The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:32:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The Rise of Climate Litigation – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The Rise of Climate Litigation https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/03/the-rise-of-climate-litigation/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-rise-of-climate-litigation https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/03/the-rise-of-climate-litigation/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2022 14:07:46 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=143972?d=20220303090746EST Posted by Subodh Mishra, Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., on Thursday, March 3, 2022
Editor's Note:

Shagun Agarwal is a Climate Solutions Associate at ISS ESG. This post is based on his ISS memorandum. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita (discussed on the Forum here); Companies Should Maximize Shareholder Welfare Not Market Value by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales (discussed on the Forum here); and Reconciling Fiduciary Duty and Social Conscience: The Law and Economics of ESG Investing by a Trustee by Max M. Schanzenbach and Robert H. Sitkoff (discussed on the Forum here).

Climate litigation is an increasingly common and accessible area of environmental law, and is being used to hold countries and public corporations to account for their climate mitigation efforts and historical contributions to the problem of climate change.

A Global Surge in Litigation

There is a clear upward trend in the use of climate litigation. Until 2017, the total number of climate litigation cases was 884 across a total of 24 countries, with 654 of these cases being in the United States. By 2020, this number had nearly doubled to 1,550 cases across 38 countries.

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