways care patterns shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Other concerning trends identified in the
report include a diminishing capacity to respond to bushfires, with the
number of volunteer firefighters dropping by 17% over the past seven
years, and the dominance of fossil fuels in the domestic energy supply
contributing to climate risks.
Professor Beggs, who is also Lancet
Countdown Centre Oceania director, added because of Australia’s
particular exposures, long-term tracking for climate hazards was
crucial.
ANU’s Professor Hilary Bambrick, National
Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health director, lauded recent
government efforts to deal with “priority risks” via the national climate risk assessment.
“This past year Australia has taken a
crucial step forward in understanding how risks are connected across
sectors,” Bambrick said.
“This assessment should facilitate more
considered and coordinated planning and response to increasingly
dangerous climate change to better protect human health and wellbeing.”
The assessment also highlighted
Australia’s progress in shifting to renewables, noting renewable energy
sources provided nearly 40% of domestic electricity needs.
Renewable storage and generation of large-scale and small-scale kinds are also growing.
Paper co-author Professor Stefan Trueck,
who is the director of Macquarie University’s Centre for Transforming
Energy Markets, noted that more funding is needed to realise renewables’
potential.
“Electricity generation from renewables
keeps accelerating, fossil fuel generation is shrinking, but ensuring
reliability of electricity supply demands even greater investment in
renewables and storage,” he said.
Ship owners who fail to reduce emissions intensity 30% by 2035 will have to pay into a “net zero fund” to clean up shipping through green fuels
A container ship passes underneath Oakland bridge (Photo: Caribb/MOL)
Governments
at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) have agreed on a set
of annual emissions reduction targets for 2028 to 2035 along with
financial penalties for failing to meet them.
After a
week of talks in London, they voted through a decision that ship owners
should reduce the emissions intensity of their vessels – the amount of
climate-heating emissions per unit of fuel – by 30% by 2035 and 65% by
2040, both against 2008 levels.
In a contentious closing session
on Friday, where some fossil fuel-producing nations opposed the
measures, they also fixed annual targets for each year between 2028 and
2035. Targets for the 2035-2040 period will be decided in 2032.
Governments already agreed
back in 2023 to reach net zero “by or around i.e. close to 2050” – and
this week’s talks were key to working out how to get there by adopting
greener fuels and energy efficiency.
Ship
owners who fail to meet the “base” targets on the path to achieving a
30% reduction by 2035 will have to buy “remedial units” from the IMO to
make up the difference, priced at $380 a tonne of carbon dioxide
equivalent.
The IMO will spend the money through a new “Net Zero
Fund” on cleaning up the maritime sector, helping workers through the
green transition and compensating for any negative impacts of that
transition on developing economies, such as increases in the price of
food due to higher shipping costs.
No
money raised from selling remedial units will be spent outside the
maritime sector, disappointing climate activists and some governments
which had hoped the money could generate tens of billions of dollars per
year in broader climate finance.
On top of these base targets,
governments have set additional compliance targets which are harder to
meet and would deliver a more ambitious reduction in emissions intensity
of 43% by 2035.
If shipowners fail to meet these additional
goals, they can make up for it through three options: buying cheaper
second-tier remedial units at $100 a tonne; buying “surplus units” from
ships that have met the goals; or using surplus units they have banked
by over-achieving in previous years.
Governments
have also agreed on a threshold for how polluting a shipping fuel can
be and still be officially considered a “zero or near zero fuel”, making
its use eligible for funding from the Net Zero Fund.
That
threshold has been set at 19 grammes of carbon dioxide equivalent per
megajoule (gCO2e/MJ) of energy, falling to a maximum of 14 grammes in
2035. This potentially sets up battles between industry and
environmental lobbyists over the carbon intensity of different fuels,
such as various types of biofuel.
The overall emissions reduction
policy is expected to be formally adopted at an IMO session in October
this year, with some technical details still to be resolved.
Fossil fuel nations opposed
In
Friday’s vote on the new measures in London, 63 nations supported them,
while 16 voted against and about 25 abstained. Those opposed were
mainly nations whose economies rely on oil and gas – fossil fuels that
currently power ships – like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran.
Explaining
their opposition, the Saudi delegate said, “we believe in balance –
achieving a balance between energy security and affordability, climate
action and economic development”. His nation is “equally committed to
all of these pillars and we understand that – in order to achieve
progress – we must balance these priorities equally”, he added.
