This article offers a comprehensive analysis of rights-based climate litigation aimed at addressing climate change-induced loss and damage, underlining its potential as a transformative force amid the minimal progress towards a coordinated global response on this topic. It builds on literature highlighting the potential of rights-based climate litigation to fill the gap in accountability for climate change and its consequences, noting that research to date has not systematically analyzed the remedies that plaintiffs have sought or secured. By focusing on remedy claims, this study illuminates the capacity and the limitations of such litigation to unlock redress for loss and damage while highlighting its reciprocal relationship with international negotiations. This synergy implies a promising trajectory towards a more equitable climate governance framework, despite the complexities and challenges inherent in this rapidly evolving field.

After more than three decades of negotiations, the international response to climate change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) appears to have come full circle. At COP27, parties to the UNFCCC agreed to establish a multilateral fund to address loss and damage from global temperature rise, an idea that was initially put forward by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the early 1990s. Employing a historical critique, which draws upon archival and doctrinal research and interviews with key informants who participated in the early days of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change, this article examines the AOSIS proposal in its wider historical context, and provides reflections for the renewed endeavour to negotiate a multilateral fund on loss and damage, in particular with a view to achieving justice for climate victims.

Les changements climatiques occupent une place centrale en gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement. Vu l'envergure des défis à résoudre, la plus récente Conférence des Parties (CdP) de la Convention-cadre des Nations Unies sur les changements climatiques (CCNUCC), la CdP-27, faisait face à de grandes attentes. Ce court article offre un bilan critique de la CdP-27. L'article présente une synthèse des résultats de cette CdP en étudiant quatre volets principaux, soit l'atténuation des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES), l'augmentation du financement climatique, l'adaptation aux changements climatiques et les pertes et préjudices. Il dresse ainsi un portait des résultats de la CdP-27 au regard des attentes qui avaient été établies au préalable par les parties prenantes. L'article se conclut par une analyse prospective des principaux enjeux à suivre d'ici la CdP-28 et au-delà. Il permet ainsi de faire le point sur les plus récents développements, d’éclairer les avancées à venir et de contribuer aux discussions sur la gouvernance mondiale du climat.

There seem to be no answers to resolve the deadlock between the Global North and the Global South on liability and compensation for loss and damage from climate change. Revisiting the original story of international environmental law from the Stockholm Conference of 1972 may help us address these historical tensions. In doing so, this article unveils the genesis of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) from the Stockholm Conference as an alternative consciousness centred around the aspirations of the Global South. Indira Gandhi's plenary address at Stockholm outlined the Global South's position on environmental issues, which greatly influenced early TWAIL scholarship in the 1980s. Locating TWAIL's origins at Stockholm allows us to: (1) chart the environmental concerns of the Global South till date; (2) infer its evolved view on the “development versus environment” debate; and (3) understand the role of future TWAIL scholarship in challenging the enduring and structural limitations of international environmental law, especially in future deliberations on loss and damage.

This article examines the complex risks, costs and rewards of large-scale private law climate litigation – the climate litigation ‘holy grail’. It argues that while these cases undoubtedly have heroic aspects, their impacts can be complex or difficult to understand. It uses overlapping theories of metaphor and narrative in law, and theories of private law, to make some critical observations about these cases. Distilling some core reflections from the grail legends, the article argues that success in these cases requires a nuanced understanding of victory and defeat, and more careful thinking about the character, aims, and effect of these pieces of litigation. These stories inspire constant reflection as to what the metaphor of the ‘holy grail’ might mean in this context, and the role that these cases play in the development of a narrative about climate litigation.

This article examines the impact of the Paris Agreement on the human rights of communities who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic warming because of their geographical location, their spiritual and cultural connections with land and the wider environment, and their histories of colonialism, dispossession and other forms of exploitation. It focuses on two groups: forest dwellers, and inhabitants of small island developing states who are in danger of inundation as a result of rising sea levels. The Paris Agreement on climate change includes stand-alone articles on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), and loss and damage. The main argument in this article is that the inclusion of human rights in the Preamble to the Paris Agreement is a step forward, but is incommensurate with the scale and urgency of climate change.

Discourses on ‘climate migration’ have played an instrumental role in initiating negotiations on loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Yet, to date, the framing of climate migration has not been clear: it has been considered as a tool for reducing loss and damage (hence essentially a form of adaptation) or, alternatively, as a source of loss and damage for the migrants or for other concerned communities. Moreover, proposed approaches to address climate migration as a form of loss and damage have extended beyond compensation, and remain controversial among developed nations. In the highly politicized field of migration governance, however, this article submits that policy support and guidance in addressing loss and damage could prompt dangerous forms of political interference, such as the imposition of a Western objective of containing migrants to the Global South. It is thus suggested that top-down migration policies may not help vulnerable nations who face loss and damage in the context of climate migration.