On 31 July 2020 in a judgement in the case Friends of the Irish Environment v The Government of Ireland, the Irish Supreme Court quashed the Irish government’s 2017 National Mitigation Plan, saying that it did not give enough detail on measures to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
Giving judgement in favour of the plaintiffs in the case, the environmental group Friends of the Irish Environment, the Supreme Court ruled that the 2017 Plan did not meet the requirements of Irish legislation, the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015, in particular by allowing for an initial increase in emissions in the early phases of the period to 2050, and by not spelling out in sufficient detail the steps to be taken at each point in that period. In short, the Supreme Court ruled that the government had to go further, and do more, to show how it met the requirements of its own legislation.
The ruling adds to a list of landmark cases brought in different jurisdictions, such as the Urgenda case in the Netherlands and the Leghari case in Pakistan, where national courts have begun the show their willingness to intervene in the climate change debates. They can do this either by approaching climate action by governments as a matter of ‘rights’, such as a constitutional right to protection against the effects of climate change: or, as in the Irish case, they can reinforce the ‘obligations’ of governments, to measure up to the legislative commitments that they have given to take steps to achieve net zero emissions by particular target dates. We are likely to see further examples of both approaches.
One common feature of some of the leading climate change cases – including the Urgenda and Leghari cases, Juliana v United States of America and this case Friends of the Irish Environment v The Government of Ireland – is that there is no substantial dispute between the environmental group plaintiffs and the government defendants about the substance of climate science. That is a significant measure of the extent to which that science is accepted. Governments are not tending to go into court to argue that the scientists have got it all wrong. It is interesting to read Irish Chief Justice Clarke in Dublin considering the evidence on whether the tipping point for marine ice sheet instability has been crossed in the Amundsen Basin of West Antarctica.