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Sydney—An Australian court on Tuesday threw out a landmark legal ruling that the country’s environment minister had a duty to protect children from climate change.
Last year’s legal win by a group of high school children had been hailed by environmental groups as a potential legal weapon to fight fossil fuel projects.
However, the federal court ruled in favor Sussan Leey, Environment Minister. She decided she did not need to weigh the effects of climate change on children in deciding whether to approve new fossil fuel projects.
The judgement overturned a July 2021 ruling by a lower court that found the minister had a duty to “avoid causing personal injury or death” to under 18s due to “emissions of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere”.
Anjali Sharma, 17, who launched the legal action in 2020, said the minister’s successful appeal had left the students “devastated”.
“Two years ago, Australia was on fire; today, it’s underwater. Burning coal makes floods and bushfires more devastating and deadly. Something needs to change,” she said.
Izzy Raj-Seppings, 15, said the court had accepted that young people would “bear the brunt of the impacts of the climate crisis”, which she described as an important step in climate litigation.
However, the federal court found emissions from the mine at the centre of the case — Whitehaven’s Vickery coal mine — posed only a “tiny increase in risk” to the students.
Minister Ley welcomed this verdict.
“The minister always takes her role as the environment minister seriously,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Lawyer George Newhouse of Macquarie University said the Sharma decision reflected Australia’s lack of a bill of rights.
“We don’t have the scope for the successful climate change litigation that we see in Europe because Australia has a constitution that, quite intentionally, contains no human rights,” he told AFP.
Newhouse said landmark cases, such as the Urgenda precedent — in which Dutch citizens successful sued their government to take climate action — would fail in Australia because of this.
“I am disappointed by the Sharma decision, but not surprised,” he said.
Sharma and her fellow students will consider whether to appeal to Australia’s highest court.
Laura Schuijers, a climate and environmental law expert from the University of Sydney, said that the High Court could be tempted to hear their appeal due to the importance of the issues raised.
Schuijers said Australia’s lack of a constitutional protection of human rights made it “a very interesting place for climate litigation”.
“It means that litigants are seeking creative ways to test the bounds of the law and to ask the ultimate question: in the face of inaction, who is responsible for picking up the slack?” she said.
The ruling had “put the spotlight on Australia’s politicians and policymakers to take the proactive action that the science presented in the courtroom suggests is urgently needed”.
Australia has been at a crossroads of climate change. As global weather patterns change, droughts, bushfires and bleaching events on Great Barrier Reef have become more common and intense.
