Efforts to block climate change action

Legal efforts to block or unwind action on climate change are rising across the globe, recent new research showed, particularly in the United States, which leads the world on anti-green litigation.

- Joana Setzer

Paris -

This trend was expected to intensify as the White House took "an increasingly aggressive stance" against environmental regulations, said the authors of the world's largest analysis of climate litigation.

As in previous years, most new cases last year were filed by nongovernmental organisations or individuals using litigation to advance broader climate aims, such as opposing fossil fuel projects.

"But litigation was increasingly used not only to advance climate goals, but also to resist or reshape them," said the report by the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.