While
some island nations supported the deal, a group of six abstained from
the vote. Explaining their decision, Tuvalu’s transport minister Simon
Kofe said the agreement was not ambitious enough and “lacks the
necesssary incentives for industry to make the necessary shift to
cleaner technologies”.
These
and other island nations wanted a price on all shipping emissions from
2028 – and for that price to be at least $150 a tonne. On Monday,
Marshall Islands ambassador Albon Ishoda warned reporters that his
country and its allies would not support anything less than that.
On
Friday, Kofe also expressed “disappointment” about how the deal was
done, saying that small island developing states were not “adequately
engaged in the formulation of this document”, which was “concerning”.
One
nation that was not active at the talks was the United States, which
has largely withdrawn from international environmental and climate
processes under President Donald Trump, who supports the use of more
fossil fuels.
Shipping news service Tradewinds reported that the US left
the IMO talks on Tuesday night and threatened, in a letter sent to
London-based embassies, “reciprocal measures so as to offset any fees
charged to US ships” – although it is unclear what that might mean in
practice.
Falling short on ambition?
Climate
campaigners’ reactions were mixed. Mark Lutes, WWF senior advisor on
global climate policy called it a “groundbreaking moment, which should
signal a turning of the tide on greenhouse gases from global shipping”.
He
said it is “the first international agreement that puts an entire
sector on a mandatory reduction pathway towards net zero” but added it
does not go far enough on some “key aspects”.
But Emma Fenton,
senior director of climate diplomacy at nonprofit policy group
Opportunity Green, said the agreement “fails climate-vulnerable
countries and falls short of both the ambition the climate crisis
demands and that member states committed to, just two years ago”.
“The
weak measure approved means aiming for a low bar and dragging our feet
to get there,” they added. “It will neither ensure sufficient emissions
reductions, nor raise the revenues needed for a just and equitable
transition.”
But, they emphasised: “This is not the end, and we must look to the future to ensure ambition is raised.”
Frank Jotzo is Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy and Head of Energy,
Institute for Climate Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National
University
The federal election should be an earnest contest over the fundamentals of Australia’s climate and energy policies.
Strong global action on climate change is clearly in Australia’s
long-term national interest. But it has fallen prey to US President
Donald Trump’s disruption of the world order, which has drained global attention from other crucial issues, including climate change.
The Trump administration’s anti-climate actions might energise some to counteract it, but its overall effect will be chilling.
Election reality
A comprehensive platform to strengthen and broaden Australian climate policy towards net zero is needed more than ever.
But the political reality playing out in the election campaign is
very different, with the overriding focus on the cost of living, and the
usual emphasis on electoral tactics rather than long-term strategies.
Even a policy like Labor’s subsidised home batteries is being framed as a hip-pocket measure, rather than as a small contribution to energy infrastructure.
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Likewise, the Coalition’s pledge to halve fuel excise
is aimed squarely at easing price pressures at the pump. In fact, the
policy would slightly delay progress towards low emissions transport.
The vexed question of how to ensure sufficient gas supplies for south
eastern Australia is also cloaked in energy affordability. We are
already seeing industry push back against the Coalition’s policy to require gas companies to withhold a share of production for the domestic market.
Off target
Regardless of who wins the election, Australia’s 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 will be difficult to achieve unless there is a change of pace.
The government’s projections assume sharp
cuts during 2027–30. But national emissions have flatlined at around 28% below 2005 levels for four years.
Under the Paris Agreement, a 2035 target commitment is required this
year. The Climate Change Authority will give its advice to the new
government after the election. It has previously floated a reduction range of 65–75%
This would be compatible with the global goal of keeping warming below 2°C. Yet it might look highly ambitious under current political and international circumstances.
Renewables reloaded
The shift from coal to clean energy sources in the power sector is well underway. In 2024, renewables accounted for 39% of the national energy market, three times the share a decade ago.
But progress has slowed at the same time as older coal plants have become unreliable and costly to run.
It is clear that the future of an affordable, secure power supply in
Australia is mostly wind and solar, supported by energy storage and some
gas.
But progress needs to be much faster. Many renewable projects,
transmission lines and also Snowy 2 energy storage, are behind schedule.
This is due to supply chain constraints, regulatory clogging and
community opposition.
Blueprint for action
Deep emission reductions can still be achieved over the next ten years, but only if we pull out all the stops. That would mean:
going much faster on electricity transition
strengthening incentives and regulation to cut industrial and resource sector emissions
getting serious about a transition to clean transport
meaningful action towards low-emissions agriculture including changes to land use.
