Intersection between Climate Change, Public Health, and International Law: Litigation, Liability, and Legal Reform

The Intersection between Climate Change, Public Health, and International Law is no longer theoretical; it is unfolding in courtrooms around the world. Our Environmental Health Working Group recently published a peer-reviewed study in PLOS One titled “Legal implications of the climate-health crisis: a case study analysis of the role of public health in climate litigation.” The findings contribute to a growing body of scholarship examining how legal systems are responding to climate disruption as a public health emergency.

As climate attribution science advances and public awareness of climate-related health harms increases, public health arguments are entering climate litigation with greater frequency. Yet few researchers have evaluated this legal landscape through a dedicated public health lens. This report addresses that gap.

Why the Climate–Health–Law Nexus Demands Attention

There is now overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is a public health emergency. Courts across jurisdictions are increasingly asked to determine whether governments and corporations are meeting their obligations under environmental law, human rights law, and climate policy frameworks.

Despite this, public health remains underutilized in legal argumentation.

Environmental degradation, biodiversity collapse, and rising greenhouse gas emissions continue despite decades of legal regulation. The health consequences are tangible:

• Rising food and water insecurity

• Deteriorating air quality

• Expansion of infectious diseases

• Increased frequency of floods, wildfires, droughts, and heatwaves

• Mental health impacts, including ecological grief and trauma

These harms demonstrate that climate change directly and indirectly undermines the legal commitments designed to protect life, health, and well-being.

How We Studied Climate Litigation Through a Public Health Lens

To evaluate the Intersection between Climate Change, Public Health, and International Law, we conducted a global review of documented climate litigation filed between 1990 and September 2020.

Scope of Analysis

• 1,641 total climate litigation cases identified

• Legal databases reviewed across jurisdictions

• Cases assessed for explicit or implicit public health framing

• 65 cases categorized as public health–linked climate litigation

We extracted structured data from case documents, including plaintiff, defendant, legal precedent, decision status, and the presence of health-related argumentation.

Key Findings from Three Decades of Climate Litigation

1. Climate Litigation Is Increasing Rapidly

Case numbers are trending upward, particularly in high-income countries. Over half remain pending, reflecting the recent surge in filings.

2. Public Health Framing Is Rare but Rising

Only 3.96% of cases explicitly centered on public health as part of the litigation strategy. While mentions of “health” are increasing, the public health lens remains underdeveloped in courtrooms.

3. Courts Are Receptive, but Reform Is Needed

Among the 65 health-linked cases:

• 11 resulted in the plaintiff winning

• 11 resulted in losses

• 43 remain undecided

Although courts demonstrate openness to public health science, structural legal reform is needed to ensure health evidence carries sufficient weight in adjudication.

International Legal Frameworks Shaping Climate Litigation

The Intersection between Climate Change, Public Health, and International Law operates within a complex legal architecture.

Global Climate Governance

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change acknowledged the global nature of climate change and the need for international cooperation.

The Paris Agreement, endorsed by 196 countries, emphasizes the right to health and outlines mitigation and adaptation commitments. However, enforcement mechanisms remain limited.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 3 (“Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages”), reinforce health-centered development objectives—though they are not legally binding.

Human Rights and Environmental Law

International Environmental Law (IEL) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL) increasingly intersect in climate cases. Courts are asked to interpret:

• The right to life

• The right to health

• The right to a healthy environment

• Intergenerational equity principles

More than 80% of UN Member States now recognize the right to a healthy environment in law.

The Rise of Eco-Centric Legal Paradigms

Legal systems historically grounded in anthropocentric principles are beginning to evolve.

Countries including Ecuador, Bolivia, and Panama have adopted eco-centric frameworks granting rights to nature. France has passed legislation recognizing the crime of ecocide. These shifts reflect a broader reimagining of law beyond resource extraction toward ecological protection.

The key question moving forward:

Will eco-centric law integrate a clear public health mandate?

Embedding public health within eco-centric legal systems could ensure climate rulings systematically prioritize human and planetary well-being.

Climate Attribution Science and Legal Causation

Litigation depends on demonstrating causation. Advances in climate attribution science now allow courts to quantify proportional responsibility for extreme weather events and climate-related health impacts.

As attribution methodologies mature, they strengthen:

• Claims of foreseeability

• Demonstrations of negligence

• Quantification of attributable risk

• Economic valuation of health harms

Robust scientific evidence increases the likelihood that public health arguments will influence judicial reasoning.

Financial Systems, Liability, and Health Risk

The economic dimension of climate litigation is central to the intersection of climate change, public health, and international law.

Courts are increasingly asked to:

• Price the health impacts of pollution

• Evaluate financial disclosures on climate risk

• Assess corporate duty of care

• Consider investor activism strategies

Financial institutions, asset managers, and fossil fuel companies are facing mounting litigation. Market forces are gradually internalizing previously externalized public health costs.

