Developing a Research Agenda for Climate Litigation

Climate litigation has dramatically increased around the world. Between 2016-2019, more than 120 cases were filed each year around the world, many brought against governments or private corporations to spur climate action. In the U.S. alone, for example, more than two dozen lawsuits have been filed by states and municipalities against fossil fuel companies seeking compensation for climate damages. Climate litigation relies on scientific evidence to inform legal arguments. This work characterizes the research gaps and opportunities to inform climate ligation. This work is informed by discussions at a November 2020 workshop on litigation-relevant research gaps and opportunities as well as by a set of semi-structured interviews we conducted with 22 legal scholars and practitioners in March and April 2021. Interviews were coded using a grounded theory approach. Our findings are not intended to be comprehensive, but rather illustrative of the significant and growing unmet need for scientists across climate-related disciplines to do litigation-relevant research. We focus on research related to lawsuits against governments and fossil fuel companies, the defendants in the vast majority of cases. This paper reviews the nexus of science and climate litigation, existing research that has informed climate litigation, and outlines key areas for future research that would be highly relevant to climate litigation. Results from the qualitative analysis show that areas for future research include: Linking physical impacts to public/private harm with greater specificity, estimating monetary/financial effects of climate change-related impacts, and more end-to-end studies linking emitters to impacts. This research also explores research gaps in ways to define mitigation obligations for governments and corporate actors and scientific approaches to corporate and government obligations.