Strategic Litigation for Climate and Corporate Accountability
Our recent report, Strategic Litigation: Climate and Corporate Accountability, explores the legal strategies CSOs use to check corporate power—responsible for fueling the climate crisis and driving human rights abuses. Drawn from the projects SAGE supports, the report highlights how communities and their allies engage at different points along the legal continuum from case development to litigation to implementation of judicial decisions. While some of the legal strategies SAGE grantees pursue have the explicit objective of addressing corporate contributions to climate change, other cases primarily seeking redress for human rights and environmental harms have, nonetheless, produced significant climate outcomes.
Successful legal strategies and cases supported by SAGE have reduced emissions and pollution, halted deforestation, advanced stewardship of lands and resources, ameliorated health and environmental impacts, and catalyzed changes to extractive industry practices of major carbon emitters. Some examples of impact achieved along the continuum of legal strategies include: Unchecked corporate power is driving human rights abuses and fueling the climate crisis. Corporations in the fossil fuel, agribusiness, plastics, and mining sectors, pursuing profits and unlimited growth, have caused significant harm to the climate with limited accountability. The same lack of accountability also leads to human rights abuses, including unsafe labor conditions, polluted water, loss of land and livelihoods, and criminalization of defenders. Some examples of impact achieved along the continuum of legal strategies include:
Case Development. Follow the Money, a groundbreaking investment chain mapping methodology - developed by IDI and Equitable Cambodia - reveals key pressure points that are pivotal in building powerful cases and fueling successful legal action and other climate strategies. Initially developed as part of SAGE’s first round of grants in 2015, IDI has since used the FTM approach to provide corporate research and training to CSOs, including other SAGE grantees, unlocking new targets of litigation, more favorable jurisdictions, and additional causes of action.
Litigation. In December 2024, the Kichwa community of Puerto Franco in the Peruvian Amazon won a historic lawsuit, recognizing that Indigenous communities must consent to and benefit from conservation projects, including carbon credit projects, on their territories. The decision required the government to grant the community title to its territory and cancel overlapping forestry concessions. The Kichwa’s legal strategy was co-developed with their allies and SAGE grantees, Instituto de Defensa Legal, Forest Peoples Programme, and Due Process of Law Foundation.
Implementation of Judicial Decisions. The community of Piquiá de Baixo in Açailândia, Brazil, is on the fenceline of three steel plants with nine blast furnaces and a cement plant. In 2024, the community, with support from Justiça nos Trilhos and FIDH, successfully completed implementation of a 2016 agreement with Vale and the Brazilian government, resulting in the construction of a new community for 312 families at a safe distance from the industrial pollution. This win sets an important precedent for other communities who are seeking to hold carbon emitters financially liable for the environmental and public health effects of their pollution and to create sustainable alternatives.
These and other examples highlighted in the report show that successful litigation strategies, cultivated from the ground up and rooted in layered campaigns, require a diversity of organizations and expertise and, consequently, provide multiple entry points for support. Donors, tailoring support to their strategic focus, can enable organizations to engage at different points along the continuum from case development to litigation to implementation of judicial decisions, producing significant outcomes for communities and the climate.