A re-elected Labor government would likely do more on renewable
power, while also strengthening action on industrial and resource
emissions through the Safeguard Mechanism.
But more will be needed to prepare for the 2030s. If the Teals hold
the balance of power in a hung parliament, they would push Labor to be
more ambitious.
By contrast, a Dutton government might dial back the existing ambition and adopt a lower 2035 target than Labor.
Nuclear means more coal
The initial focus of the Coalition’s energy policy going into the campaign has been to build nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power would be far more expensive than the alternatives, costing
hundreds of billions of dollars for only a small share of future power
supply. It would need enormous subsidies, probably through government ownership.
Deployment would inevitably be a very long time off. The near term
affect would be to delay the transition to more renewable energy.
The coalition’s nuclear power plan has sparked protests on financial and environmental grounds.Steven Markham
The Coalition’s modelling
assumes ageing coal-fired power plants would keep running beyond their
announced closure dates. That would mean burning more coal and keeping
Australia’s national carbon emissions higher for longer.
The future of resource exports is green
Australia’s intrinsic interest in limiting climate change remains
urgent. Our opportunity as a green commodity producer and exporter
remains solid.
Green industry policy has been on the rise under the Albanese government, through support for green hydrogen and green iron. But we will not be able to subsidise our way to greatness in clean export industries.
What is needed is international green commodity markets for
Australian supplies of green ammonia, iron and other products. This is
best achieved through carbon pricing in commodity importing countries,
coupled with border carbon adjustments which give exporters of cleanly
produced products an edge in those markets.
A strong Australian 2035 emissions target would help send a signal to
investors and overseas markets that we are serious about the
transition.
COP31 would be a big chance for Australia to demonstrate positive
leadership. It would also create pressure to do more for developing
countries, given the conference would be hosted jointly with Pacific
island states.
Disappointment is likely, as rich countries will probably fail to meet expectations. In any case, Australia will be pushed by our Pacific neighbours to do more on climate change.
Monica Feria-Tinta is one of a growing number of lawyers using the courts to make governments around the world take action.
The Los Cedros forest, Ecuador. Photograph: Minden Pictures/Alamy
Feria-Tinta
nodded, deep-red fingernails clattering on her laptop as she typed. She
paused and looked up. “Are we entitled to nature? Is that a human
right? I would say yes. It’s not an easy argument, but it’s a valid
one.” She recommended going to the council with hard data about the
impact of trees on health, and how removing the tree could violate the
rights of an economically deprived community.
Recent rulings in the
European court of human rights, she added, reinforced the notion that
the state has obligations on the climate crisis. This set a legal
precedent that could help residents defend their single tree in
Southend. “It isn’t just a tree,” said Feria-Tinta. “More than that is
at stake: a principle.”
The
meeting was just a tiny example of a much bigger shift in how law is
being used to fight climate breakdown. Since the early 1980s,
communities and campaigners have turned to the courts to fight back
against polluting industries. But traditional environmental claims are
geographically specific – as in West Virginia, say, where residents sued the chemical firm
DuPont for failing to prevent toxic chemicals from leaking into their
water supply. Climate litigation presents very different challenges.
A
vast number of actors are responsible for emissions, making it hard to
establish legal responsibility, and often the worst harms occur in a
different continent to the worst emissions. But in the last decade, a
series of court cases around the world have sought to change the legal
status quo.
“It’s been a huge shift,” said Adam Weiss, chief programmes
and impact officer at ClientEarth, an environmental law charity that has
spearheaded this approach. “Judges now see the environmental issues
we’re facing as existential, and have allowed the interpretation of
human rights law to shift to grasp that.”
Feria-Tinta
is one of the pioneers of this change. In 2017, she worked on the first
case to argue before an international court that state failings on the
climate crisis were violating the human rights of a group of Indigenous
people. The case was successful, and since then, hundreds of claimants
around the world have made similar arguments.
Feria-Tinta is “one of a
small group that’s really engaged in thinking strategically about how to
use the law as a tool to push for greater ambition on climate change
and biodiversity”, says Margherita Cornaglia, a barrister specialising
in climate and environmental justice.
After
the meeting with Treverton, Feria-Tinta explained to me how all of these
grand legal debates related to Chester the tree. “It is not just that
this tree is threatened, but that it’s valuable,” she said. “After the
second world war we developed certain standards in human rights treaties
because of the horrors humanity endured. But we separated what is human
from nature. We are living in such a cataclysmic moment that only now
are we realising how vital nature is for human beings. The law has to be
reframed, rethought.”
