TY - CHAP
T1 - The role of science in climate litigation
AU - de Augustinis, Juliana
PY - 2025/6/5
Y1 - 2025/6/5
N2 - As the climate crisis intensifies, climate litigation challenging government failures continues to evolve across jurisdictions, highlighting the crucial role of scientific evidence in shaping judicial decisions. Nevertheless, judicial interplay with climate data is still insufficiently explored from Global South perspectives and systematic approaches. This chapter addresses this gap by, first, investigating judicial approaches to climate science observed in Brazil, a jurisdiction with potential for innovation and diverse ongoing climate cases with likely significant public impacts. Further, the contribution compares the Brazilian insights with the trends identified through a structured content analysis of forty-nine rulings judged between 2015 and 2022 in fourteen countries. On the one hand, the systematic analysis reveals that while judgments often cited scientific information about mitigation, courts rarely employed methods like appointing committees of experts, commissioning expert reports, or conducting reliability tests to assess qualitative aspects of the evidence, such as trustworthiness and uncertainty. In addition, the comparison with Brazilian climate cases draws attention to the frequent use of procedural institutes such as amicus curiae and public hearings as tools to gather and understand scientific evidence. The study highlights the potential of such instruments as mechanisms for enhancing judicial capacities when dealing with climate science. Additionally, it paves the way for future research on the evolving use of these mechanisms in upcoming Brazilian climate litigation decisions.
AB - As the climate crisis intensifies, climate litigation challenging government failures continues to evolve across jurisdictions, highlighting the crucial role of scientific evidence in shaping judicial decisions. Nevertheless, judicial interplay with climate data is still insufficiently explored from Global South perspectives and systematic approaches. This chapter addresses this gap by, first, investigating judicial approaches to climate science observed in Brazil, a jurisdiction with potential for innovation and diverse ongoing climate cases with likely significant public impacts. Further, the contribution compares the Brazilian insights with the trends identified through a structured content analysis of forty-nine rulings judged between 2015 and 2022 in fourteen countries. On the one hand, the systematic analysis reveals that while judgments often cited scientific information about mitigation, courts rarely employed methods like appointing committees of experts, commissioning expert reports, or conducting reliability tests to assess qualitative aspects of the evidence, such as trustworthiness and uncertainty. In addition, the comparison with Brazilian climate cases draws attention to the frequent use of procedural institutes such as amicus curiae and public hearings as tools to gather and understand scientific evidence. The study highlights the potential of such instruments as mechanisms for enhancing judicial capacities when dealing with climate science. Additionally, it paves the way for future research on the evolving use of these mechanisms in upcoming Brazilian climate litigation decisions.
U2 - 10.1163/9789004690974_005
DO - 10.1163/9789004690974_005
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9789004690813
T3 - International environmental law
SP - 85
EP - 108
BT - Brazil and climate justice
A2 - Tigre, Maria Antonia
A2 - Rocha, Armando
A2 - Winter de Carvalho, Délton
PB - Brill
CY - Leiden
ER -