Climate Litigation before International Courts Conclusive Remarks on a Comparative Study

This chapter builds on the previous chapters in this book and provides concluding remarks on international climate litigation. A comparative narrative is created around the agents behind climate litigation, resulting from access to court rules and the fragmentation and cross-interpretation legal phenomena affecting a very diversified set of legal grounds in international climate cases. This narrative is built on a systematised summary of the main findings on existing environmental and climate cases before the United Nations system – including the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and human rights bodies – the African, European, and Inter-American human rights regional systems, and the Court of Justice of the European Union. We conclude that regional cultural contexts are determinant factors in the outcomes of legal cases, with Latin American and African systems emphasising collective rights, while the European approach remains individual-centred. The upcoming ICJ advisory opinion on climate change will be a critical moment in determining how these contrasting worldviews will be reconciled on a global scale.