Many observers see the
law as the last hope for preventing catastrophic climate change. “It
seems to me all other avenues have been exhausted,” says Brett
Christophers, professor at Uppsala University and the author of The
Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. “Governments and
companies aren’t taking serious and significant action, but in theory,
at least, both are beholden to the law.”
This strategic shift also has
limitations, since, put bluntly, states can ignore rulings made in
faraway international courts (or, for that matter, in their own courts).
Meanwhile, it is not just environmental groups who are embracing
climate-related litigation. In the US, there has been a significant rise
in cases filed by airlines, fossil fuel producers and even states
arguing against the obligation to consider climate risk in their
financial planning.
Yet Feria-Tinta passionately believes in the power
of the law to create change. As the world passes the grim benchmark of
1.5 degrees of global heating, can the law save us from environmental
destruction?
THE
barristers’ chambers grouped around the four Inns of Court in central
London are the epitome of the British establishment. The buildings –
courtyards with neatly manicured lawns, stone staircases and gothic
masonry – resemble Oxbridge colleges and grand private schools, and many
of the people who work there are graduates of these institutions.
Feria-Tinta’s
path was different. She grew up in Peru, the daughter of Indigenous
parents who had migrated to the capital city, Lima, and become
successful businesspeople. Although she occasionally visited her
grandparents in the Andes, most of her early life was spent in Lima,
which she describes as a “grey, concrete city”. Indigenous culture was
part of the background of her life, but one step removed; her parents
spoke Quechua at home, but she never learned to speak it. She couldn’t
communicate fully with her grandmother, who refused to learn Spanish –
the language of the colonisers.
At school,
Feria-Tinta excelled in debating and she ended up studying law at
university. Soon after graduating, she was offered an exciting work
opportunity, as an assistant producer on a British documentary about the
political situation in Peru. She helped the team orchestrate interviews
and set up shoots. By the time the programme aired in 1992, everything
had changed. In April that year the president, Alberto Fujimori,
dissolved Congress and began a brutal dictatorship. Political opponents
were being persecuted.
Facing the threat of jail time, torture or even
death for her work on the film, Feria-Tinta fled to the UK in 1993 with
the help of the documentary team. “It was difficult to accept that I’d
become a refugee,” she told me. “Suddenly, I was at the very bottom of
the social hierarchy. I was unprepared for that. Then I thought: OK, now
what do I do?” She decided international law would be the best use of
her training, and soon won a scholarship for a graduate degree at the
London School of Economics.
‘Painstakingly focused and intellectually very ambitious’ … Monica Feria-Tinta.Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
Adjusting
to life in Britain wasn’t easy; she was confused by people’s physical
reserve and struggled to understand the accent. But these were small
complaints. “I understand what it is to live in fear,” she said. “This
was an opportunity to be alive, and I took it seriously.” She spent
hours at London’s many free museums and public libraries and developed
an enduring passion for English literature – her conversation is full of
references to writers such as Alfred Tennyson, William Blake and
Virginia Woolf.
After graduating from LSE, she spent the next decade and
a half working in international courts in Strasbourg, The Hague, Latin
America and elsewhere. In 2014, she qualified as a barrister and won a
pupillage at the London chambers Twenty Essex, where she is still based.
Feria-Tinta’s
interest in environmental law developed in the wake of the 2015 Paris
agreement, when she found herself wondering how the treaty could be
enforced. The agreement set out states’ obligations on the climate but
it did not include any enforcement mechanism to ensure that they
actually complied. “At Cop each year, states seemed happy to just chat,
chat, chat, despite how critical the situation was,” she said. “I
wondered whether the old frameworks could be used to address it.”
Human
rights law is broadly individualistic – to win a claim, someone has to
show that their particular rights are being violated by a state,
corporation or other entity. Environmental destruction tends to have
more diffuse causes and effects. But in the aftermath of the Paris
agreement, a fierce debate broke out among lawyers and scholars about
whether international courts could be used to pursue climate justice –
and if so, how.
In 2018, Feria-Tinta entered
the fray with a paper arguing that even specific human rights
agreements, and other longstanding, binding treaties such as the Law of
the Sea, could apply to the climate crisis. “Treaties are living
instruments – they have to be interpreted in light of modern
developments,” she told me. Using apparently narrow treaties to build
legal cases about climate change would prove to be an influential idea.
But the only way to find out if it would work was to test the principle
in court.
