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Snapshot

  • Climate change generates extensive administrative law challenges in Australia and globally.
  • However, against the backdrop of Australian administrative law doctrine, such challenges are often unsuccessful, although the possibility of legal disruption remains.
  • This article examines how various courts have responded to climate-related challenges and discusses the inherent constraints in pleading such cases considering administrative law doctrine.

Climate-related litigation has become an important avenue for enforcing governments’ climate change obligations, often in the form of judicial reviews of administrative decisions to approve potentially climate-damaging projects such as coal mines (see, for example, the Grantham Research Institute’s Global trends in climate change litigation: 2022 snapshot). Governments are typically named as respondents.

A frequent argument in administrative law challenges is that government decision-makers have failed to properly consider climate change in statutory decision-making. Climate advocacy in administrative law has often sought to integrate climate change into decision-making for projects with substantial climate impacts, using broader statutory purposes. While climate litigation in administrative law has met with mixed success, it is a crucial mechanism for raising public and political awareness, generating pressure for broader regulatory change.

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