Climpact — Charting the Landscape of Climate Litigation Impacts

Research

Research Agenda

Climpact's research agenda: an interdisciplinary, open-access framework for tracking how climate litigation drives change in law, policy, business and society.

Beyond the gavel , measuring the impact

Litigation’s impacts are neither immediate nor linear . A court decision doesn’t simply produce a direct outcome — it could trigger complex chains of effects that materialise across different domains, at different times, through mechanisms that are often indirect and difficult to trace, even before the decision is rendered . Identifying where impacts actually occur and recognising them when they emerge requires sophisticated analytical frameworks and interdisciplinary empirical research.

A framework that moves beyond existing taxonomies

Our framework of areas and sites of impact captures litigation’s multidimensional influences across distinct but interconnected domains. We identify where litigation’s effects materialise — in legal and policy, social and cultural, and economic domains — and trace how impacts in one sphere catalyse transformations in others .

  • Legal, judicial and policy — The regulatory space where litigation transforms the established legal frameworks of climate governance, affecting judicial interpretations of state and corporate responsibilities, legislative and regulatory developments, and policy implementation.
  • Social and cultural — The societal and relational space where litigation shapes public discourse about climate responsibilities, mobilises civic engagement and reconfigures the expectations placed on governments and corporations alike.
  • Economic — The market space where litigation influences corporate strategies and industry practices, affecting individual firm performance and broader market responses to climate-related risks and opportunities.

One dataset, three disciplinary lenses

Our interdisciplinary team of legal scholars, sociologists and economists will analyse the same dataset of cases simultaneously through their distinct methodological lenses, working with standardised analytical tools — Individual Case Impact Charts and Aggregate Case Impact Charts — that enable genuine integration while preserving disciplinary rigour. This synchronised approach will reveal patterns invisible to single-discipline analysis .

  • Individual Case Impact Charts (ICIC) — At case level, the ICIC records the observed effects flowing from a single case across legal, social and economic domains, the evidence supporting each, and the strength of the inferred causal link.
  • Aggregate Case Impact Charts (ACIC) — At cluster level, the ACIC synthesises ICIC entries across families of cases, with thematic and geographic cross-cluster analyses surfacing where, how and under what conditions litigation produces impact at scale.

The cases we are tracking , worldwide

Climate litigation is a global, fast-moving field . This live map plots the cases Climpact analyses as the research advances — click any marker to open the case : its court, the parties, the outcome and what it changed.

Triangulating the full record

We examine cases through systematic cross-referencing of court proceedings, legislative records, policy documents, media coverage, corporate disclosures and stakeholder interviews — building a comprehensive evidence base that connects litigation events to observable changes across multiple domains.

  • A multi-source record — Court proceedings, legislative records, policy documents, media coverage, corporate disclosures and structured stakeholder interviews are read against one another to corroborate every finding.
  • Process-tracing — Our process-tracing methodology will reconstruct the causal mechanisms linking litigation to impacts, distinguishing genuine effects from mere correlation. We don’t just document what changed after litigation — we demonstrate how and why litigation drove those changes.

An unprecedented empirical assessment

500 cases analysed through interdisciplinary methods, generating the most comprehensive empirical assessment of climate litigation’s effectiveness ever produced.

  • 500 — Cases analysed under a common interdisciplinary framework — 327 government-target and 173 private-target.
  • 3 — Disciplinary lenses — legal, sociological and economic — applied to the same cases at once.
  • ~20% — Approximate share of all global climate litigation represented in the Climpact sample.