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On July 31st, Ireland’s Supreme Court held that the Irish government’s current climate plan failed to meet the requirements set out in the statutory Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act of 2015. The ruling will require the government to (a) revise its plan to realise greater near-term emission reductions, and (b) better specify how Ireland will achieve the Act’s long-term objective of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The case is Friends of the Irish Environment v. Government of Ireland (IESC, 2020). 

When the case initially went before the Irish High Court, the government prevailed, with the High Court finding the government had broad discretion as to how to achieve the legislation’s required emission reductions. The existing plan was legally valid under this view. On appeal, the Irish Supreme Court found the Act required a certain degree of specificity as to how the requisite emission reductions would be achieved between the Act’s coming into force and 2050. The government’s plan failed in this respect, leaving the bulk of emission-reduction work to future governments. 

Though the Irish Supreme Court’s judgment rested on the fact that the Irish government’s plan did not satisfy legislative requirements, Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) made numerous interesting arguments in line with those made in the Dutch Urgenda climate case which succeeded in requiring the Dutch government to ramp up its emission reduction actions. FEI pointed to Urgenda as persuasive precedent, arguing, as the plaintiffs in Urgenda did, that the government’s failure to mitigate climate change violated citizens’ rights under either or both the European Convention of Human Rights (this argument prevailed in the Urgenda case) and the national constitution. 

The Irish Supreme Court rejected these arguments, but their recurrence in ongoing climate litigation is contributing to interesting jurisprudence surrounding the concept of a legal right to a healthy environment. Indeed, the Irish Supreme Court at one point in their decision even discussed Canadian environmental law and policy expert (and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment) David Boyd’s textbook The Environmental Rights Revolution: A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights and the Environment. As climate action cases, such as this Irish case, continue to proliferate, Boyd’s textbook may soon be just the first of many.

Photo: Climate Case Ireland