Scientific publications

Over the last decade, Europe has been the crucible of path-defining climate cases. Across the region, courts have been asked to define the limits of public and private responsibility. This Essay argues that corporate climate litigation in Europe has developed along two intersecting trajectories that together define an emerging framework of climate accountability. The first extends publiclaw standards to corporations, translating human rights and carbon-budget principles into private-law duties of care, due diligence, and disclosure that reach across entire value chains. The second trajectory sees the emergence of polluter-pays litigation, which seeks to proportionate damages and adaptation costs from major emitters, testing how attribution science and emissions accounting can ground financial responsibility for climate harm. This Essay situates corporate climate litigation in Europe within a broader trend toward the financialization of climate accountability. Drawing on leading and pending cases across Europe, it identifies emerging principles alongside persistent enforcement challenges linked to insolvency, insurance, and cross-border jurisdiction. This Essay concludes that Europe is building a provisional but concrete framework for corporate climate responsibility and financial redress. Understanding the feedback loops between public-law scaffolds, private-law duties, and polluter-pays mechanisms helps clarify both the promise and the limits of Europe’s multi-scalar model of climate accountability.

The European Parliament is often portrayed as an environmental champion, but we still know little about what drives individual legislators’ attention to climate policy. This article examines whether MEPs are responsive to climate-related hazards in their constituency by matching climatological data from the subnational electoral districts of MEPs from five Member States with their issue attention to climate change during the 2004–2024 terms. It is shown that extreme heat episodes, wet spells and temperature anomalies in the constituency are associated with increased MEP issue attention to climate change. However, further analyses suggest that these findings are driven primarily by cross-country differences rather than within-country temporal variation. Contrary to expectations in previous party politics scholarship, this study does not find evidence that the effect of climate hazards is conditioned by MEPs’ party positions on the environment.

This article examines the evolving relationship between the Paris Agreement and human rights law, focusing on the interaction between these two regimes. It argues that human rights norms increasingly inform the interpretation, enfocerment and implementation of the climate regime, while the Paris Agreement functions as an interpretive, evidentiary and accountability framework within human rights law and practice. The article analyses how human rights considerations have been incorporated into the Paris Agreement through its preamble, operational provisions and subsequent treaty body practice, particularly in areas concerning participation, transparency, safeguards and just transition. It further examines how courts and other human rights oversight mechanisms have relied on the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals, governance structures, reporting mechanisms and mitigation pathways when assessing states’ obligations. Drawing on text analysis and institutional and judicial practice, the article assesses the interaction between the climate and human rights regimes. It argues that cross-fertilisation between the two regimes remains partial, selective and contested, reflecting continuing tensions concerning accountability, institutional competence, state sovereignty and the limits of adjudication. The article concludes that the relationship between the Paris Agreement and human rights law is best understood as an evolving process of reciprocal interpretive and institutional reinforcement.

This review critically assesses academic literature on how EU legal frameworks and institutions have navigated the dual imperatives of urgency (“fast”) and justice (“fair”) in climate governance, since the launch of the European Green Deal (EGD) and during the first term of the von der Leyen Commission. It focuses on core legal instruments and on the roles of key institutions tasked with developing and enforcing climate obligations: the European Commission (EC), the European Parliament (EP), the Council and European Council, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), and national courts. Positioned at the intersection of EU studies and sustainability transition studies, the review bridges legal and political science perspectives. Drawing on urgency and justice as analytical lenses, we identify a recurring temporal mismatch across EU climate governance, where urgency is embedded ex-ante, whereas fairness tends to be appended ex-post. This pattern is visible in EU climate laws—which mandate fast action through ambitious targets and accelerated transitions—and institutional dynamics. The EC and Parliament broadly align on urgency imperatives, with justice often reduced to distributive compensation. In contrast, the Council's and the European Council's intergovernmental, consensus-driven logic emphasizes nationally framed justice, which can temper urgency. National courts strongly engage with urgency but generally defer burden-sharing decisions to political actors. We argue that embedding justice concerns early in the policymaking process is essential for ensuring that fast and fair transitions reinforce one another. The review concludes with a research agenda to guide future interdisciplinary work on urgency-justice dynamics amid changing political landscapes.

Since 2019, the European Green Deal (EGD) has sought to harmonise efforts across several sectors towards a long-term goal of carbon neutrality. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2022 REPowerEU Plan positioned decarbonisation as a key means to reduce dependence on imports of Russian fossil fuels. Central to achieving this goal is reforming the permitting processes for renewable energy projects, particularly regarding environmental rules and principles. We trace how the EU has addressed the challenge of balancing renewables and biodiversity concerns by identifying and explaining the effects of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 on policy integration. Drawing on the processual approach to policy integration, our study identifies three phases of integration of biodiversity concerns into EU renewable energy policy. The most recent phase disrupted ongoing efforts towards policy integration initiated by the EGD and shifted the balance towards accelerated renewable energy deployment over biodiversity concerns. Employing insights from the EU crisis literature and focusing on the effects of the crisis on actor-level factors of policy integration (capacity, core beliefs, commitment), we unpack how the crisis contributed to reducing policy integration of biodiversity into renewable policy.

Although climate action is highly intertwined with governance structures, climate policy modelling science has been argued to insufficiently reflect political processes. We analyse the evolution of democratic governance embedded in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) that are heavily underpinning modelling studies. Using the Narrative Policy Framework in the SSPs storylines, we find underrepresentation of narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice, despite their importance in envisioning legitimate and inclusive transitions. An evaluation of quantitative indicators within the SSP framework under the same democratic principles shows divergence from the patterns implied by the storylines. Finally, analysis of scenarios assessed in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that regions scoring high in democracy-related indicators tend to perform well in mitigation, aligning with empirical evidence. These findings highlight opportunities to enhance the SSP framework to inter alia more adequately incorporate political processes.

Research on the global climate movement underlines the importance of learn-ing and diffusion processes for adopting similar master frames and movementtactics. At the same time, participation research suggests regionally differentpatterns of mobilisation and protest behaviour. Due to different historicalsocialisation processes, Western and Eastern European citizens show differ-ences in political activity despite some signs of convergence. This article exam-ines the sociodemographic characteristics and attitudes of climate activistsfrom Eastern and Western Europe. Using protest surveys of Fridays for Futureparticipants in 15 Western and Eastern European countries, we show significantdifferences between them. Western European climate activists tend to havestronger leftist attitudes, while in Eastern Europe apolitical stances are morecommon along with higher confidence in market solutions to solve environ-mental problems. Such differences are likely to affect the cohesion and successof the global climate movement.

The European Union’s European Green Deal (EGD) was announced as an ambitious endeavour to achieve a just transition, address climate change, biodiversity loss and more. Importantly, it expresses the desire to tackle these challenges in a democratic way. Indeed, the scale of the changes required to meet the EGD’s goals mean that without democratic consent it is likely to fail, with disastrous consequences. With this introduction to the Special Issue on the European Green Deal and democracy we sketch the contours of this wide-ranging debate through a focus on aspects of democracy that are central to the EU and the EGD: representation, participation and deliberation, justice and the just transition, and expertise. The different contributions to this Special Issue examine democratic elements in the EGD and surrounding governance structures by exploring alternative sources of democratic innovation, including deliberative mechanisms and social movements, as potential avenues for transformative change.

This case note examines the landmark judgment issued by the European Court of Human Rights regarding the complaint brought by the NGO Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and four individual applicants against Switzerland. It explores the ground breaking nature of this judgment and its broader implications for climate change litigation at the national, regional and international levels.