THE
year before Feria-Tinta published her paper, Sophie Marjanac was living
in her native Australia and working for ClientEarth, a legal charity
focused on the environment. Her first job after university had been
working on indigenous land rights on the Torres Strait, an archipelago
off the northern coast of Australia. From the mid-2000s, tidal surges
had sent flood water crashing over the inhabited islands, destroying
graves and leaving human remains washed up on the land. Rising sea
levels had led to saltwater seeping into the soil and poisoning coconut
trees. Coastal erosion and flooding had decimated other crops.
For
years, islanders had campaigned for help from the Australian
government. They wanted funding for seawalls and other coastal defence
measures, and they wanted Australia to address the root problem by
setting more ambitious targets for reducing emissions. But nothing was
changing. Marjanac, who had stayed in touch with elders on the islands,
hit on the idea of arguing that climate breakdown was violating the
islanders’ human rights.
At first glance, it
was not a promising strategy: there was no successful precedent in the
international courts. But the timing, at least, was good. Several
similar cases had recently been brought in domestic courts around the
world in what legal experts now call the “rights turn” in climate
litigation.
In 2015, a district court in the Netherlands
ruled that the Dutch government had an explicit duty to protect the
human rights of the Dutch population against climate breakdown and to
reduce emissions. The same year, the Pakistani high court
ruled that the government had violated citizens’ constitutional rights
by not upholding its climate policy. Marjanac reasoned that if
international courts made similar findings – that states have a legal
duty to tackle the climate emergency – it could have a significant
global impact.
In the autumn of 2018,
ClientEarth contacted Feria-Tinta to ask whether she would act on behalf
of the Torres Strait islanders. The team decided to bring a case before
the UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with a
specific treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights – one of the courts of limited jurisdiction that Feria-Tinta
believed could be used for this purpose. But there were many reasons to
think the case might fail.
Back in 2005, an Inuit activist had filed a
similar claim against the US, arguing that global heating was melting
the Arctic and violating the inhabitants’ human rights. The
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had rejected the claim without
considering it. “One of the things that the petitioner in that case
said is that what starts in the Arctic doesn’t end in the Arctic,”
Feria-Tinta said. “That really, really stayed in my brain.”
As
Feria-Tinta immersed herself in the islanders’ testimony, she found
herself deeply moved. Feria-Tinta has two distinct modes: one is sharply
rational, the other is emotionally attuned to the point of raw
vulnerability. (During one of our conversations, she told me a story
about watching a brood of newborn ducklings, gearing up to jump from
their nest into the pond water far below. “Watching nature, you learn
what courage is,” she said. “I thought: if a duck can do that, what
can’t you do?” Her voice was steady as she recounted this, so it took me
a moment to realise her eyes were streaming with tears.)
Dowar Islet and Waua Islet in the Torres Strait.Photograph: John Rainbird/Alamy
Feria-Tinta
brought a fresh perspective to the Torres Strait islanders’ case.
Indigenous people have special status in international law, and having
worked with these communities professionally and being intimately
connected with them personally, she was able to build a powerful
argument. “She really helped us think how to broaden [the case],” said
Marjanac. “She talked about bringing in children to the claim, because
the right to culture was something transmitted to young people – and if
the islanders are forced to leave because of the climate crisis and
rising seas, it’s a fundamental breach of culture.”
In
May 2019, the case was filed with the Human Rights Committee. The UN
moves slowly at the best of times, and the committee faced pushback from
the Australian government, which argued that climate breakdown was not
the fault of any one state, and that Feria-Tinta’s interpretation of the
treaty was incorrect. This approach was no surprise. Australia’s prime
minister at the time, Scott Morrison, had once brandished a lump of coal
in parliament as a sign of his commitment to the fossil fuel industry.
In
September 2022, three and a half years after the case formally began,
the verdict was announced. The committee found that the Australian
government had failed to adequately protect Torres Straits islanders
against the adverse impacts of the climate crisis. The UN ordered the
government to compensate people for the harms they had suffered and to
take measures to secure their communities’ safe existence.
Feria-Tinta
was thrilled, not only for the islanders, but because of the
possibilities the case opened. “It was the first time in international
litigation that the question was, ‘Can a state be held responsible for
lack of climate action?’” she recalled. “And the answer was ‘yes’.”
IN
the five years between the inception of the Torres Strait case in 2017
and its conclusion in 2022, the field of climate litigation had
transformed. In that time, the number of climate-releated cases going through courts had more than doubled. In 2023, the World Economic Forum
identified failure to mitigate climate breakdown as the biggest risk
facing the planet, and suggested that the increase in litigation was a
result of governments moving too slowly in the transition to net zero.
