Legal implications of the climate-health crisis: A case study analysis of the role of public health in climate litigation

RESEARCH ARTICLE Legal implications of the climate-health crisis: A case study analysis of the role of public health in climate litigation Narayan Toolan1,2☯*, Hannah MarcusID2,3☯*, Elizabeth G. Hanna4,5‡, Chadia WannousID2,6‡ 1 UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, 2 World Federation of Public Health Associations–Environmental Health Working Group, 3 School of Public Health, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 4 Australian National University, Fenner School for Environment and Society, Canberra, Australia, 5 WG Chair, World Federation of Public Health Associations–Environmental Health Working Group, 6 Towards A Safer World Network and Future Earth Health-Knowledge Action Network, Stockholm, Sweden ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. ‡ EGH and CW also contributed equally to this work. * narayantoolan@gmail.com (NT); hannahmarcus6@hotmail.com (HM) Abstract Background Strong scientific evidence affirms that climate change is now a public health emergency. Increasingly, climate litigation brought against governments and corporations utilizes inter- national human rights, environmental and climate laws and policies to seek accountability for climate-destructive and health-harming actions. The health impacts of climate change make litigation an important means of pursuing justice and strategically challenging legal systems. Yet there is scant documentation in the literature of the role that public health has played in climate litigation and the legal weight public health narratives are given in such

contexts. Therefore, we assessed to what extent courts of law have used public health harm in legal adjudication and sought to provide practical recommendations to address barriers to positioning legal arguments in public health-centric frames. Methods We reviewed legal databases to identify all publicly reported, documented, cases of climate litigation filed in any country or jurisdiction between 1990 and September 2020. For the 1641 cases identified, we quantified the frequency of cases where health concerns were explicitly or implicitly raised. Findings Case numbers are trending upwards, notably in high income countries. Resolution remains pending in over half of cases as the majority were initiated in the past three years. Cases were primarily based in climate and human rights law and brought by a wide range of groups and individuals predominantly against governments. About half of the decided cases found PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268633 June 15, 2022 1 / 31 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Toolan N, Marcus H, Hanna EG, Wannous C (2022) Legal implications of the climate-health crisis: A case study analysis of the role of public health in climate litigation. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0268633. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0268633 Editor: La´szlo´ Vasa, Szechenyi Istvan University: Szechenyi Istvan Egyetem, HUNGARY Received: April 19, 2021 Accepted: May 4, 2022 Published: June 15, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Toolan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the

Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All data used to develop this report is publicly available on the respective case law databases of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (https://www.lse.ac.uk/ granthaminstitute/), and the Sabin Center for Climate Change law (https://climate.law.columbia. edu/). Additionally, the minimal dataset can be found in the paper and Supporting Information files.