Climate change litigation and the individual: an overview

This chapter serves as an introduction to the comparative climate change litigation exercise present in this book, which stems from efforts leading up to the 2018 International Academy of Comparative Law Colloquium. The chapter is based on several fact scenarios established by the editors, in order to develop a comparative look at climate change across a variety of countries. This effort will ultimately lead to the development of the Climate Change Litigation Initiative (C2LI), an online platform intended to further explore the state of climate change litigation in national courts. This introductory chapter summarises the findings from the book in general and specifically highlights the different scenarios on which the individual chapters are based. It further explores in detail the issues of standing, grounds and remedies in climate change litigation, and highlights a number of crosscutting issues discussed throughout the book.