CLIMATE LITIGATION AS A REGULATORY COMPLIANCE TOOL: EXPANDING STATE AND CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY

The challenge of climate change poses significant regulatory and governance issues which are not limited to the conventional environmental law enforcement systems. International systems like the Paris Agreement set high mitigation levels but their success is heavily grounded on national implementation and accountability systems. Here, climate litigation has become one of the growing weapons of enforcement of regulatory compliance and increase of state and corporate responsibility. This study looking at climate litigation as a doctrinal and normative process that converts aspirational climate pledges into enforceable legal requirements. Through a qualitative approach to the doctrines, the research examines prominent cases of the judicial courts, international legal tools, and legal arguments to understand how the judicial courts perceive the constitutional provisions, statutory requirements, and human rights provisions in climate-related cases. Close emphasis is put on landmark cases like Urgenda Foundation v. The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled in the Netherlands v. Milieudefensie et al. and the District Court of The Hague ruled in Royal Dutch Shell v. Milieudefensie et al. which exemplify the increase in the judicial control over governmental climate policy and corporate emissions strategies. The results show that climate litigation acts as a supplementary regulatory compliance tool through three main directions, clarifying legal responsibilities, strengthening the correlation between national regulations and international climate policies, and creating wider corporate standards of care based on the human rights and due diligence principles. Climate change is becoming a justiciable matter by the courts, which reduces the distance between political obligations and legal responsibility. Litigation on the corporate level helps to create the climate-related governance through the impact on the reduction of emissions, disclosure of risks, and long-term sustainability planning. According to this study the climate litigation is a trend in environmental governance with a major change towards polycentric and multi-level accountability. In spite of institutional and procedural constraints on judicial intervention, judicial intervention is essential to sealing the enforcement gaps and supporting the legal framework of climate responsibility. Finally, climate litigation should not be viewed as a simple response-driven system of dispute resolution, but a new regulatory tool that is transforming the scope of state and corporate climate responsibility