Legal eagles: how climate litigation is shaping ambitious cases for nature

Environmental lawsuits are nothing new but now lawyers are turning their attention to cases that address the loss of biodiversity.

The Tagus estuary near Lisbon is Portugal’s largest wetland, a vital habitat and stopover for tens of thousands of migratory birds, including flamingos, black-tailed godwits and glossy ibis. It has also been earmarked as the site of a new airport, leading the environmental law charity ClientEarth and a group of Portuguese NGOs to sue Portugal’s government. When they get their day in court, they will argue that the authorities failed to properly consider how the project would affect an internationally protected nature reserve, and the knock-on effects on other countries visited by the birds.

“If you destroy that site, you have an impact not only in Lisbon, but on all the sites up the flyway,” says Anna Heslop, head of wildlife and habitats at ClientEarth. “If the bird populations don’t arrive, they never get breeding.”

While environmental lawsuits are not a new phenomenon – the earliest known case, a dispute over water resources, dates back 4,500 years – campaigners are thinking more deeply about how they can tackle the complex problem of modern biodiversity loss.

Heslop says litigants are increasingly looking beyond a single site or narrow issue. “Those older school cases will continue. What we aim to do is to have a bigger impact across the whole, like every site in Europe or south-east Asia, or to push governments to be more ambitious. The trick for us is finding cases that will have a more strategic impact; I don’t think that was happening on the same scale before.”

The lack of a strategic approach to date is partly a reflection of a wider misunderstanding of the scale of the global biodiversity crisis, says Heslop. “Climate change advocates have done a great job over the last 10, 20 years, of making people realise this is a massive issue and therefore they get more of the resources,” says Heslop. “But they’re twin and equal crises and if you fix climate change and not biodiversity, we’re all screwed.”

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