Climate rights: a spatial framework for environmental action

In a rapidly warming world, civil society is increasingly turning to courts to pursue climate justice and land rights. Against the background of this “rights turn,” this article explores the intersections of legal processes, artistic research, and policy frameworks and their repercussions for exposing environmental destruction and ecocide in legal contexts. We consider how artists have engaged with law by proposing alternative forums as a form of institutional critique and the rise of artistic research as investigative practice, before arguing that new investigative methodologies and spatial frameworks are urgently needed to pursue climate justice through the courts. By way of example, we introduce the “Climate Rights” project, which demonstrates how arts-driven visual and spatial analysis and participatory methods can be put to work in assisting frontline communities–most recently, in cases fighting “green colonialism” in Sápmi. In contextualising this work, we point to how the climate-culture-policy nexus of the green transition in Europe might actually undermine the territorial and cultural rights of minority and Indigenous communities. Our position is to advocate for collective work, as well as progressive climate policies, that will prioritises environmental justice over the neoliberalisation of nature and ensure accountability for climate action.