...While recent suits tend to focus on the effects of climate change on property, climate change also poses serious risks to human health.  “Those lawsuits don’t explicitly call out health but, if they did, they might have a stronger leg to stand on,” said Sabrina McCormick, professor of public health at George Washington University and lead author of a new study on the role of health in climate lawsuits...McCormick, along with a team of scholars at George Washington University, evaluated nearly 900 court decisions from 1990 to 2016 related to climate change and coal-fired power plants and found that health featured in just 16 percent of those cases...They discovered that...invoking health strengthens climate lawsuits in two significant ways...[A] plaintiff may gain standing by demonstrating that his or her health has suffered as a result of air pollution...
[A]rguments around public health play well in court...McCormick said that judges appear more comfortable ruling on matters of public health than litigating climate science...