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2 - Climate Change Litigation in Domestic Courts and Human Rights Commissions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2019

Randall S. Abate
Affiliation:
Monmouth University, New Jersey
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Summary

Creative climate change litigation has raised awareness of the human rights dimensions of climate change impacts and highlighted the deficiencies of the existing domestic and international regulatory regimes to address climate change. The Inuit petition, submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2005, marked the beginning of this movement to hold public and private actors accountable for their contributions to climate change impacts and their failure to act (or at least to act adequately) to address the problem. A line of public nuisance cases was pending in US courts while the Inuit awaited the decision on its petition. This line of cases initially sought injunctive relief for climate change mitigation, but subsequently sought damages from private companies for their greenhouse gas emissions. The Kivalina case sparked the climate justice movement in this regard, where a small and remote Native Alaskan community sought damages under a public nuisance theory for the cost of relocation as a result of severe coastal erosion that caused its homeland to become imminently uninhabitable.

Type
Chapter
Information
Climate Change and the Voiceless
Protecting Future Generations, Wildlife, and Natural Resources
, pp. 17 - 42
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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