Presentation short abstract

Drawing on the court case KlimaSeniorinnen vs Switzerland at ECtHR, I examine the political ecology of climate litigation against states. I show how the court produced a contradictory judgment and I propose asset stranding litigation as a more meaningful path for climate litigation against states.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on the court case KlimaSeniorinnen vs Switzerland at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR 53600/20), I examine the political ecology of climate litigation against states – climate movement’s latest and last hope to address runaway climate change. Klimaseniorinnen v. Switzerland is notable not only because the ECtHR recognized climate mitigation as a human rights issue, but also because it set a precedent by endorsing a national carbon budget in combination with an extraterritorial, consumption-based approach to state responsibility. Given that Switzerland has already exhausted its carbon budget (or is about to), the court has effectively produced a contradictory judgment. I show how this judgment can only be reconciled with a carbon budget if the court 1) accepts an overreliance on offsets and carbon dioxide removal which would lead to further climate delay and deterrence, or 2) effectively demands a political economic transformation far beyond the temporality and scale of economic lockdowns imposed during COVID-19. I highlight how these issues have been largely sidelined in the heated public debate that ensued after the judgment and I show how environmental NGOs try to navigate these contradictions by asking the Swiss government to repay its carbon debt to the Global South through climate mitigation finance and projects abroad. I conclude by proposing that a more meaningful path for climate litigation in the era of overshoot climate politics (Malm and Carton 2024) against states could be centered around the litigation of fossil fuel asset stranding.