The expectation that governments and corporations prioritize human health over short-term profit is rising, particularly following global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Barriers to Access and Structural Limitations

Several limitations shape the current landscape:

• Western-centric case databases

• Limited documentation from certain jurisdictions

• Restricted access to subscription-based legal resources

• Underreporting of criminal climate litigation

These barriers may exacerbate climate injustice, particularly in low-income regions most vulnerable to climate-health harms.

Practical Recommendations for Legal and Public Health Stakeholders

To strengthen the role of public health within climate litigation, we recommend:

1. Initiate health-backed legal cases across jurisdictions

2. Advocate for eco-centric laws with explicit health mandates

3. Mobilize funding for climate-health attribution research

4. Integrate climate-health curricula in higher education

5. Establish environmental health expert panels for court testimony

Legal epidemiology (the study of law as a determinant of health) should expand into climate law to ensure legislation actively protects human well-being.

Conclusion: Repositioning Health at the Center of Climate Law

The legal field of environmental governance is undergoing rapid transformation. Courts can no longer dismiss the scientific consensus linking anthropogenic climate disruption to harm to human health.

Litigation offers a powerful mechanism to:

• Drive decarbonization

• Establish financial liability

• Protect vulnerable populations

• Advance intergenerational justice

However, the Intersection between climate change, public health, and international law will only reach its full potential if public health becomes central, not peripheral, to climate legal strategy.

Integrating health risk into economic cost structures, strengthening eco-centric legal paradigms, and mobilizing interdisciplinary expertise can shift legal systems toward a well-being–centered economy.

The future of climate litigation may ultimately depend on one fundamental principle:

The protection of planetary health is inseparable from the protection of human health.

The original report was done by Hannah Marcus, Co-Chair of our Environmental Health Working Group.

The Disability Pandemic: What COVID Revealed About Who Gets to Live

The pandemic has been a brutal reminder that disabled people don’t matter. Living through this, as a disabled person with a wonky immune system, has been a reminder that my life doesn’t matter to most.

Where I do matter is in my disability community, the community of people at such risk of this deadly disease who have rallied and worked together to protect ourselves. After two years of lockdowns, fear, forgetting, and being ignored, my nerves are sanded raw. A new variant is announced. Restrictions for me creep back in. I’m left wondering if this is how it will be from now on: no more music, no more crowds, no more indoor anything really, and maybe no more footy. For the rest of my life.

The past two years, and the many before them, showed me that I can build a life in four walls. I can survive terrible things. But isolation is not neutral. It wears you down. And what the disability pandemic has shown is that survival often depends less on government systems and more on each other.

What Is “The Disability Pandemic”?

The disability pandemic refers to the disproportionate risk, neglect, and systemic exclusion experienced by disabled people during COVID-19—especially in access to healthcare, vaccination, social supports, and public policy decisions.

While COVID-19 was a global crisis, its impact was not evenly distributed. In Britain, 60 per cent of those who died from COVID were disabled people. In Australia, that data isn’t properly collected. We aren’t counted.

Instead, we are hidden behind phrases like “underlying health conditions.”

Who is valued?
Whose life is worth saving?
Who gets the ventilator?
Who is triaged out?

These questions were not abstract for disabled people. They were immediate and terrifying.

“You Would Die”: Locking Down Before the World Did

In February 2020, my GP was kind but blunt.

You have to go into lockdown now, she told me. This virus is very serious for you. With all your…and she waved her hands to indicate my entire body. You can’t get this. You would die.

I walked home along Katoomba Street, my stick pressing into the pavement, navigating around people suddenly rendered dangerous. I closed the door to my flat and would not go out again for five months.

A few years earlier, my heart had failed. Doctors stood at the end of my hospital bed and told me I was about to die. It turned out I didn’t want to.

I did everything they told me: restricted fluids, cardiac rehab, and medication. I would place my hand over my heart and whisper to it, willing it to keep beating. Eventually, it did.

During COVID, that same adrenaline-fuelled panic returned. Every surge in cases meant locking down weeks before everyone else. Checking supplies. Preparing to disappear again. This time, I could only control my small part. The rest depended on whether everyone else also didn’t want me to die.

I wasn’t entirely confident.

Living in Two Worlds During COVID

The disability pandemic created a strange split reality.

In one world, things became more accessible than ever. Meetings moved online. Arts events went virtual. I could give evidence to a royal commission without having to navigate inaccessible spaces. For once, everyone was on screen, not just me stuck on someone’s phone in the corner.

In the other world, my supports collapsed. I didn’t see another person for months. Gym and physio disappeared. My arthritis tightened its grip. When I couldn’t get food, I cobbled together strange cupboard meals. When I was lonely, I didn’t say it out loud.

