Local, Territorial, State, Province Level Actions

🔎 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.

🔎 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.

🔎 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.

🔎 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.

🔎 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.

🔎 Investigate and sue polluters and their enablers like financiers

Through a variety of legal mechanisms, people and entities at all levels should initiate investigations and lawsuits that hold polluting and destructive industries and their enablers liable for their multifaceted roles in the climate crisis and wrongdoing.

What does this look like?

• States/regions/communities/individuals formally launch investigations into polluting and destructive industry corporations and actors to firmly establish what they knew about climate change, and when, and what actions they did or didn’t take to address these findings.
  • Investigation and legal claims toward agribusiness can be made on the grounds of direct harm or eco-destruction caused through business practices.
• States/regions/communities/ formally sue polluting industry corporations for compensation for the damage caused or projected to be caused as a result of their business practices, failure to comply with climate action commitments, or their deception and manipulation.
  • Compensation received should directly support frontline communities and those that endure the direct abuse of polluting and destructive corporations, or to funds that distribute to these communities, such as those detailed here.
• Register legal claims with national and international judicial bodies to expose and challenge the damage and abuses (environmental or related to people and community) endured as a result of specific projects or business practices of transnational corporations.
  • These claims, often brought by local communities, have the ability to set ground-breaking precedents that spur lasting change. For example, a local community of Indian fishermen launched a lawsuit that wound up setting a powerful legal precedent for international financial institutions via the U.S. Supreme Court. Read more about this here.
• Judicial systems should guarantee specific prescribed time frames that should be a matter of months (not years), and that states or legal systems are required to adhere to when liability claims are registered.
• File liability lawsuits against the institutional investors and financiers that enable corporations to pollute, destroy, abuse, and to use the corporate personhood or corporate veil to protect themselves.
  • Initiate lawsuits against executives and directors of financial corporations that fail to adequately consider and address climate risks. Just 35 investment banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and HSBC, have channelled more than US$2.66 trillion into fossil fuels between 2016-2019. There is increasing precedence and potential to sue corporate actors like financiers for breaches of duty of care and diligence.

In recent years, climate change litigation to advance liability claims has been increasing significantly across global jurisdictions. In the past, the majority of these lawsuits have been brought against governments. We’re now, however, witnessing an intensifying focus in launching climate liability cases against corporations based on several robust legal arguments and claims. This shift in focus on holding corporations legally liable for climate change has been facilitated by advancements in climate attribution science, knowledge from previous legal challenges and precedents, increased evidence regarding corporations’ climate change denial and deception efforts, increased public action to hold corporations accountable for climate change, as well as more effective collaboration between governments, attorneys, scientists and advocates across various jurisdictions and legal contexts.

Some of the most prominent types of legal claims that may be utilized to sue corporations directly, collectively, or individually include but are not limited to:

• Public Nuisance
  • Nuisance is an act or omission that interferes with the rights of the community, or the public generally. Public nuisance claims focus on the argument that the extraction and promotion of fossil fuels contributes to climate change impacts, such as sea-level rise, and that these impacts create a public nuisance that interferes with rights of individuals or communities represented.
• Negligence
  • Most polluting corporations had prior knowledge of climate change science and impacts, in some cases decades before it was commonly known by the public. Being able to demonstrate this prior knowledge forms the basis for negligence claims related to a corporation’s breach of their duty of care by not preventing foreseeable harm, and for negligent failure to warn of the likelihood of this harm.
• Misleading advertising
  • These claims focus on corporate advertising that misled the public regarding the corporation’s climate change activities, the nature of its products, or the anticipated impacts of its actions on communities in its supply chain. Misleading advertising cases allege that promotional and advertising campaigns by polluting corporations violate national law or even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which require accurate communications between businesses and people.
• Consumer protection
  • These claims focus on breaches in consumer protection law, which typically forbids corporations from engaging in any unfair or deceptive trade practices. Consumer protection cases assert that polluting corporations engaged in deceptive marketing and promotion of their products by disseminating misleading information refuting the scientific knowledge generally accepted at that time, advancing junk science and developing public relations materials that prevented reasonable consumers from recognizing the risk that products like fossil fuels would cause serious climate change impacts.
• Strict liability
  • Rather than alleging fault (such as negligence or tortious intent by the defendant), these cases claim strict liability for “design defects," - i.e. problems with a product’s design that render it dangerous to use. In these cases, fossil fuels, for example, are the product, with the defect in this case being the impact of the emissions and the known risks associated with them. For strict liability claims to be robust, the evidence needs to show the defendants engaged in business, sold the product to plaintiffs, the product was used as intended and it caused harm to the plaintiffs.
• Human rights
  • Human rights-based climate litigation focuses on the role of corporations in driving climate change and the related impact on an individual’s human rights. These types of claims utilize human rights law to demonstrate corporate obligations to respect human rights such as those expressed in the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants, Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. These types of claims demonstrate that domestic human rights bodies may also provide leverage for further action on climate change.
• Nature rights
• Torts
• Administrative actions
• Health recovery costs and strengthen sanitary healthcare systems.
• Violation of Free, Prior and Informed consent as granted under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIPs)
• Violations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
• Violations of customary and traditional rights of communities

Click here to read about the lessons learned through the precedent of advancing tobacco industry liability through the Master Settlement Agreement.

