Workshops & Conferences

CLIMPACT Inaugural Conference | Keynote Dialogue 1 Legal and Policy Impacts: Implementation, Enforcement and Regulatory Response

5 October 2026

The CLIMPACT inaugural conference is approaching. In the coming days we will present the programme in detail, and today we begin with the first of our keynote dialogues. Climate litigation against governments has become a significant feature of climate governance. In several jurisdictions, framework rulings, which challenge the adequacy of a state's climate action as a whole, have been followed by legislative amendment, revised targets and new planning instruments. Whether the judgment produced those changes, or accompanied changes already under way, remains a distinct and contested question. The same difficulty of attribution arises in the best-known cases. The Netherlands exceeded the target set in Urgenda, yet the inference from that outcome to the judgment has been disputed. In Germany and Ireland, legislative amendments followed Neubauer and Friends of the Irish Environment within months, but coincided with political developments that were under way independently of the litigation. Governments have also responded in very different ways. Some rulings have met symbolic compliance, with reports and action plans produced while the remedies themselves are inconsistently implemented. In other cases legislatures have accepted the obligation formally while narrowing its content, or have contested the court's authority to impose it. Impacts may even precede a judgment: the filing of a case, or the prospect of an adverse ruling, can lead a government to amend legislation or abandon a project before any court has decided anything. What a court can require of a government is constrained by the separation of powers and by the institutional capacity of courts to supervise policy. Some courts declare an obligation and leave the state to determine how to meet it; others retain supervision over implementation. Once proceedings close, monitoring passes largely to the litigants and to civil society, whose capacity to follow the remedy through and to return to court becomes itself a condition of the ruling's impact. The German experience illustrates the point: the amendments adopted after the ruling were later weakened by a new government, and the organisations that brought the case have returned to court. Siri Gloppen, Benoit Mayer and Joana Setzer , in conversation with Harro van Asselt , will take up these questions: the milestones and limits of systemic climate litigation, the role of remedy design, and whether emissions should serve as the principal measure of what it achieves. The leading judgments are still recent, while assessments of this kind ideally require observation over five years or more. The dialogue therefore takes stock of what is known so far and considers the directions that research may take from here. 12 October, Aula Magna Aldo Cossu, 13:10.