On May 21, the Constitutional Court of South Korea held the second and final hearing of the lawsuit challenging the national climate policy.
According to Nature, in this landmark "challenge", adults, children, infants and even unborn children have submitted petitions, accusing the Korean government of not doing enough to deal with climate change. The plaintiffs claimed that the government's climate targets were too low, threatening their rights to live in a healthy environment.
Yin Shizong, the legal adviser in charge of the case, said: "This will send a signal that all countries need to take action to deal with the global crisis, without exception."
The cases heard by the Constitutional Court of South Korea combined four similar cases filed between 2020 and 2023, and held the first hearing last month.
One of the cases was brought up by parents on behalf of their children, including an unborn child, "Woodpecker", who is now one year old. Yako Shihara, a climate litigation researcher at the Kyoto Climate Adaptation Center in Japan, said: "The woodpecker is a powerful symbol that society should protect its unborn offspring from the impact of climate change."
Yin Shizong hopes to make a ruling on the case later this year, before South Korea modifies its climate plan submitted to the United Nations.
At present, the goal of the Korean government is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% in 2030 compared with the level in 2018. Climate Action Tracking, an organization that monitors global climate commitments, said that if all countries maintain this level, by the end of this century, compared with pre industrial levels, global temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius. This exceeded the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting the temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius.
Zhu Mingzhe of the University of Glasgow, UK, said that from a legal point of view, if the plaintiff loses, the possibility of the South Korean Constitutional Court agreeing to hear the climate case again will be reduced, but this should not be regarded as a failure. "Even if I lost this time, I lost very well because it stimulated social consciousness." He believed that the case had been successfully filed with the Constitutional Court of South Korea. (Wang Fang)
