Quantifying intergenerational inequity in lifetime climate risk as evidence in child and youth-led lawsuits

Climate change is already causing widespread negative impacts across the world, including by increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. With further warming, children and young people will be exposed to an ever-greater number of risks from anthropogenic climate change. Building on previous research quantifying lifetime exposure to climate extremes [1,2], we present a flexible framework, demographics4climate,  that can be applied on any climate dataset to quantify lifetime exposure to climate risks in a spatially explicit and age-specific way. We present the application of the framework on a case study by estimating the lifetime exposure to high and very high fire weather conditions in Portugal for different generations and under different demographic and warming scenarios. We discuss the relevance of this analysis for the climate lawsuit Duarte Agostinho and others v. Portugal and others (recently dismissed from the European Court of Human Rights), as well as the relevance of the framework for child and youth-led climate lawsuits more broadly. We propose that this framework, including possible extensions upstream towards emission sources and downstream towards impacts, could provide meaningful science-based contributions to the evidentiary base of child and youth-led climate lawsuits.  

 

[1] Thiery, W. et al. Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes. Science 374, 158–160 (2021).

[2]  Grant, L. et al. Global emergence of unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes. Nature, accepted.