03 November 2025
Cooperation Without Justice?
The ICJ’s advisory opinion insists heavily on the duty to cooperate to protect the climate system. I show that this duty of cooperation is grounded in an acknowledgment of differentiated obligations among states but falls short in specifying how those differentiated obligations should be quantified, whether in relation to mitigation or to adaptation finance. I argue this reflects a general reluctance to engage with the distributive issues central to climate justice claims which, in turn, serves to preserve the ICJ legitimacy. Continue reading >>
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05 December 2023
The Belgian Climate Case
On November 30, the Brussels Court of Appeal rendered a landmark decision in the climate case brought by “Klimaatzaak” (“climate case” in Dutch) against Belgian public authorities (the federal and the three regional governments). In this decision, the court found the federal authority and the Brussels and Flemish regions’ climate action to be in violation of Articles 2 and 8 of the ECHR and of their duty of care, and imposed a minimal GHG reduction target to be reached by Belgian authorities for the future. In their blogpost, Alice Briegleb and Antoine De Spiegeleir provide a clear overview of the case, exploring its previous stages and insisting on the continuing failures of the Belgian climate governance and its complex federal structure. We focus on our part on how the decision makes it clear that the climate justice movement is now confronted with the tension between the legally required and the ethically desirable parameters of climate effort distribution. Continue reading >>
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