Description
While governmental action is found to fail to deliver on its climate objectives, climate litigation has emerged as a new strategy used by a diversity of international actors to move climate ambition forward. Climate litigation is expected to produce effects beyond climate protection, to include broader environmental justice stakes, including giving more voice to minorities and rebalancing climate governance. This communication centres on youth as actors of international climate litigation cases and how they shape this environmental justice shift. This research analyses three elements: (i) an inventory of all cases that have included youth as claimants; (ii) assessment of their results or ongoing developments; (iii) comparing these to the characteristics of other international climate litigation cases. To do so, it builds on a broader inter-disciplinary research project, the CLAIM (2025-2030) research project on international climate litigation cases brought by marginalized actors.. By zooming on youth, the paper identifies the specificities of this category of international actors, with regards to their use of legal and communication tools to influence climate policy, and discusses to which extend they are able to address current accountability imbalances in global climate governance for more environmental justice.
