Environment activists are increasingly holding companies to account by filing lawsuits against them for climate inaction. Countries and companies have been slow to take the urgent actions needed to prevent a climate catastrophe in a scenario where the world’s temperature can rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius or more.

Protests, talks and even shareholder activism has slowly been bringing change in how companies and governments are acting in response to climate change. But progress has been slow and intermittent.

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The number of climate change lawsuits and judgements has only increased in numbers in recent years. The number of climate change lawsuits have more than doubled since 2015, found a report by researchers at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute.

Between 1986 and 2014, over 800 climate change-related lawsuits were filed while over 1,000 cases were filed after 2015 since now, found researchers from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

But it is not just the number of cases that have been increasing, but their potential impact and scope as well. Just this year, two historic judgments on climate change-related lawsuits were decided in favour of activists.

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The Hague District Court had ordered Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company, to reduce global emissions by 45 percent by the start of the next decade. It marked the first time any court had enforced upon companies their duty to do their part to prevent climate change. While Shell has stated it would be appealing against the decision, the company must abide by the orders in the interim.

Similarly, Germany’s supreme constitutional court, the Karlsruhe court, had decided in another historic judgment the country’s government must do more to prevent climate change and adopt more ambitious policies to keep temperature rise within the check.

Lawsuits on the same lines are being planned against major German automobile car manufacturers BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen to force them to phase out internal combustion engines that use fossil fuels by 2030.

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Similar judgments, though perhaps smaller in scope, are increasingly being given out in lawsuits all over the world. The proliferation of climate change lawsuits has been brought forth because of the increased frustration that many feel about the inaction of government and companies regarding action against climate change.

At the same time, increased technical and scientific knowledge about how exactly climate change is being caused by the action, or inaction, of humans have been instrumental as key evidence in such lawsuits.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)