Yury Rovnov’s Article on Climate Tort Lawsuits

Laboratory’s research fellow Yury Rovnov examining the changing trends in how national courts within and across legal systems assess climate actions in tort.The polycentric nature of climate policy, which had proven fatal to plaintiffs’ earlier cases in common law jurisdictions, has rarely struck judges in continental Europe as a particularly effective defence. Nonetheless, to civil-law courts, too, the difficulties of linking individual harm to a specific GHG emitter have until recently made the adverse effects of climate change appear conceptually inapt for redress by means of tortious liability.

This seems to be changing. While last year’s judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Hamm in Lliuya v RWE, explicitly acknowledging the possibility of a successful tortious claim, may have been seen as an isolated artefact (especially against the background of the Federal Court of Justice’s recent orders in BMW and Mercedes-Benz cases), the order by the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 2024 and that by the Cantonal Court of Zug in December 2025 to admit climate-related tort claims to trial suggest an emerging pattern. Its most ‘salient feature,’ to use a term from Australian tort jurisprudence, is the courts’ willingness to adopt a variant of the material contribution or material increase in risk tests for establishing causation—which, however, does not guarantee plaintiffs success.

In contrast, European courts in recent years have rejected defendants' arguments regarding the political and public-law nature of such disputes, agreeing to entertain civil actions. In 2024, the Supreme Court of New Zealand adopted a similar stance, allowing a private-law claim against major emitters aimed at compelling net-zero greenhouse gas emissions to proceed to trial on the merits—reversing lower and appellate court rulings that had previously dismissed the action as non-justiciable. Employing a comparative-law framework, the author analyzes these shifting judicial postures that have enabled plaintiffs to overcome threshold motions and secure hearings on the merits.

The article is available at: https://kluwerlawonline.com/journalarticle/European+Energy+and+Environmental+Law+Review/35.2/EELR2026006