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

emissions exceeding national guidelines [61]. Our database searches identified that between 1986 and the end of May 2020, a total of 1,587 cases of CCL worldwide had been brought before courts, with 1,213 (76%) cases in the United States and 374 cases in 36 other countries and eight regional or international jurisdictions. Out of this total we found 65 directly linked public health cases. With the mounting climate crisis unfolding, CCL continues to be a grow- ing field of law that intersects International and National Environmental Law, International Human Rights Law, and a complex range of statutes, regulations, and legal principals spanning national, subnational and, in some countries, constitutional law. One of the most notable temporal trends we observed was the increasing frequency of cli- mate change being framed as the core issue. Litigation is evidently evolving as a specific tool for climate legal action. Early cases tended to present environmental destruction as the central concern and framed climate change as a peripheral or secondary issue. The 2020 climate liti- gation snapshot found climate change to be “at the centre of the legal argument” in about 41% of cases, whereas in the remaining 59% climate change was classified as a “peripheral issue” [61]. The increasing discussion of climate change as a core issue suggests the ‘legal main- streaming’ of climate change, whereby the adaptation, mitigation, and regulation of industry, becomes a matter of business and financial law, discussed in detail below.

The changing role of environmental and human rights law in litigation. Our results confirm reported trends attesting to a substantive rise in the contributions of environmental and human rights law to legal argumentation in litigation. Regarding human rights, several powerful case studies illustrate a trend towards petitioners increasingly employing rights claims in climate change lawsuits. In the Urgenda case (Table 1, case 1), the courts decided that human rights, which include the “right to health” is linked with decarbonization. In a case brought by Friends of the Irish Environment [89], the courts held that Ireland’s national mitigation plan partially violated statutory law, because it was not set to reduce GHG emissions sufficiently over the near term. In this case, human rights were used as part of the justification. In the case of Maria Khan et al. v the Federation of Pakistan (Table 1, case 3), rights to life, dignity, and a clean and healthy environment were argued to be under threat by the actions of the defendants. Likewise, the constitutionally guaranteed “Right to Life” is evoked in the legal argumentation of Future Generations v Ministry of the Environment (Table 1, case 2), as is “Article 2(2) of the Basic Law: Right to Life and Physical Integrity” in the lawsuit filed against District of Columbia vs. Exxon Mobil Corp. (Table 1, case 5). In their analysis of other rights- based claims in climate litigation cases, Peel and Osofsky (2017) conclude that receptivity of

courts to rights-based framing is on the rise because it provides a “tangible legal framework for analyzing state actions that lead to climate change” [90]. This is encouraging from a public health standpoint, as all UN human rights treaty bodies now recognize individual rights to life, health, food, and water [49, 91], providing a stronger legal avenue for plaintiffs to link claims of health threats to rights-based legal frameworks. Human rights have also been used by the defense in ‘just transition litigation’ to question the “benefits and burdens of the transition away from fossil fuels and towards net-zero emis- sions” [92]. Public health science can provide critical evidence to ensure that human rights are protected, defended and upheld. That defensive interests do not succeed in using a human rights narrative, when it is corporate rights that are at stake, and not human well-being. In relation to rights for nature, we also observed a rise in eco-centric framings of the envi- ronmental. This included the attribution of personhood to nature in some of the more recent cases and the recognition of the inherent value of the environment independent of ecosystem services. PLOS ONE Public health as a legal tool in climate litigation PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268633 June 15, 2022 17 / 31