Climate litigation ready for takeoff in China
Newsletter #34
Photo by Luna Zhang on Unsplash
This newsletter is a bit late, and shorter than usual due to a combination of technical issues and work demands.
Highlights from the Sustainability Agenda
The main items are climate litigation looks set to take off in China, the upcoming UN 2023 Water Conference next week, and the IPCC Sixth Assessment Synthesis due out on Monday.
China gets a green light to bring climate litigation cases
This is big. Last month a decision from China’s Supreme People’s Court that could encourage China’s public interest prosecutors to add climate cases to the thousands of environment challenges they bring every year.
The backstory dates to 2015 where public interest prosecutors in 13 provincial areas were authorised to initiate public interest litigation, leading to over 2,000 cases in areas ranging from environmental protection to food and drug safety.
In 2017 the right to launch such litigation was enshrined in Chinese law, and by end-2018 over 3,000 km² of damaged lands and water sources were restored, with over 10,000 polluted facilities ordered to be rectified or closed.
Why this new guidance which came out last month is a milestone:
first document stating that judicial services should play a role in supporting carbon neutrality efforts (China’s commitment is for 2060)
signals the dedication of China’s judiciaries to boost climate litigation, using the power of the law to safeguard the achievement of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.
According to UK-based NGO Client Earth:
The guidance is advanced by global standards, in the sense that it recognizes that many types of disputes could be relevant to addressing climate change. The document itself specifies 17 types of climate-related cases and was also coupled with the release of 11 case examples.
The relevant cases fall into categories such as restructuring of heavy industry, establishing a low-carbon energy system, improving the carbon market.
Environment is a big part of China’s global governance strategy
Global governance refers to the rules, norms, and institutions that regulate international cooperation and anyone who been at the UN and its agencies in recent years will attest to the fact that China has become a big player, known not just for leadership of certain agencies such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, but also for subtler details such the respect commanded by the Chinese negotiating teams at the big climate and biodiversity COPs for their technical competence and rigour.
This is an interesting Twitter thread from Yale scholar Moritz Rudolf about the latest Chinese priorities for international norm setting.
IPCC report coming Monday
The Synthesis of the Sixth Assessment Report is being launched on Monday - and representatives of the world’s governments have spent the week in Switzerland finalizing a summary text.
In case you’re asking yourself why this matters, after all the IPCC released 3 parts of its mega report in 2021-2022 (catch up on the highlights of the Adaptation and Mitigation reports from the with our podcasts from last year).
The world won’t hear from the IPCC again until likely 2027-2028.
The Sixth Assessment has set the tone for climate action in recent years, starting with the 1.5 C Special Report in 2018 which drove the emergence of movements such as Fridays for Future and Greta’s climate strike.
The reports in 2021-22 notably marked the coming of age of attribution science, which links warming to extreme weather and climate disasters, and this has provided the evidence base for a big spike in climate litigation.
The story of water between 2 UN conferences
Next week is the UN 2023 Water Conference - believe it or not the first such conference at the UN in nearly half a decade. The last one took place in Mar del Plata in Argentina in 1977, when the world was a very different place. The IPCC did not yet exist, the US had not recognized the People’s Republic of China and the only multilateral environmental Convention that existed was the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.
Here’s a paper from the new journal Nature Water that retraces the story of water between those 2 conferences.
A big milestone was the 2010 UN General Assembly resolution recognizing water and sanitation as a human right. However, the paper notes that this recognition has
(…) not yet been sufficient to ensure clean water for all at an affordable price, including the impoverished, marginalized, many Indigenous peoples15 and those in remote locations in high and low-income countries16,17.
Colonization legacies within law and practices have left many low-income countries with water ‘ownership’ patterns tied to land ownership18 that impede water access and sharing.
What else I’m reading
China tech analyst Dan Wang’s annual newsletter from China is always a good read. This year’s edition features an account of how he took refuge from lockdown Shanghai to the green hills and mountains of Yunnan province in the southwest. Which lead to some deeper reflections on the differences between the view from the centre and the view from the margins. And this:
(…) imperial China had its most splendid cultural flourishing when the polity was most fragmented—during times that carry faintly apocalyptic names like the Warring States period, when Confucianism and Daoism came into shape—and that it experienced its worst political decay after continuous centralization, whether Ming or Qing.
As France spirals deeper into political crisis and social chaos, harking back to the intellectual ferment of those far-off days is really a solace.