New Article on Climate Science and Natural Resource Litigation – Climate Law Blog

Climate change has major implications for the sustainable use and conservation of natural resources. Rapid and unprecedented changes in bioclimatic conditions can significantly affect the integrity, productivity, and carrying capacity of ecological systems that provide essential resources such as food, timber, and fresh water. Many natural systems are already under severe stress at current levels of climate change and may be unable to sustain historical use patterns. Resource management decisions can also exacerbate or mitigate climate change by affecting the balance of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is critically important that resource managers account for these considerations in the environmental and scientific assessments underpinning their management decisions.

Climate Science and Natural Resource Litigation, written by the Sabin Center’s non-resident  fellow Jessica Wentz, evaluates the legal and scientific basis for recognizing obligations on the part of resource management agencies to assess and respond to climate change across different types of management decisions.  It draws insights from a survey of U.S. litigation involving forests, fisheries, rangelands, and freshwater resources, examining how litigants framed the legal and scientific arguments in these cases, and how courts interpreted agency obligations to engage with climate science pursuant to existing legal mandates for sustainable use, conservation, and science-based decision-making. One key goal of this analysis is to facilitate understanding of how scientific information can be used in legal settings to address the “climate action gap” in natural resource management.

The surveyed cases suggest that litigation has been somewhat successful in driving more rigorous assessments of climate change and its implications for management decisions. However, agencies still frequently conclude that climate impacts are too uncertain or insignificant to warrant a response, and courts will generally defer to such conclusions unless plaintiffs can demonstrate that the agency has overlooked or arbitrarily dismissed scientific information that provides actionable insights for the decision under review. This underscores the importance of collaboration between resource managers, legal advocates, and scientists to develop, disseminate, and communicate scientific information that can meaningfully inform resource management decisions.

The article concludes with reflections on the surveyed cases, and insights on how legal and scientific actors can help promote deeper engagement with climate science in the courtroom as well as the broader field of natural resource management. One key recommendation is that agencies and courts should not set the bar of proof too high for climate impact assessments and adaptation, i.e., agencies should not ignore foreseeable climate impacts because there is uncertainty about those impacts, but rather should strive to resolve, characterize, and respond to the uncertainty using available tools such as climate models, scenarios planning, and adaptative management. The article also identifies specific examples of “climate science information needs” for natural resource management, based on the areas of scientific uncertainty and data gaps that agencies have cited as the basis for inaction on climate change. These include downscaled climate data, integrated climate and ecosystem data, detection and attribution research, tools for quantifying forest carbon storage, and both qualitative and quantitative data on ecosystem impacts.

This article is the latest in a series of publications from the Sabin Center evaluating the interplay between legal claims and scientific arguments in climate litigation, and part of the Sabin Center’s Climate Law and Science Initiative, which seeks to build understanding of how ongoing developments in climate science can help shape legal and policy responses to climate change. It has been published in the Environmental Law Reporter and is available through the Columbia University scholarship archive.

Jessica Wentz

Jessica is now a non-resident senior fellow at the Sabin Center.