Climpact — Charting the Landscape of Climate Litigation Impacts

Framework

Methodology

How Climpact identifies, codes and measures the impacts of climate litigation across legal, political, economic and social dimensions.

How do we recognise impacts when we see them?

Climate litigation’s impacts don’t follow neat linear paths . A single court decision can trigger policy changes, shift corporate strategies, reshape public discourse, and influence investment patterns — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes years apart , often in ways no one anticipated when the case was filed. To capture this complexity, Climpact introduces a novel analytical framework built on two core concepts: areas of impact and sites of impact .

Two charts, one common grammar

Areas of impact are conceptual, coherent, and overarching societal domains where litigation’s effects emerge and interact. Sites of impact are the specific domains within each area where litigation expresses its transformative potential — concrete manifestations of how litigation translates into measurable changes in institutional arrangements, established practices, and behavioural patterns.

  • Individual Case Impact Charts (ICIC) — For each case, the ICIC records observed effects across the legal, judicial and policy area (α), the social and cultural area (β), and — for private-target cases — the economic area (γ), together with the supporting evidence.
  • Aggregate Case Impact Charts (ACIC) — The ACIC consolidates ICIC entries at cluster level, with thematic and geographic cross-cluster analyses where emerging patterns cut across the clustering structure.

Two litigation pathways, three disciplines

Climpact is structured around two complementary Research Lines , each addressing a distinct category of climate litigation based on the nature of the respondent. Research Line A examines cases brought against public authorities; Research Line B focuses on litigation targeting private actors. This distinction reflects different legal frameworks and divergent pathways through which judicial outcomes translate into impacts.

  • Research Line A — Government-target litigation — 327 cases against public authorities, examined across two areas of impact: the legal, judicial and policy area (α), where litigation reshapes regulatory frameworks, judicial interpretations of state obligations and the implementation of climate policies; and the social and cultural area (β), where cases alter public discourse and civic mobilisation. A team of legal scholars and sociologists works on the same cases simultaneously.
  • Research Line B — Private-target litigation — 173 cases targeting carbon majors, financial institutions and other corporate actors, examined across three areas: the legal, judicial and policy area (α), tracing the legal construction of corporate climate obligations; the social and cultural area (β), examining corporate-stakeholder relations; and the economic area (γ), evaluating effects on corporate strategy, market valuations and risk disclosure.
  • Process-tracing — making sense of complexity — At the conclusion of each Research Line, ICIC and ACIC evidence is consolidated into Chains of Impact (CoIs). A structured protocol of causation tests verifies necessary conditions, identifies sufficient evidence, examines counterfactual scenarios and documents interaction effects between areas of impact — distinguishing genuine causal influence from temporal coincidence.
  • Open-access database — breaking the silos — A modular, API-based infrastructure integrates case outcomes with ICIC, ACIC, visual and narrative Chains of Impact and standardised metadata. Public APIs enable researchers, institutions and civil society organisations to query and build upon Climpact data, fostering interoperability with existing repositories rather than duplicating them.

A multi-source evidentiary record

For each case we map media narratives through computational text analysis and qualitative interpretation, conduct structured expert elicitations , and cross-reference legislation, regulatory and administrative decisions, case law, and academic and grey literature. At cluster level we add targeted surveys and social media analysis . For private-target cases, we also collect corporate governance documents, disclosure filings, strategic communications, and market data.

  • Documentary record and elicitations — Court filings, judgments, legislative and regulatory records, policy papers, academic and grey literature, and structured expert elicitations with litigants, legal teams and promoting organisations form the primary evidentiary spine.
  • Media, surveys and market data — Computational text analysis of press coverage, targeted surveys of citizens, policymakers and legal professionals, social media analysis, and — for private-target cases — stock prices, investor statements and financial performance indicators.

From correlation to mechanism

Climate litigation does not operate in a vacuum . Policy reform, corporate transformation and shifts in public discourse result from multiple intersecting forces, and a judicial outcome alone rarely explains what follows. The central methodological challenge is distinguishing genuine causal influence from mere temporal coincidence .

  • Chains of Impact and causation tests — Findings from ICIC and ACIC are consolidated into Chains of Impact and subjected to a structured sequence of causation tests — verifying necessary conditions, identifying sufficient causal evidence, and evaluating competing explanations for observed outcomes.
  • Counterfactuals and interaction effects — The protocol examines counterfactual scenarios to determine whether observed changes would have occurred absent litigation, and documents interaction effects between areas of impact — how legal developments trigger social mobilisation or market responses, and vice versa.

An infrastructure built to be reused

Existing climate litigation databases document case characteristics and immediate outcomes, but none traces how cases connect, influence one another and collectively reshape governance systems over time. Climpact’s open-access database is designed to fill precisely this gap — built on a modular, API-based architecture, with controlled growth beyond the original dataset through a submission and peer-review workflow open to external researchers.