Journal of African Development

Over the last decades, there has been the immense proliferation of climate change litigation in developed nations, following a rich array of litigation strategies and where corporate responsibility and governmental failure are highlighted. Most captivity is filed against massive entities that emit greenhouse gases to great amounts: relief for these actions includes injunction, damages, and establishment of duties and responsibilities related to climate change. Another noteworthy phenomenon in such jurisdictions is the growing use of human rights frameworks for making claims under the right to healthy environment and intergenerational equity. Moreover, it will include wins in the cases in which the focus has been on a core legal interest, formerly untested in cases, in which damages to human health out of climate change have been the basis for precedent-setting litigations against states for failing to act to prevent climate change. The emergence of climate change litigation as an essential tool to put governments and corporations on their feet and into action against the continuing environmental crisis has placed India as a particularly vibrant and universally interested case study. Besides the carbon emission profile of India, it is this judicial activism that makes the climate litigation discourse imagined in India, an important site for understanding the trends in the global environmental governance regimes. The paper will examine the trends in climate change litigation in India as developed through key judgments and its impact on environmental policy of the country and overall discourse on climate justice across the world. In particular, this review will clarify the reasons and reasons behind the rise in climate litigation, rules that govern it and the social repercussions of the litigation in the Indian context considering that India is particularly vulnerable to climate change effects such as air pollution.