Event

Courts, Stories, Consequences: The Impacts Of Climate Litigation And The People Behind It

Name: Courts, Stories, Consequences: The Impacts Of Climate Litigation And The People Behind It
Start: 2026-10-12T19:30:00.000Z
End: 2026-10-12T22:00:00.000Z
Location: L'Argenteria, Via Roberto Da Bari 139

12 October 2026 — L'Argenteria, Via Roberto Da Bari 139

A joint event CLIMPACT × PersoNa

Over the past decade, claimants across Europe have taken their governments to court over the adequacy of national climate policy, with different outcomes. In these cases the organisations that acted as claimants were also the people who built the campaign around the litigation, who decided how it would be presented to the press and to the public, who chose which personal accounts would carry it, and who have since watched what the case did and failed to do in the years that followed.

The evening is arranged to draw on that double position, of claimant and of campaigner, and brings together representatives of organisations that promoted systemic climate cases against their governments. The speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Each of them will be asked how the media told the story of their case, and how much the personal accounts of the people behind it counted, in court and outside it. They will be asked what their case has changed, in law and policy, in public debate, and in the organisations themselves — and, where the change has yet to come, what has held it back.

The perspective of those who bring these cases is part of what CLIMPACT sets out to record. The project examines 500 cases worldwide across every domain in which litigation may leave a mark, from judicial doctrine, legislation and administrative practice to media coverage, public discourse on climate responsibility, and the capacity of civil-society networks, and it draws on legal, sociological and economic analysis conducted in parallel on the same case. Within that design, the accounts given by individual claimants, by the organisations that acted as parties, and by those who promoted or supported the litigation without appearing in the proceedings are a source in their own right, gathered through surveys addressed to them and through the study of how cases are constructed and carried.

The PersoNa project - ‘Personal Narratives in Climate Litigation’ tackles a topic that is at the core of this evening: what judges can learn about climate change from the people who live its impacts, and what happens when those lived accounts enter a courtroom. Most climate cases rest on institutional science, yet cases such as KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland, Duarte v. Portugal, Herrera Carrión et al. v. Ministerio del Ambiente del Ecuador, and Sustaining the Wild Coast v. Minister of Mineral Resources of South Africa have foregrounded the experience of affected people. The project examines how personal narratives, understood as accounts of lived climate impacts, affect judges, lawyers and parties and shape wider societal engagement with litigation. It explores under which conditions they are accepted as credible evidence to establish standing or demonstrate harm before courts. Its methods combine legal analysis and literature review, ethnography across ten locations, Critical Discourse Analysis of societal debate, and Text Mining of court rulings, over cases filed since Urgenda in 2013.

The event opens with brief presentations of CLIMPACT and of PersoNa, the project on personal narratives in environmental and climate litigation based at the University of Padua, and of what the two have in common. The evening is held in English, open to the public as well as to conference participants, and followed by dinner at the same venue.