Time and narrative in climate litigation: Reflections on <i>Pabai v Commonwealth of Australia</i>

Time is a challenge for applicants in negligence-based climate litigation. Climate change harm is a temporally complex phenomenon that demands attention to the past, present and future, including histories of colonialism. Negligence law, however, demands temporal boundaries be drawn in order, among other things, to place limits on the scope and content of one person’s duty to be careful of another. Decisions regarding what time frames are relevant to an assessment of responsibility for climate harms are neither inevitable nor neutral. They have political and material implications for how law deals with historical legacies. This article explores how the temporal narrative of climate change in Pabai , and specifically the applicants’ claims regarding the existence of Commonwealth duties of care, challenged conventional boundaries of negligence law, while simultaneously being critical to the expressivist messaging of the case.