The Chinese courts – environment and climate change

Chinese courts have played an increasingly important role in the country’s environmental and climate governance, particularly since the emergence of environmental litigation over the past decade. Yet the position of Chinese courts in relation to other state institutions and their practical contributions are not well understood.

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the Chinese court system, examining how the specialised environmental divisions function and their limitations. The authors carried out a systematic review of key legal documents and judicial decisions, analysed accounts from official media, and drew on information from 20 interviews with judges and prosecutors at central and local levels conducted between 2022 and 2025.

The paper shows how institutional reforms, new legal pathways and shifting governance objectives have shaped judicial practice. The findings underscore the Chinese courts’ growing capacity to influence environmental and climate governance.

Key points for decision-makers

• The development of environmental adjudication in China reflects a continuous interaction between judicial practice and institutional reform. The Chinese state’s prioritisation of environmental governance was essential to the establishment of the Supreme People’s Court’s (SPC) environmental division in 2014. In the same year, the SPC directed courts across the country to establish specialised divisions or teams for environmental and natural resources cases.
• Expansion of public-interest litigation: in 2017, public-interest litigation was formally incorporated into Chinese law, with prosecutors empowered to sue government agencies and recognition of both non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and prosecutors in civil public-interest cases targeting polluters.
• The establishment of specialised divisions, the growth of environmental public interest litigation and the incorporation of climate-related concerns into judicial reasoning have taken shape within a broader political and institutional landscape characterised by both centrally designed reforms and dispersed local experiments.
• These reforms and experiments have widened the judiciary’s operational space and encouraged judges to address complex environmental conflicts. They have also revealed challenges that need to be managed by further legal and institutional developments. For example, China currently lacks binding climate law, requiring Chinese courts to rely on interpretation of other laws and climate-related policies.
• Climate litigation in China is largely focused on disciplining private actors through civil and environmental public-interest litigation, leaving government agencies largely beyond judicial scrutiny. Although the government can, in principle, be sued by citizens filing administrative legal cases or prosecutors initiating public-interest litigation, the scope of these actions is tightly constrained.
• Chinese judges defer to the executive branch’s policymaking authority and technical expertise in implementing climate governance. They are also reluctant to impose harsh measures that could drive a polluting business into insolvency, particularly when the company is a major local taxpayer or employer. Instead, courts prefer to encourage companies to find technological solutions.
• In March 2026, the National People’s Congress adopted the Ecological and Environmental Code, integrating pollution prevention, ecological conservation and climate governance. The Code is likely to reinforce the existing characteristics of climate-related adjudication in China, providing limited grounds for judicial review of governmental climate action and a continued focus on private actors.

DOI: 10.21953/researchonline.lse.ac.uk.00140346