On screen, no one saw my disfigured skin or wonky hands. They didn’t see me limping. In screen-land, I looked like everyone else. That virtual erasure made it harder to explain what was happening behind the camera.

The social model of disability tells us that when environments become accessible, we become less disabled. But during COVID, accessibility sometimes masked a crisis.

Triage Fears and the Shadow of Eugenics

Early reports from overwhelmed health systems overseas raised another fear: rationed care.

Disabled people around the world spoke about being triaged out. Alice Wong imagined a doctor reading her chart and deciding she was a waste of precious resources.

Those fears were not paranoia. They were rooted in history.

Australia has a long record of institutionalizing disabled people. Eugenics found fertile ground here. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 excluded people based not only on race, but also on mental and physical health.

Writer Amanda Tink observed that eugenic thinking did not end with World War II; it mutated.

During COVID, people across the political spectrum argued for policies that placed disabled people at higher risk of dying, then shouted at us when we objected.

If disabled people are the ones dying, then the pandemic can feel like it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else.

That is the quiet logic of the disability pandemic.

Government Failure and Community Response

When the pandemic hit, disabled people began making frantic calls:

• I can’t get food.

• My supports have stopped.

• I can’t afford essential medication.

• What are the rules?

• What is Telehealth?

Fifteen to twenty per cent of the population was effectively forgotten.

Advocacy organizations (many run by disabled people) scrambled to respond while facing the same barriers themselves. Governments stonewalled. Complaints were redirected. Concerns were minimized.

The Disability Royal Commission later found that failure to consult disabled people in early pandemic planning led to neglect of our needs during an unprecedented emergency.

The vaccine rollout repeated the pattern. Disabled people were told we were prioritized. In practice, many could not access vaccines. Some group homes were among the last to receive them.

“Everything’s fine,” governments said.

Everything bloody well was not.

Disabled Mutual Aid: Webs of Care That Kept Us Alive

While governments faltered, disabled people organized.

Online groups became information clearinghouses. People translated public health orders. Shared state-by-state updates. Explained income support changes. Crowdfunded emergency funds. The Disability Justice Network of Australia distributed over $40,000 (mostly raised by disabled people for disabled people).

Writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls these networks “webs of care.” The ways we kept each other alive during COVID, they argue, were nothing short of heroic.

This is what the disability pandemic revealed most clearly: we survive because we build each other’s safety nets.

Not as charity. As solidarity.

First Peoples With Disability and Vaccine Inequity

The failures were even sharper for First Peoples with disabilities.

Damian Griffis, CEO of First Peoples Disability Network, warned that First Nations people with disabilities were at risk of being triaged out or receiving inadequate support. Vaccine access required centre-based appointments, which were not accessible to many.

The fear was justified. The rollout repeatedly failed to reach those most vulnerable.

The disability pandemic intersects with colonial history. Australia’s federation was built on exclusion: white, able, male. That foundation shapes who is visible, who is protected, and who is forgotten.

Freedom for Whom?

I watch people chanting about their freedom and think about what I’ve lost.

Will I ever go to the footy again? I’ve been going to AFL games since I was a kid, sneaking into Princes Park, singing “We are the Navy Blues,” watching my grandmother yell at Hawthorn.

The idea that I might never sit in a crowd again is unbearable.

I have had three vaccine doses. But the people in the ICU, while vaccinated, the ones dying, are people like me. People with “underlying health conditions.”

Friends make complicated plans to see me. Rapid tests. Isolation before visits. Carefully rationed social contact.

Is this how it will be now?

Flavia Dzodan asks what it means to protest public health measures in a country built on occupying space by obliterating others. The question lingers.

Freedom, during the disability pandemic, often meant freedom from considering us.

The Small Things That Are Everything

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes that sometimes we think we must save the world, and anything less is nothing.

But we, in our small crip circles, are the world.

The small, low-key things we do to keep each other alive are nothing. They are everything.

That is the quiet lesson of the disability pandemic.

Disabled people have always built networks of care. We will continue to. These webs will endure beyond COVID, beyond the next crisis, beyond the next wave of forgetting.

We survive because we refuse to let each other disappear.

About the Author
El Gibbs is an award-winning writer and disability advocate. Her work has featured in Growing up Disabled in Australia, Overland, Eureka Street, and Croakey.

Welcoming New Members

On May 19, 2022, during the General Assembly of the World Federation of Public Health Associations, member organizations have welcomed 3 new members; the Eastern Mediterranean Public Health Network (EMPHNET), the European Network of Medical Residents in Public Health (EuroNet MRPH), and World Patients Alliance.

We look forward to working together towards our shared goals of protecting and promoting health & wellbeing worldwide.

Welcoming New President

On May 19, 2022, the WFPHA formally welcomes its new President Prof. Luis Eugenio de Souza. He will hold the role of President for the next two years.

Luis is a professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a leader in health equity and sustainable development!