BY POLLY MANN
If you believe as I do that climate change is a real threat to continued life on this planet, a recent New York Times half-page article about the issue is encouraging. For example, in April 2016, 21 teen-agers and children, members of the environmental organization Our Children’s Trust, sued the federal government to force it to take more aggressive action against climate change. Julia Olson, the executive director of the group, said the children saw the issue as one of human rights. Michael B. Gerrard, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, called the ruling a potential landmark.
In other parts of the globe people have also been taking similar action. Last year a Pakistani law student, Ashgar Leghari, sued the government over delays in carrying out a national climate change policy that could help reduce the heavy floods and droughts that threaten the country’s food security, as well as the Leghari’s family farm. Last year a court ordered the Pakistani government to form a climate change commission for what appeared to be the most serious threat facing Pakistan.
In New Zealand a law student, Sarah Lorraine Thomas, said she had been inspired to take legal action by a 2015 court decision in the Netherlands that ordered the Dutch government to take more forceful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In an email she explained, “Hearing about these cases was a kick in the butt—they were just ordinary people too—I felt that I really had no excuse.”
In November 2015, Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya sued the German utility RWE for its proportional contribution to global climate change. The effects of increasingly extreme weather, such as drought, can make farming more precarious. A particularly responsible factor is nearby Palcacocha Lake which is being filled to overflowing by melt-water from nearby glaciers. Mr. Luciano explained that one could actually see the glaciers melting, disappearing year by year. The previously mentioned company, RWE, is being sued, and German courts have accepted the case.
What all this activity will lead to is hard to predict but regardless of the outcomes, attention is certainly being focused on the negative effects of climate change.
