Local, Territorial, State, Province Level Actions
Local:
Stop fossil fuel expansion
Pass short and longer-term local regulations that curb the ability of fossil fuel corporations to extract, transport, or promote their product in local jurisdictions.
What does this look like?
Cities, towns, and communities take proactive action to Stand Against Fossil Fuel Expansion by becoming SAFE cities that pass local laws to prohibit fossil fuel projects.
Implement local government resolutions that commit to immediately ending fossil fuel and agri-business expansion in your city, town or community.
Pass a moratorium that immediately prohibits the development of any new fossil fuel infrastructure, beginning with wealthy and diversified countries that are best positioned to do so.
Just as a community in Northern Washington state, U.S. did.
Follow through with legislation that makes these restrictions permanent, which also has the additional effect of protecting against environmental hazards like oil spills.
Prohibit the transport or storage of fossil fuels through or in your jurisdiction.
As South Portland, Maine did in 2014, when tar sands were no longer allowed to pass through the city.
Or as Portland, Oregon did in 2016, when it became the first major municipality in the U.S. to prohibit the bulk storage of fossil fuels, essentially ceasing oil trains from passing through the jurisdiction.
Defund police departments, which have long used their power both to violently protect polluting industries’ infrastructure over people’s lives, and to terrorize and communities of colour.
Instead, invest funding in measures that make communities safer, healthier, and more sustainable such as education, restorative justice, and community-based renewable energy infrastructure.
Local:
Challenge Paris Agreement violations
Hold specific polluting and destructive corporations, or groups of them, to account for their climate inaction by suing them for failing to comply with the Paris Agreement commitments.
What does this look like?
Sue countries, polluting and destructive corporations or related actors for violating the right to a safe and clean environment, including by driving deforestation or failing to have adequate, ambitious, and just climate action plans that are fully aligned with the commitments of the Paris Agreement to keep global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This argument led to the successful challenge in the U.K., where a new runway at Heathrow International Airport was ruled illegal since it was not in line with the U.K.’s Paris Agreement commitments.
Similarly, incompatibility between Netherland’s climate action plans and the Paris Agreement commitments has led civil society organizations and over 17,000 citizens to sue Royal Dutch Shell for failing to align its business practices with the action necessary.
Local:
Increase access to justice for frontline communities
Implement a variety of measures to ensure communities on the front lines of the climate crisis have access to legal mechanisms for advancing climate justice, including through North-South solidarity.
What does this look like?
Climate cases in the Global South generally only indirectly implicate climate change, among other reasons, because of the limited access to justice. These challenges could be in part addressed by advancing subnational/local strategies that:
Develop or strengthen inclusive processes that allow communities to direct access to legal actions. Tools that can help achieve this include:
Strengthen or advocate for effective partnerships amongst governments and between governments and civil society, to:
Organize sources of data: Case management from legal aid providers, both government and civil society, can be beneficial to understand trends in justice needs, who is lacking access to justice, geographic spread of justice services, what assistance communities need to resolve disputes, the experience of marginalized groups, and the utility and impact of legal aid and paralegal services.
Establish a financial fund that can support legal assistance needs.
Establish programs with law faculties that can support the legal cases.
Implement and strengthen community governance frameworks, and create opportunities for cross sub-national learning on effective mechanisms that allow communities to access legal actions directly, allowing actors to:
Learn from and share best practices in order to strengthen case management and data collection.
Strengthen sub-national South-South and frontline community collaboration, in particular by developing training programs that better enable local communities to access and use legal systems.
Formalising opportunities for North-South and frontline solidarity that allows for:
Partnership between impacted communities and individuals in the Global South and international allies and legal experts who help facilitate access to justice and accountability.
Seizing opportunities where legal action is currently being taken internationally or in the Global North to align this action with what will benefit impacted communities in the Global South.
Local:
Raise public awareness about climate denial and greenwashing
Through education, media engagement, and resolutions, build political will for polluting industry liability and denormalise corporate impunity and business-as-usual.
What does this look like?
Raise awareness, inform, and educate decision-makers and the public regarding corporations’ role in exacerbating climate change, the need to protect climate policies from vested corporate interests, as well as the strategies and tactics used by corporations to interfere with the setting and implementation of climate action and liability measures at every level of governance, including through greenwashing.
Increase awareness through public materials, media, and local resolutions and/or investigations that expose the fossil fuel industry’s (and other polluting industries’) historic and ongoing practice of using individuals, front groups and trade organizations to act, openly or covertly, on their behalf or to take action to further industry interests.
Mandate public school curricula that critically examine the intersections between polluting industries’ global expansion and abuses and the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and racism.
Local:
Challenge attempts to pre-empt liability locally
Play a watchdog role, exposing and challenge insidious attempts at the local level by polluting corporations to seize opportunities to avoid liability for harms done.
What does this look like?
Coordinate with government officials and decision-makers at all levels of governance to ensure that cities and communities have the ability to pursue liability against polluting industries without the possibility of pre-emption at the regional, country, and/or international level.
Identify and challenge attempts by the industry to preempt local liability claims for past, current, or future harms through legislation, voluntary agreements, litigation, or other means.
Implementing the measures of the liability roadmap
Decision-makers and movements at all levels should keep the following in mind when implementing the measures laid out in this roadmap:
Enacting these policies and measures is simply the first step to holding polluting and destructive industries liable: There will be much work for government officials, decision-makers, activists and civil society alike to do to ensure these measures are fully implemented and move us toward the transformative change the world needs.
Liability should be applied to all industries and corporations that make business decisions that contribute to climate change and its impacts, or that cause harm to people and nature. In addition to the fossil fuel industry, these industries include but are not limited to agribusiness, forestry, mining, and the energy sector.
Many of these measures could equally apply to state-owned corporations. Because the national contexts and unique needs vary from country to country, it is worth considering where to apply and how to adapt the principles and measures listed in the Liability Roadmap to address state-owned polluting corporations. Factors to consider when doing so could include but are not limited to the degree of democratic control over the entity, role and use of funding from oil/gas revenues, and responsiveness of the entity to transition to regenerative, renewable energy sources.
Measures implemented at the national level should support and reinforce, rather than contradict, measures implemented at the sub-national and local, and vice versa.