Climate litigation is exploding worldwide.But does it actually work?

Climpact is the first large-scale empirical research project to answer that question with systematic evidence — analysing 500 cases, around 20% of all global climate litigation, to reveal if, how, when and why courtroom battles translate into real-world change.

500 cases. Cases analysed across legal, social and economic domains. ~20% of all global climate litigation, represented in the sample.

Beyond verdicts and headlines, Climpact traces the mechanisms through which litigation generates effects — the regulatory frameworks that shift, the corporate practices that adapt, the public narratives that evolve, the market dynamics that respond. A groundbreaking open-access database will replace anecdotal evidence with robust findings about when, how and why litigation drives change.

How litigation translates into tangible change

01

Policy & regulation

The regulatory frameworks that shift — how rulings ripple into laws, policy and concrete government action on climate.

02

Corporate & markets

The corporate practices that adapt and the market dynamics that respond as high-emitting companies face legal pressure.

03

Society & discourse

The public narratives that evolve — how leading climate cases reshape media attention and the wider debate on the climate crisis.

TRACE 0.1

17,039 documents and 578,146 pages read. Machine-assisted tracing of how climate judgments are cited in later litigation worldwide: the citations of a judgment, what the citing text does with each one, and the pages where the argument goes on without the name.

What’s happening at Climpact

Climpact LIT

What one case leaves behind

Every case leaves traces, long before the ruling. Report one, or read what others have reported.

Report the first trace

TRACE 0.1Ask anything about climate litigation.

Climpact ConversationsBeyond the GavelThe show on what climate cases set in motion, well beyond the ruling.

What we study, how we analyse it, and what comes out of it

A framework that moves beyond existing taxonomiesOur 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.Research agenda One dataset, three disciplinary lensesOur 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.Research agenda Triangulating the full recordWe 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.Research agenda An infrastructure built to be reusedExisting 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.Methodology