ABSTRACT
Climate litigation is usually understood as cases before judicial and quasi-judicial bodies that involve substantive issues of climate change science, policy or law. Climate litigation can have an impact on the national legal framework and its implementation, particularly in the aspect of climate change mitigation. Some of the most important climate litigation rulings of recent years – the Urgenda III judgement and the Neubauer decision – have increased the national obligations in the field of greenhouse gas reduction of the Netherlands and Germany, respectively. The impact of the indicated rulings on climate law lies, among other things, in overcoming the ‘drop-in-the-ocean problem’. This problem is twofold. Firstly, since climate change is a global process caused by many actors, individual responsibility (of a specific state or economic actor) for causing it is excluded. Secondly, since climate change is a global process, even if the individual responsibility of a specific actor were to be accepted, it cannot consist of an obligation to reduce national emissions, as such a reduction would not solve the problem. The Dutch Supreme Court transcended the drop-in-the-ocean problem by pointing to state responsibility arising from the state's contribution to climate change. The German Constitutional Court made this problem (the state's contribution to climate change) irrelevant by pointing to the objective responsibility of the state to protect the rights of individuals threatened by climate change, which is independent of who causes it. The most relevant court decisions in the field of climate litigation indicate that climate change is a global problem and not a local (national) or cross-border problem. Its solution, therefore, cannot consist only of an international response, but neither can it consist of a state protecting only its own territory and population.
