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 Global North-Global 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.[1] 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[2] 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.

  • Formalize opportunities for Global North-Global 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.

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.

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