Introduction

The volume Climate Litigation and Vulnerabilities: Global South Perspectives proceeds from the point of departure that prevailing climate chaos disproportionately affects people and environments in countries in the Global South that have contributed the least to the climate crisis. To frame the volume, this chapter offers novel insights on vulnerability, injustice, and intersectionality in climate litigation in the Global South, including with reference to experiences in Brazil, India, and South Africa. Vulnerability accounts for how climate change disproportionately affects the most vulnerable and least responsible among us, the Global South. Intersectionality exposes how gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and other social conditions interact to inform and influence climate injustice. Then, after summarising the chapters within this volume, the chapter concludes that litigation is a plausible if insufficient mechanism for confronting universal and particularised vulnerability to climate change, accounting for intersectionality, and mitigating entrenched inequalities.