Today, litigation is an integral part of the climate movement.
Not everyone is happy about this shift. Recent judgments in the European court of human rights – such as a 2024 ruling
in favour of a group of Swiss women who argued that their rights were
being violated by their governments’ inadequate action on the climate –
set a precedent that will have a sweeping impact on all European states,
including the UK. Speaking to a British parliamentary committee soon
after this ruling, Lord Sumption KC, a former supreme court justice,
warned that such court decisions could limit national governments from
making their own climate legislation. He was concerned that some of the
interpretations were a stretch. “You can’t have moving goalposts and
call it law,” he said.
Within the climate
movement, most agree that a variety of tactics – protest, political
negotiation, lawsuits – are needed to force change. But some are
concerned that litigation risks absorbing disproportionate time and
funding. “Donors like litigation,” one campaigner told me, with a weary
shrug. It’s not hard to see why: a victory can make a tangible
difference and generate a torrent of good publicity.
The 2015 Dutch case
spent years going through the courts – the government lost its final
appeal in 2019 – but is credited with leading to a more stringent
climate policy in the Netherlands and the phase-out of coal power
stations. But litigation is also “slow, expensive and difficult”, says
Catherine Higham, a senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and winning a legal
battle is usually only the start of the story. Consider the Torres
Strait, where three years after their moment of triumph, the islanders
are still fighting for all the mitigation measures they were promised.
In
March 2025, a landmark trial began in Germany that shows the
limitations and possibilities of this approach. A Peruvian farmer, Saúl
Luciano Lliuya, is suing the German energy multinational RWE. His
argument is that the company’s greenhouse gas emissions have fuelled
global heating and accelerated glacial melt above his home town of
Huaraz, Peru. This is despite the fact that RWE has never operated in
Peru. The case has been extremely slow. First filed a decade ago, it is
only just going to trial – but if it succeeds, it will open up a whole
new avenue to hold major polluters accountable.
Feria-Tinta
believes deeply that progress can be achieved through the courts, even
if that change is incremental. “The law is what we have,” she told me,
firmly. Yet in our conversations, she made clear that her loyalty is to
the courts rather than to any particular cause. “There’s nothing like a
dictatorship to make you appreciate the rule of law,” she said. “Try to
live without it and you realise how important it is.”
This can lead to work that, to an outsider to the legal world, may seem odd. In her book, A Barrister for the Earth, which
will be published later this month, Feria-Tinta discusses her work in
2019 on behalf of communities in West Timor affected by the Montara oil
spill, one of the worst offshore oil platform accidents in history.
Describing the “disturbing images” she saw of the aftermath of the
spill, she writes that the quiet of her barristers’ chambers helped her
“avoid becoming paralysed by the weight of it all”. Given this strong
reaction, I was surprised when she later told me that even after she
started working on groundbreaking climate crisis cases, she has acted on
behalf of oil companies; in one case advising a company after an oil
spill caused by a third party, in others advising on reputational risk
or disputes.
Feria-Tinta does not see this as
contradictory to her climate work: it is simply the nature of her job.
She is not an environmental campaigner but a barrister. As such, she is a
firm advocate for the “cab rank”
rule, a professional obligation that states that barristers cannot pick
and choose their cases according to personal preference. “I will
sometimes defend parties with whom I disagree completely,” Feria-Tinta
said. “I can still argue their case within the limits of the law.”
One
reason she particularly values the cab rank rule, she told me, is
because in Latin America, where it doesn’t exist, lawyers can be
persecuted for representing certain clients, whereas in Britain the rule
helps maintain a level of distance. (Even so, Feria-Tinta’s stance is
not shared by all of her peers. In 2023 more than 100 lawyers, including
more than 20 barristers, said they would no longer abide by the cab rank rule when it came to climate-related cases.)
Feria-Tinta’s
respect for the law does not amount to reverential conservatism: she
wishes to change it from within. “She’s painstakingly focused and
intellectually very, very ambitious,” said Jake White, head of legal at
World Wide Fund for Nature. As her work repeatedly brought her into
contact with people at the frontlines of climate disaster, she started
to wonder if the legal system needs to change even more drastically –
and to recognise the rights of nature itself.
