10 Years of Climate Litigation

In this first episode of Between Heat and Hope, Simon Waswa, PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam is joined by Dennis van Berkel, Legal Counsel of the Urgenda Foundation and Strategic Advisor at the Climate Litigation Network (CLN). The conversation begins by taking stock of CLN’s 10-year anniversary since the landmark Urgenda decision. This decision marked the first time a court ordered the State to do its part in the fight against climate change. The discussion then delves into the legal architecture that has been cumulatively built from the bottom up through the different climate cases from Urgenda to KlimaSeniorinnen to the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion (ICJ AO) on climate change.

The conversation closes with reflections on the future of climate litigation and the democratic legitimacy of courts as they continue to hold States and corporate actors to account amid political backlash and an accelerating climate crisis.

References

CLN “Ten Years Climate Litigation” report

Urgenda

KlimaSeniorinnen

ICJ AO on climate change

Andre et al. (2025) – 89% study (see also here)

Recommendations

Outrage + Optimism (Podcast)

The Ezra Klein Show (Podcast)

About

Editing: Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, January 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

Greenpeace The Netherlands v Netherlands (Bonaire case)

In this second episode of Between Heat and Hope, Phillip Paiement, Professor of Law & Governance in the Anthropocene at Tilburg Law School, discusses the Bonaire case of 28 January 2026 with Christina Eckes, professor of European Law at the University of Amsterdam. The conversations covers the adaptation and mitigation aspects of the judgment.

In relation to adaptation, it draws out the particular situation of the residents of Bonaire as compared to the resident of the State of the Netherlands, reflects on the missed opportunity to engage more with the colonial history of the claims in this case, and concludes that the case may serve as basis for future litigation by plaintiffs from the Caribbean Netherlands, including not only the special municipalities like Bonaire but potentially also the autonomous constituent countries. More broadly, it offers a basis for equality claims grounded in geographical vulnerability.

Concerning mitigation, the discussion covers the judgment’s grounding in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)’s KlimaSeniorinnen judgment (2024), the relative absence of the Advisory Opinion (AO) of International Court of Justice on States’ Obligations in Respect to Climate Change (2025), and the District Court’s engagement with fair share. It comes to the conclusion that the Bonaire case applies the budget logic of KlimaSeniorinnen and the ICJ’s AO but could have more clearly developed its express requirement that the State of the Netherlands quantifies its emission allowances as part of the global emission budget that keeps global warming below 1.5°C.

References

Bonaire Case (Dutch with links to the English translation)

KlimaSeniorinnen

ICJ AO on climate change

Urgenda

TransLitigate, Phillip Paiement PI (ERC Starting Grant 2021)

Recommendations

Katherina Pistor, The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It (Yale University Press, 2025).

John Vaillant, Fire Weather (Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, 2023).

About

Editing: Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, January 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

The Legal Strategy behind Greenpeace The Netherlands v Netherlands (Bonaire case)

In this third episode, Eefje de Kroon, Greenpeace The Netherlands’ Campaign Lead for Climate and Energy, speaks with Tessa Trapp, PhD Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, about the Bonaire Climate Case (Greenpeace The Netherlands v The Netherlands). The conversation begins with a brief overview of the Dutch court’s judgment pronounced on January 28, 2026, and the mitigation, adaptation, and non-discrimination obligations for the Dutch government. Eefje then expands on Greenpeace's advocacy and legal strategy relating to Bonaire, including on the special history, culture, and traditions, as well as particular vulnerability of the island. She also talks about the close relationship and collaboration with residents of Bonaire and people with a personal connection to Bonaire, who played a central role not just in planning the case, but also in its success, despite not being granted individual legal standing. To conclude, Eefje and Tessa look to the future and discuss potential follow-ups, as well as political and judicial consequences of the judgment.

References

Bonaire Case (Dutch with links to the English translation)

Youtube Playlist: ‘De Toekoemst van Bonaire’, by Greenpeace Netherlands

Recommendation

Words to Win By (Podcast)

About

Editing: Simon Waswa & Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, January 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

Lawyering before the European Court of Human Rights

In this episode of Between Heat and Hope, Veronika Fikfak, professor of Human Rights and International Law at UCL, joins us to discuss the ‘European Human Rights Bar’, this is the network of lawyers that bring cases to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Having just completed an ERC Starting Grant and being about to start an ERC Consolidated Grant, Veronika has done extensive empirical work – both qualitative and quantitative – on the ECtHR. In this episode, she shares her great expertise on lawyering before the ECtHR and links it for us to current and future climate cases before the Strasbourg Court. We discuss opportunities and limits of bringing a climate case to the ECtHR, reflect on the consequences of the particularities of climate litigation in light of Veronika's research findings on the European Human Rights Bar in general, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the separation but also cooperation between domestic lawyers and their ECHR counterparts.

