The roundtable was co-convened by Professor Megan Bowman (Director of the Centre for Climate Law & Governance) and Dr Jenny Driscoll (School of Education, Communication & Society) of King’s College London, and involved a multidisciplinary team comprising external collaborators from Generations Together, Our Children’s Trust (OCT) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) together with Law School colleagues Dr Emily Barritt (Transnational Law Institute), Dr Rosana Garciandia Garmendia and Professor Holger Hestermeyer (CIGAD), and PhD student Franka Pues. The project is funded by a King’s Climate & Sustainability Seed Grant.
The roundtable acknowledged that the climate crisis demands clear and urgent action, and discussed the legal triumphs in youth-led litigation, such as Judge Kathy Seeley's groundbreaking 2023 decision in favour of sixteen young plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana that affirmed their constitutional rights to a clean and healthy environment. Moreover, just days after the roundtable, two landmark ‘age related’ climate cases were decided by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on 9 April. In Duarte Agostinho and Others v Portugal and 32 Others, the Plaintiffs were a group of Portuguese children and young adults who claimed that 32 governments were not acting sufficiently to address climate change, which poses risk to their lives and wellbeing. Frustratingly, the substantive merits of the case were not heard because the ECHR held the case to be inadmissible on procedural grounds regarding the need to first exhaust local remedies. However, the contemporaneous case of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland brought by a group of elderly Swiss women did proceed to hearing, and the ECHR held that the Swiss government’s failure to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions is a violation of human rights. Arguably, that case has now set a benchmark for all European countries to urgently align national efforts to 1.5 degrees Celsius; an outcome that will have implications for children’s rights and youth-led litigation. Indeed, impacts on youth and future generations were acknowledged explicitly by the ECHR in the KlimaSeniorinnen case: it found, amongst other things, that ‘a disproportionate blame on future generations’ must be avoided so measures must be implemented in ‘good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner’. Not surprisingly, the KlimaSeniorinnen decision has been described by the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), which supported the Duarte youth case, as ‘a massive win for all generations!’
Several key players in these landmark cases were also participants in the youth litigation roundtable at King’s College London. In a lively and frank discussion under the Chatham House Rule, roundtable participants discussed legal approaches for children’s justice and identified important avenues for future litigation. At the centre of discussions was the concept of intergenerational justice when advocating for the rights of children and future generations. The participants also recognised that collective action and strategic advocacy are necessary to enable safeguarding and securing of these rights. In the words of one participant: ‘We are so short of time now that we need as many players as possible on the field, playing together, talking to each other, and allowing each other to pass the ball’.
On this point, Professor Bowman highlighted that a key moment of the day was discussion of the meaning of success when litigating children’s rights in the context of climate change. ‘Due to this roundtable, I am now convinced of the rather unorthodox view that going to court should no longer be considered as a last resort but rather as the first line of defence’, she said. ‘Children do not have suffrage; they are too young to vote. Yet for this same reason they will be impacted harder and for longer than the adult politicians and decision-makers who are failing to protect them. In the context of ongoing existential crisis, climate litigation can serve a powerful function as a relational healing space in which adults communicate to children that they care enough to take action regardless of the outcome in an individual case’.
Indeed, timing is everything. Two reports from 2021 highlight the importance and urgency of addressing the detrimental effects of climate change on young people and children. UNICEF stated that almost half of the world’s 2.2 billion children are already ‘at extremely high risk’ from the impacts of climate change and pollution. A comprehensive global study published in the Lancet medical journal titled ‘Climate Anxiety in Children and Young people and their Beliefs about Governmental Responses to Climate Change: A global survey’ found that ‘climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal’ with the related publication ‘Young People’s Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury: A Global Phenomenon’ specifying that nearly six out of ten young people aged between 16-25 were worried about the effects of climate change and four out of ten respondents felt that concerns about the climate emergency and their future has encouraged hesitancy about having children.
Importantly, this project on youth-led climate litigation links with other projects in the Law School on the related issue of the Rights of Nature. In 2018, young litigants won their case against the Colombian government to halt deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in the Future Generations v Minister for the Environment (Demanda Generaciones Futuras v. Minambiente) judgment (2018). Dr Emily Barritt, Co-director of the Transnational Law Institute (TLI) co-produced a short film Sentinels, highlighting the key issues regarding that judgement and the Rights of Nature movement. Similarly, under the leadership of Sue Willman (Acting Director of Clinical Legal Education and Supervising Solicitor), the King’s Legal Clinic launched a student-led 'Rights of Nature Toolkit: How to Protect Rivers in England and Wales’ in January 2024 as the first ‘applied rights of nature’ guide to cover rivers in the UK.
The Law School will continue to provide impactful research and collaborative engagement in these emerging areas of youth climate litigation and rights of nature. To this end, next steps in the youth climate litigation project include publishing a concise outcome report of roundtable discussions and recommendations that can help to inform litigation approaches, and holding a follow up event to embed and extend an emerging international community of experts in the fields of law, children’s rights and sustainability. The aim is to facilitate a coordinated and collaborative approach and to light a beacon of hope in the ongoing climate crisis.