Event

Climpact Inaugural Conference

12 October 2026 — Palazzo Ateneo

Shaping the Future of Climate Litigation Research

Another summer has passed in which the physical evidence of climate change was the subject of continuous public attention, and in which the distance between what states have undertaken and what they have done remained the central political fact of the matter. Courts have become one of the places where that distance is contested. Climate litigation has grown into a prominent feature of climate governance, and the pace at which it is developing gives a particular urgency to a question that remains open: whether it changes anything, and if so what, where, for whom, and under what conditions.

More than 3,600 cases have been filed across 62 countries; they are increasingly heard by apex courts and argued before regional and international tribunals, and the advisory opinions delivered in 2024 and 2025 are expected to sustain this growth. Establishing what litigation produces beyond the judgment requires evidence from outside the legal record, methods drawn from other disciplines, and periods of observation that many of the leading cases are still too recent to allow.

Work on the impacts of climate litigation is being done in law, political science, sociology and economics, under evidentiary standards that differ from one field to the next, and the results are dispersed across literatures that have limited occasion to meet. Where findings appear to conflict, it is often unclear whether the disagreement is substantive or an artefact of how each study was designed, and that question cannot be settled from within any one discipline. Establishing what is known requires the relevant work to be examined together, and examined with the methodological choices in view.

The conference is convened to take stock. Over two days in Bari it brings together scholars from law and the social sciences to establish what is currently known about the impacts of climate cases brought against governments, what remains contested, which methods are available and where their limits lie, and which questions should be prioritised in the next phase of research. It is also the occasion on which CLIMPACT — a four-year project funded by the Italian Fund for Science, analysing 500 cases worldwide — presents its research agenda, and on which its own methodological choices are put before the researchers best placed to contest them.

The programme is built around three keynote dialogues, each taking one of the domains in which impacts arise: legal and policy; social, media and narrative; judicial and transnational. In each, two or more scholars engage one another directly under a chair. Alongside them, six parallel panels drawn from an open call for papers follow those impacts into the settings where they materialise.