The news
South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the lack of legally binding targets for reducing carbon emissions violates the rights of future generations to be protected from climate change. The court ordered the government to draw up concrete plans for the period through 2049.
Climate activists won a partial victory after the court ruled that the country’s failure to specify targets for the years 2031-2050 – when it hopes to achieve carbon neutrality – placed an “undue burden” on future generations.
However, the court did not find that the government had met the target of reducing CO2 emissions by 35% from 2018 levels by 2030. The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ requests for more specific implementation plans.
SIGNALS
Ruling could be catalyst for further climate action in Asia
The verdict is the first of its kind in Asiaclimate activists said, and there are hopes it could set a precedent for similar initiatives, including in Japan, where plaintiffs recently filed a lawsuit against 10 thermal energy companies and called on the government to commit to stronger emission reduction plans. Although Japan has a less active civil society and weaker judiciary than South Korea, their climate policies are similarand Japan does not want to lag behind its neighbor, another climate advocate told Dialogue Earth. Asia is responsible for almost all global growth in emissionsMainly due to rapid economic development and industrialization, this poses a major challenge in the global fight against climate change, a columnist argued in Forbes.
The ‘legal battle’ in climate lawsuits
The youngest plaintiff in the South Korean case was a 20-week-old embryo, and a lawyer told Agence France-Presse that her age helped illustrate people’s desperation for change. The latest wave of climate lawsuits has been marked by a “rights turn” — the use of human rights and constitutional arguments by plaintiffs — while the geographic scope, once based primarily on the U.S., has shifted to Europe, Climate Action Europe wrote. That said, lawsuits in the U.S. — even those that have been dismissed — have inspired copycat efforts around the world, including in Colombia, Germany and Belgium, a legal expert told Politico’s E&E News after the youths’ landmark case was dismissed in May.