Climate-washing cases against corporates ‘rapidly’ expanding

Climate litigation against companies is on the rise, particularly outside of the US, with climate-washing cases one of the most rapidly expanding areas of litigation. This is according to analysis by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Its report, Global trends in climate change litigation: 2024 snapshot, notes that historically, the vast majority of climate cases have been filed against governments. This remains true in 2023, but there is a split between cases filed in the US – the jurisdiction with the largest overall number of cases – and those filed elsewhere. In the US, just 15% of cases were filed against companies, but for cases in the rest of the world, around 40% of cases involved companies. The report points out that about 230 climate-aligned lawsuits have been initiated against corporations and trade associations since 2015, with more than two-thirds filed since 2020. The report defines these cases as examples of strategic litigation that appear to seek to advance a broader climate action agenda. In 2023, 47 new climate-washing cases were filed against companies and governments, with “more than 140 such cases filed to date on climate washing, making this one of the most rapidly expanding areas of litigation”. The report also highlights that most decided climate-washing cases have confirmed that communications were misleading. More than half of the nearly 140 climate-washing cases reviewed between 2016 and 2023 have reached official decisions, with 54 of these 77 cases concluded in favour of the claimant. There were more than 30 cases worldwide in 2023 seeking to hold companies accountable for climate-related harm allegedly caused by their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. The report also identified six so-called ‘turning off the taps’ cases, which challenge the flow of finance to projects and activities that are not aligned with climate action, with 33 such cases having been filed since 2015. There were nearly 50 cases filed in 2023 that were not aligned with climate goals, including backlash litigation against ESG policies, challenging the incorporation of climate risk in financial decision making. “These cases also included strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) suits against NGOs and shareholder activists that seek to deter them from pursuing climate agendas. Non-aligned cases also included just transition cases, which challenge the distributional impacts of climate policy and green versus green cases, which concern potential trade-offs between climate and biodiversity or other environmental aims,” the report said. It highlighted that climate litigation cases have continued to spread to new countries, with cases filed for the first time in Panama and Portugal, bringing the total number of countries in which climate cases have been recorded to 55. In addition, climate litigation cases in the Global South are increasing and gaining more attention, with over 200 climate cases from these countries recorded in the global database, comprising around 8% of all cases. While just 5% of climate cases are before international courts, many of these cases have significant potential to influence domestic proceedings, said the report. For example, the UK’s Supreme Court very recently ruled a local council should have considered the full climate impact of burning oil from new wells. The US had the highest overall number of litigation cases filed in 2023 with 129, followed by the UK (24), Brazil (ten), Germany (seven) and Australia (six). The US remains the country with the highest number of documented climate cases, with 1,745 cases in total, followed by Australia, where 132 cases have been identified, although only six new cases filed in 2023 have been recorded so far. The report concludes that “whether climate litigation is advancing or hindering climate action remains difficult to determine. Some types of cases, such as government framework cases, have already had lasting impacts on domestic climate governance. However, the long-term implications of other case types, such as climate-washing cases, remain unclear, despite the relatively high levels of ‘successful’ cases in the courtroom.” The analysis for the report was based on a dataset containing 2,666 climate litigation cases compiled by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Around 70% of these cases have been filed since 2015, the year the Paris Agreement was adopted. 233 of these cases were filed in 2023.

Climate-washing cases against corporates ‘rapidly’ expanding

Report finds

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