🔎 Compel the release of industry documents

Through measures laid out elsewhere in this roadmap, or via other means, decision-makers may obtain access to industry documents that evidence wrongdoing. Releasing this data is critical for people, civil society, the media, and officials alike to hold corporations accountable for their harms.

What does this look like?

• Provide for and utilize the right to freedom of information and related legislation, as well as access to information as per Principle 10 of the Rio Convention.
• Publicly disclose and release any data and documentation from polluting corporations that has been previously withheld from the public, making it possible to monitor and expose their wrongdoings.
• Click here to read about the lessons learned through the precedent of advancing tobacco industry liability through the Master Settlement Agreement.

🔎 Protect policymaking from polluters’ manipulation

Pass and implement conflict-of-interest policies and legislations to create the space for policymakers and public-serving actors to advance justice and real solutions.

What does this look like?

• Reduce the ability of polluters to advance policymaking that protects their profits by implementing measures to firewall policymaking from their interference and influence.
• This includes but is not limited to:
  1. instituting a firewall to end polluting industry access to decision-making processes.
  2. addressing vested or conflicting interests.
  3. ending preferential treatment of and rejecting partnerships with individuals and institutions or organizations directly or indirectly representing dirty or destructive industries.

🔎 End business with polluters

Withhold a corporation’s license to pollute and abuse by blacklisting polluting corporations, especially those that are currently under public scrutiny or investigation.

What does this look like?

• Ban corporations that are currently the subject of legal investigations or found guilty through such investigations (sub-nationally, nationally, regionally or internationally) for allegations related to fraud, misconduct, or human rights abuses from receiving any privilege or incentives, including but not limited to subsidies, stimulus funds, tax breaks, and access to policymaking spaces and negotiations.
• International institutions such as the UN bodies and the World Bank or other financing and investment bodies cease relationships with, or blacklist, these corporations.
  • These measures should also be taken toward polluting corporations and industries in general, in addition to applying them immediately to entities under legal scrutiny.
  • End the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings, which grades economies not on the strength of their environmental or corporate accountability policies, but effectively pressures countries to deregulate.
  • Cut ties and contracts with such corporations at all levels, including local-level partnerships that allow polluters to “greenwash” their image and buy goodwill among community members.

🔎 Recognize and deliver climate reparations

Global South communities, women, youth, Black and other communities of colour, and Indigenous communities are on the front lines of the climate crisis. Recognize that they are owed reparations for the damage wrought by climate change and polluting or destructive corporate practices. And deliver reparations by requiring these corporations to sincerely apologize and address the damage they cause and debts owed.

What does this look like?

• Require corporations to provide public, sincere apologies to communities and individuals that have endured abuse, in some case for decades, and whose lives, livelihoods, homes and cultures have been adversely affected or lost as a result.
• Distribute and deliver reparations owed to communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis by requiring corporations to pay their climate debt to these communities, while acknowledging such a debt can never be fully paid.
• Reparations must not create dependence on polluting corporations and the mechanism for delivery of reparation- whether financial or otherwise- should be led by the affected person or persons.
• Reparations could be delivered in part through a variety of means, subject to the approval of affected communities, including:
  • Direct compensation for losses incurred (both past, present, and future).
  • Restoring land unlawfully or unduly under the control of polluting corporations back to its natural stewards, i.e. indigenous communities or local/frontline communities including women, peasants, fisherfolks, nomadic and rural peoples.
  • Making accessible technology that directly helps impacted communities respond to and address the impacts of climate change.
• Cancel any and all debt from Global South countries or frontline communities that arises out of financing real and legitimate climate action within a country.
• Align reparations measures with the demands of frontline communities based in a country/jurisdiction calling for reparations. For example:

🔎 Community-based climate damage funds

Provide support needed to frontline communities and countries that are adapting to climate change while simultaneously enduring its impacts.

What does this look like?

• Establish national or local climate damages/self-defence funds that collect, govern, and disburse the funds retrieved from liability measures advanced internationally, nationally, or sub-nationally.
• These should be community governed.
• Funds should provide for:
  • the development of community controlled renewable energy initiatives;
  • ensuring food sovereignty;
  • increasing resilience against climate disasters.