References

KlimaSeniorinnen

Veronika Fikfak

Recommendations

Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025).

Monica Feria-Tinta, A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future (Faber, 2025).

About

Editing: Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, February 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

A Law and Political Economy Approach to Climate Litigation

In this episode, Ioannis Kampourakis, Associate Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and co-director of the Law and Political Economy (LPE) in Europe project joins Rena Hänel, PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam, to talk about what is to be learned from applying a Law and Political Economy lens to climate litigation.

The episode begins with Ioannis describing the theoretical foundations of Law and Political Economy as a stream of legal scholarship that emphasizes the law as being constitutive of markets and the economy more generally. He then applies these insights to explain both how law has helped to create and sustain unsustainable economic patterns at the root of the climate crisis, and how climate litigation could harness the transformative potential of the law by focusing on what he calls structural enablers of economic power.

The conversation then turns to the practical work that the LPE in Europe project is doing with civil society organizations engaged in strategic litigation, including climate litigation, to integrate insights from scholarship into their legal strategies. In the end, Ioannis and Rena discuss ideas for potential future case strategies that could address the climate crisis as part of a wider "polycrisis" of climate change, widening economic inequality and wars, among others.

References

LPE in Europe Project

Urgenda

Milieudefensie v Shell

Lliuya v RWE

Workshop: Advancing a Law and Political Economy Approach to Strategic Litigation, LPE in Europe (2024)

Recommendations

Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, The spectre of state capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Thea Riofrancos, Extraction: The frontiers of green capitalism (WW Norton & Company, 2025).

David McDermott Hughes, Who Owns the Wind?: Climate crisis and the hope of renewable energy (Verso Books, 2021).

About

Editing: Martyna Durlik, Clara Kammeringer

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, February 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

Corporations, Climate Change & Human Rights

For this episode of Between Heat and Hope we are joined by Professor Evelyne Schmid. Evelyne Schmid is a professor of international law at the University of Lausanne, where she is an expert in human rights. Her work focuses, among other things on corporate conduct and the safe and just operating space of humanity within the environment.

In this episode, we discuss with Evelyne the ongoing Swiss case of Asmania et al. brought by four plaintiffs from the Indonesian island of Pari against cement producer and major emitter Holcim. From the role of human rights in this case, we move to a wider discussion on applying human rights regimes to corporate conduct, the role of corporations in the climate crisis and attempts of regulating corporate conduct through social responsibility and sustainability due diligence schemes. Throughout the episode Evelyne, teases out why it is important to also litigate against corporations and not just against states. She discusses the impact corporate conduct has on emissions and the power corporations hold in the international system, as well as the consensus in the international community that corporations have to be actively engaged in the green transition.

References

Evelyne Schmid

Asmania et al. vs Holcim

ICJ AO on climate change

Richard Heede, ‘Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers’, 1854–2010. Climatic Change 122, 229–241 (2014).

Carbon Majors Website

Recommendations

Center for International Environmental Law

Professor Sundhya Pahuja on ‘Metastatic Legality: Companies, States and the Spread of European Law’, 26 March 2026

About

Editing: Simon Waswa

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, March 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).

Standing at the European Court of Human Rights

In this episode of Between Heat and Hope we are join by Professor Corina Heri. Corina Heri is Associate Professor of human rights and climate change at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Primary Investigator of the TEMPORALAW project. In this capacity she works on human rights law, climate change, the role of courts as well as the role of vulnerability in the law.

The conversation sets out discussing climate litigation before the European Court of Human Rights and particularly looks at different questions related to access to court and what kind of applicants can and should bring climate cases. Corina walks us through her critique of climate litigation exclusively being brought by associations as flattening the claims that can be made that way. From KlimaSeniorinnen we look to the wider set of climate cases before the ECtHR and discuss how Duarte Agostinho, Greenpeace Nordic, and possible the pending case Müllner v Austria fit into the puzzle and what they tell us about the Court’s approach to the climate crisis. Corina also shares some more structural insights on the functioning of the Court in relation to its narrative of limited resources and how that impacts its treatment of climate cases. Finally, we get a taste of the questions Corina’s new project TEMPORALAW will investigate.

References

KlimaSeniorinnen

Duarte Agostinho

Greenpeace Nordic

Müllner v Austria

Corina Heri, ‘Climate-related vulnerabilities and the European Court of Human Rights: Reimagining victim status through intersectional thinking’ (2025) 38/5 Leiden Journal of International Law, 88.

TEMPORALAW, Corina Heri PI (funded by the Research Foundation Flanders, Odysseus scheme)

Recommendations

Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017).

Law at the End of the World (Podcast)

About

Editing: Simon Waswa

Music: “Delayed Flight” by Michael Ramir C. via mixkit

Recorded at the University of Amsterdam, April 2026

The LitDem Project

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101125511).