FOR
a long time, even as an adult, Feria-Tinta felt disconnected from the
natural world. It was through her long-term partner, Klemens Felder, who
grew up in the Austrian Alps, that she began to develop an appreciation
for nature. “I was oblivious – but he’s the kind of person to tell me,
‘Actually you’re not seeing this properly’,” she said. Learning to love
the English landscape has been a way of connecting both with her adopted
homeland and with Indigenous ideas about the interrelation of life on
Earth.
This personal transformation was under
way when, in the summer of 2020, Feria-Tinta was asked to provide advice
for a case against a mining company that had begun exploration in
Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest. Spanning almost 5,000 hectares (12,000
acres), Los Cedros is home to an extraordinary variety of species – from
fungi and orchids to snails, jaguars and bears – many of which cannot
be found anywhere else.
Feria-Tinta had worked
on many cases involving mining in Latin America. But this one was
unusual because there were no people in the area where mining was to
take place – and therefore, no basis for a human rights claim. However,
it happened that in 2008, Ecuador had become the first country in the
world to recognise the rights of nature. Its constitution states that
“nature, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral
respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of
its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes”.
The
idea that nature could have legal rights has gathered pace in the 21st
century. Bolivia and Panama have followed Ecuador’s lead, while other
countries have passed laws awarding rights to natural entities. In 2017,
the government of New Zealand passed legislation which recognised the
Whanganui river as a legal person. In 2019, Bangladesh granted all its
rivers the same status as humans, empowering the National River
Conservation Commission to represent them.
These rights of nature cases
tend to focus on biodiversity, distinguishing them from strategic
climate litigation, which uses the law to hold states and corporations
to account for climate harm. But biodiversity and climate breakdown are
closely interrelated. Forests, rivers and oceans sustain human life and
absorb carbon emissions, even as rising temperatures threaten their
survival.
Awarding rights in principle is only
one part of the battle; these rights also have to be protected on the
ground. The Los Cedros case, which would be heard in the constitutional
court of Ecuador, was going to test this principle. The mining company’s
argument was that preventing them from going ahead would violate a
trade agreement between Ecuador and Canada. Feria-Tinta had been asked
to act as “amicus curiae”, providing expertise without acting
on behalf of either party.
As she worked on her brief, Feria-Tinta found
herself thinking much more broadly about what the law is actually for.
“Not that long ago, women were not considered legal persons,” she said.
“In Europe, abstract entities – corporations, robots – can end up having
rights. So what is the proper legal argument against a river or a
forest being a legal entity?”
In December
2021, Ecuador’s constitutional court delivered its verdict. The rights
of nature, the court said, were not mere rhetorical statements, but
“binding legal obligations”. The forest had won. It was a judgment that
showed what is possible for the worldwide rights of nature movement.
Los
Cedros has, for now, been preserved. But the outcome of such cases is
not always so clearcut, even after a positive court verdict. In 2017,
India’s Ganges river was recognised as a legal person, but by 2023
pollution had continued to the extent that most of its water is
undrinkable.
THE
notion of trees or rivers having rights may seem distant from the UK.
These ideas are most firmly established in countries with organised
Indigenous communities, who see the Earth as a “single, interconnected
organism”, as Feria-Tinta puts it in her book. “I suspect many British
judges would roll their eyes if you tried to argue a forest should have
rights,” said Will McCallum, co-executive director of Greenpeace UK. But
even in Britain, there have been some developments on this front.
A
few years after the Los Cedros case, an environmental group in Sussex
instructed Feria-Tinta to help them draft a charter for the river Ouse.
Like many other rivers in the UK, the Ouse is polluted with effluent and
wastewater. The charter they produced states that the Ouse is a living
entity with eight specific rights, including the right to flow and the
right to be pollution-free. In February 2025, Lewes district council
passed the charter, making the Ouse the first river in the country to
have legally recognised rights.
The charter isn’t binding, and the next
stage is for the council to work out how these rights can be
implemented. And yet seeing this happen in her adopted country was
emotional for Feria-Tinta. “I’ve come to love the rivers of England,
which have been on this island long before any form of human life,” she
said. “Rivers are places where civilisations began, and most people I
have met around here want nature to be cherished.”
The Ouse near Lewes, East Sussex.Photograph: Peter Cripps/Alamy
The
more cases she has worked on, the more Feria-Tinta has come to see
commonalities in how seemingly very different communities relate to
their natural environments. At the start of 2025, she finalised her
legal advice about Chester, the tree in Southend that the council
intended to chop down. She set out the council’s obligations on the
climate under the European convention on human rights.
