Climate litigation is not a monolith. There is no typical party or set of parties, arguments, defenses, or remedies, and cases raise numerous issues of constitutional, statutory, regulatory and common law. While the media often focuses on a few dozen cases brought by cities and states against fossil fuel companies, the universe of climate litigation is extremely broad and diverse. The Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Climate Litigation Database is populated with a host of disputes that vary widely in scope, substance, and outcome, including challenges related to offshore wind farm permits, environmental reviews of cryptocurrency mining or other resource-intensive facilities, and much more.
Sabin’s Climate Litigation Database started with a few dozen cases in 2007 and is considered the world’s most comprehensive collection of primary source documents from climate cases around the world. The cases in the database can be filtered by jurisdiction, issue, and date filed, and following a September 2025 revamp of the site, has the benefit of a more powerful search function that combs through all uploaded documents to retrieve results. As of October 2025, the database features more than 3,100 cases, with more than 2,000 of those in the United States. Even still, the database may only be scratching the surface of how climate change is reshaping law and the courts.
Notably, cases must meet certain criteria to be added to the database (e.g., the case must be before a judicial body and climate change law, policy, or science must be a material issue of law or fact). This means that some cases that result from a climate impact (e.g., a litigated insurance claim following an extreme storm) or where the outcome may affect greenhouse gas emissions or adaptation actions but climate change is not a central issue (e.g., restrictions on development in coastal areas vulnerable to sea-level rise) are by definition excluded.
Unquestionably then, while the case entries provide important data points for considering how climate arises in litigation (i.e. by showing the trees), the database may not fully depict the broader picture (i.e. the forest). This is true both in terms of the overall number of cases (where a single hurricane might result in thousands of litigated insurance claims, as in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria) and the collective impact of the decisions (where a single wildfire might result in a billion-dollar settlement, as in Hawaii after the Lahaina fires).
Under any definition though, including a relatively narrow one, climate litigation is on the uptick. And this is not surprising because climate change is altering our planet in ways humans have never before experienced, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its most recent assessment report (“Climate change is already affecting every inhabited region across the globe”). All indications suggest that this increase is not a fleeting trend but a “new normal” for courts.
Most judges—who are generalists—need tools to understand the scientific and technical evidence before them. As former ELI President Scott Fulton noted in 2019, “[w]ith the body of climate suits growing, and with judges increasingly being called on to work with science questions in this context, the time for [a judicial education program about climate science] seemed to be now.” ELI’s Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) meets this need with evidence-based judicial education about climate science and how it arises in the law. It does not advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case, but rather provides the context judges need to effectively manage the evidence that will be presented by the parties in cases that come before them.
CJP’s Climate Science and Law for Judges curriculum is part of that. This September, CJP updated the Overview of Climate Litigation, the curriculum’s foundational legal module which provides some of that context by explaining what might qualify as a climate case, where cases are being filed, what issues they are raising, as well as some of the latest developments and trends in a variety of climate-related disputes. Faithful to CJP’s focus on climate science, the module also offers examples of the types of climate science that has been relevant to litigation.
As both the CJP curriculum and the Sabin Database demonstrate, these issues are here –and here to stay, given advances in climate science, the increasing intersection between climate and other disciplines (including the natural and social sciences), and the pace and scale of legislative and regulatory decisions that have an impact on climate-warming emissions or affect various aspects of communities’ ability adapt to the impacts of climate change.