Global trends in climate change litigation: 2026 snapshot

This report focuses on key trends and evolutions in global climate change litigation from the calendar year 2025, while also highlighting important new developments through to May 2026. The primary source of data is the Climate Litigation Database maintained by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The report explores developments in the field through five themes:

1. The continued maturation of the field as a recognised dimension of global climate governance
2. Its ongoing expansion and innovation across new locations, actors and legal theories
3. The scale and coordination of the pushback now underway against both climate action, in general, and climate litigation specifically
4. The growing complexity of a field increasingly enmeshed in the politics and trade-offs involved in the implementation of climate policy responses
5. The current state of knowledge about the implementation and impacts of climate litigation in the real world.

This report is the ninth in a series. You can find previous years’ reports here.

Core insights

The authors identify the following key trends for the period January to December 2025:
• In 2025, 249 new climate cases were filed, bringing the total since 1986 to more than 3,600 cases.
• Over three quarters of these cases have been filed since 2015, the year of the Paris Agreement.
• Cases have been filed across 62 countries, up from just 17 countries a decade ago. In 2025, cases were newly filed in Grenada, Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Singapore and Zambia.
• The United States remains the jurisdiction with the highest number of cases: 151 new cases were recorded in 2025, bringing the total to 2,078.

Maturity

• State obligations to act on climate change are increasingly being consolidated as a matter of legal duty, not merely political choice. This is observed in: a growing number of decisions made by ‘apex courts’: three recent advisory opinions from the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ); and a self-reinforcing cycle of climate litigation operating across domestic, regional and international courts.
• Courts are engaging with systemic polluter pays cases (seeking damages from companies for contributing to global climate change impacts) and corporate framework cases (seeking to develop standards preventing companies from continuing with high-emitting activities), though no case of these types has yet resulted in an order requiring behaviour change or the payment of damages.
• Climate-washing cases, which challenge inaccurate government or corporate narratives about the low-carbon transition, are the most common type of case involving corporate actors. However, claimants appear to be shifting their focus towards cases addressing total inaction.

Expansion and innovation

• The circle of actors involved in climate litigation is widening, with more than 50 strategic climate-aligned cases filed against companies in 2025, spanning energy, finance, transport, real estate and consumer goods. State-owned enterprises and financial institutions are defendants in at least 42 of these cases.
• New types of claimants are entering the field, and we have seen the first cases of insurance companies seeking to recover financial losses linked to climate change from governments.
• Governmental and quasi-governmental actors are also bringing new types of cases to enforce climate standards across a range of economic activities.
• Since 2015, there have been more than 249 cases brought seeking compensation for damage to the climate system from activities such as illegal deforestation. Brazil has the largest concentration of such cases.
• The next wave of climate litigation cases may emerge in three areas, relating to: carbon dioxide removal and storage infrastructure; emissions from powering large data centres; and the connection between climate change and other environmental problems, such as plastic pollution.

Pushback

• The current moment is marked by the increasing scale, coordination and institutional depth of opposition to climate litigation, especially in the US.
• Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) and new legislative interventions are shrinking the civic and judicial space in which climate advocates operate.
• The pushback has generated a substantial and growing countervailing wave of protective climate litigation.

Complexity

• Non-climate-aligned cases reflect the complex trade-offs of the implementation phase of the energy transition.
• Just transition and green v. green litigation continues to grow, raising questions over the justice and fairness of climate action, and challenging climate policy measures for their alleged impacts on other aspects of the environment, respectively.
• Some recent cases demonstrate tensions in the implementation of climate adaptation measures, highlighting potential adaptation–mitigation trade-offs. 

Impacts and implementation

• Climate-aligned judgments do not automatically translate into policy change.
• There are clear challenges in charting both the anticipated impacts and unintended consequences of positive judicial decisions.
• Implementing climate judgments requires sustained political will and legal follow-through, as illustrated by recent cases in South Korea and New York State.