Greening the European Courts: Risks and Opportunities of Transnational Climate Litigation
Angelo Giorgio Cuconato
More and more highly CO2-emitting European firms are being sued to request compensation for losses and damages (L&D) associated with climate change. Yet, the socio-economic threats and opportunities associated with such court cases are unknown. The project combines insights from economic sociology, legal philosophy, and the anthropology of climate change to investigate the broad socio-economic consequences of transnational climate litigations against highly CO2-emitting European firms. By focusing on three court case studies, it first reconstructs how such climate litigations challenge the separation of each of the main social systems involved in the suit, i.e., law, science, and economics. Secondly, ethnographic approaches and qualitative interviews are combined to investigate the perspectives of the three stakeholders involved in the litigation: the plaintiffs who suffered L&D emerging in natural disasters co-caused by climate change; a network of NGOs supporting the plaintiffs, and the litigated firm required to compensate for the plaintiffs’ L&D. Ultimately, I argue that climate litigations lead to specific socio-economic impacts that lie beyond the attempts of improving climate law.