When lawsuits first began to raise climate change issues in the late 1980s, the cases were rare and experimental, with litigants testing out ways to draw on the growing body of climate science to argue for legal obligations to address “the serious and imminent threat to our environment posed by a continuation of global warming.”1 Four decades later, climate litigation has become a defining feature of the global response to the climate crisis. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2015, marked a turning point. By establishing a near-universal framework for climate commitments, it provided courts and litigants with a concrete reference point. Since then, the number of climate cases has surged across jurisdictions, with litigants testing the extent to which governments and corporations must go to meet their obligations. In 2024 and 2025, the role of courts was underscored yet again by landmark advisory opinions from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice—all of which emphasize the central role of law in defining the climate responsibilities of states and corporations. The Sabin Center’s Climate Litigation Databases—which Sabin Center founder and faculty director Michael Gerrard first created in 2007—have contributed in significant ways to defining the field of climate change litigation. Against this backdrop, we are proud to announce the relaunch of The Climate Litigation Database.
A Trusted Resource, Reimagined
For more than 15 years, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School has tracked climate litigation through its U.S. and Global databases. These resources have become the backbone of research, advocacy, and policymaking in the field—cited by scholars in leading journals, relied on by practitioners and NGOs in litigation strategies, used in courtrooms, and referenced by journalists, policymakers, and international organizations alike. They have helped users map trends, assess risks, and understand the evolving role of courts in addressing the climate crisis.
Today, those databases come together as a single, unified platform: The Climate Litigation Database. This is not a new product but a renewed commitment: the same reliability, scope, and rigor that users trust—now paired with new tools that make the data more powerful and accessible.
Technology Meets Legal Insight
This relaunch is made possible through a partnership with Climate Policy Radar, a not-for-profit organization building open databases and research tools on climate law and policy. By applying advanced machine learning and natural language processing, CPR’s technology allows users to:
- Run semantic and full-text searches across all jurisdictions,
- Identify related concepts and terms (e.g., “electric vehicles” and “EVs”),
- Search foreign-language case documents in English, with results displayed in English,
- See highlighted text directly in documents, and
- Export structured datasets for deeper analysis.
Together, this combination of the Sabin Center’s legal expertise and CPR’s technology ensures that litigation data is not only comprehensive but also accessible to everyone, from practitioners, to scholars, to policymakers.
A Collective Global Effort
Behind every entry in the database is a network of people. The U.S. cases are collated by the Sabin Center. Cases outside the U.S. are sourced from a combination of in-house resources and the Peer Review Network of Global Climate Litigation, launched in 2021, which now comprises 175 rapporteurs covering nearly every jurisdiction worldwide. They bring local expertise and insight, ensuring that cases are not just recorded but contextualized. Their work, combined with partnerships with research and advocacy organizations in Brazil, Australia, Latin America, and beyond, makes the database a truly global project—reflecting the diversity of climate litigation as it evolves across regions and legal systems.
Why It Matters Now
Litigation has become one of the sharpest tools in the climate toolbox. It offers citizens, communities, and civil society a way to demand accountability when politics stalls. It pushes corporations to align with science. It clarifies what governments owe their people and the planet. And it is growing—in number, ambition, and impact.
By relaunching The Climate Litigation Database, we are ensuring that this rapidly expanding field can be tracked, analyzed, and understood with precision. It is not simply a research tool: it is a mirror of how societies worldwide are using the law to respond to the climate crisis.
Explore the Relaunch
The current moment in climate litigation is unprecedented. With new advisory opinions setting global standards and national courts testing and setting boundaries, the next decade will be decisive. The Climate Litigation Database, redesigned in partnership with Climate Policy Radar, is here to help researchers, policymakers, advocates, and citizens make sense of it all—and will continue to grow in functionality, from harmonized case categories to richer mapping of plaintiffs and defendants and clearer tracking of case status. It is a living platform, designed to evolve in tandem with the field it documents.
Explore the new platform at climatecasechart.com, where you also can see answers to frequently asked questions, read about our methodology, and learn about our partners in this work. You can stay connected by subscribing to the Sabin Center’s Climate Litigation Newsletter to receive the latest updates.
Dr. Maria Antonia Tigre is the Director of Global Climate Litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
Great Job Maria Antonia Tigre and Margaret Barry & the Team @ Climate Law Blog Source link for sharing this story.