As she drafted
the document, she found herself thinking about the Salween river in
Myanmar, where she had advised an Indigenous community fighting a dam
project some years earlier. Both the tree in Essex and the river in
Myanmar were seen by the authorities as expendable, rather than as
living entities valued by the people around them. “Whether it’s a single
tree, or a whole community depending on a river, what is at stake is
the future of humanity,” she told me.
A couple
of months later, on a blustery day in early spring, I met Feria-Tinta
in the village on the border of Surrey and Sussex where she now lives.
Mud squelched underfoot as we walked through woodland, stepping over
twisted tree roots, past banks of heather and marshy pools of water.
“Back in 2016, I was one of the pioneers doing this [work], but now it’s
become mainstream, and it’s a knowledge you can’t be without,” she said
excitedly, reaching out a hand to help me climb over a tree felled by a
recent storm. “We need everyone.”
The damage climate change will inflict on the world’s economy is likely to have been massively underestimated, according to new research by my colleagues and I which accounts for the full global reach of extreme weather and its aftermath.
To date, projections of how climate change will affect global gross
domestic product (GDP) have broadly suggested mild to moderate harm.
This in part has led to a lack of urgency in national efforts to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions.
However, these models often contain a fundamental flaw – they assume a
national economy is affected only by weather in that country. Any
impacts from weather events elsewhere, such as how flooding in one
country affects the food supply to another, are not incorporated into
the models.
Our new research sought to fix this. After including the global
repercussions of extreme weather into our models, the predicted harm to
global GDP became far worse than previously thought – affecting the
lives of people in every country on Earth.
New analysis shows how climate change will affect people in all countries.AP Photo/Ethan Swope
Weather shocks everywhere, all at once
Global warming affects economies in many ways.
The most obvious is damage from extreme weather. Droughts can cause
poor harvests, while storms and floods can cause widespread destruction
and disrupt the supply of goods. Recent research has also shown heatwaves, aggravated by climate change, have contributed to food inflation.
Most prior research predicts that even extreme warming of 4°C will
have only mild negative impacts on the global economy by the end of the
century – between 7% and 23%.
Such modelling is usually based on the effects of weather shocks in
the past. However, these shocks have typically been confined to a local
or regional scale, and balanced out by conditions elsewhere.
For example, in the past, South America might have been in drought,
but other parts of the world were getting good rainfall. So, South
America could rely on imports of agricultural products from other
countries to fill domestic shortfalls and prevent spikes in food prices.
But future climate change will increase the risk of weather shocks
occurring simultaneously across countries and more persistently over
time. This will disrupt the networks producing and delivering goods,
compromise trade and limit the extent to which countries can help each
other.
International trade is fundamental to the global economic production.
So, our research examined how a country’s future economic growth would
be influenced by weather conditions everywhere else in the world.
International trade is fundamental to the global economic production.James Gourley/AAP
What did we find?
One thing was immediately clear: a warm year across the planet causes lower global growth.
We corrected three leading models to account for the effects of
global weather on national economies, then averaged out their results.
Our analysis focused on global GDP per capita – in other words, the
world’s economic output divided by its population.
We found if the Earth warms by more than 3°C by the end of the
century, the estimated harm to the global economy jumped from an average
of 11% (under previous modelling assumptions) to 40% (under our
modelling assumptions). This level of damage could devastate livelihoods
in large parts of the world.
Previous models have asserted economies in cold parts of the world, such as Russia and Northern Europe, will benefit from
warmer global temperatures. However, we found the impact on the global
economy was so large, all countries will be badly affected.
A warm year across the planet causes lower global growth. Pictured: wilted corn crops during drought.wahyusyaban/Shutterstock
Costs vs benefits
Reducing emissions leads to short-term economic costs. These must be
balanced against the long-term benefits of avoiding dangerous climate
change.
Recent economic modelling has suggested this balance would be struck by reducing emissions at a rate that allows Earth to heat by 2.7°C.
This is close to Earth’s current warming trajectory.
But it is far higher than the goals of the Paris Agreement, and global
warming limits recommended by climate scientists. It is also based on
the flawed assumptions discussed above.
Under our new research, the optimal amount of global warming,
balancing short-term costs with long-term benefits, is 1.7°C – a figure
broadly consistent with the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious target.
Our new research shows previous forecasts of how such warming will
affect the global economy have been far too optimistic. It adds to otherrecent evidence suggesting the economic impacts of climate change has been badly underestimated.
Clearly, Earth’s current emissions trajectory risks our future and
that of our children. The sooner humanity grasps the calamities in store
under severe climate change, the sooner we can change course to avoid
it.
