Part 1 describes environmental, diplomatic, and political circumstances that are making climate change litigation efforts especially important at
the present moment...

Part 2 provides a survey of climate change litigation and a discussion of evident and emerging trends...

Part 3 describes three categories of legal issues that tend to be disputed among the litigants involved in climate change litigation...

Summaries of highly significant cases appear throughout this report. Those summaries provide a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the current state of climate change litigation, and also illustrate the circumstances, trends, and issues discussed in Parts 1, 2 and 3

As climate change litigation hasn proliferated, it has addressed a widening scope of activities, ranging from coastal development to
infrastructure planning to resource extraction—in effect tracing through legal efforts the long and varied list of ways in which climate change affects ecosystems, societies, and individuals’ rights and interests. It has also encountered a growing list of legal issues, such as the causal showing required to establish liability and the relevance of the public trust doctrine to governments’ approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation.