norway

On Thursday March 10, 2022, Our Children’s Trust submitted a request to intervene in Greenpeace Nordic and Others v. Norway alongside and on behalf of 100 psychiatrists, psychologists, academics, and professional organizations specializing in children’s mental health. These mental health experts, hail from 12 different countries, seek to provide the court with information about the body of science documenting the mental health crisis children are suffering due to government actions that perpetuate the climate crisis.

The health experts include Dr. Van Susteren, who convened the first panel on climate disruption and mental health in 2009 and Dr. Eric Chivian, co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. The experts have asked for permission to provide the Court with their specialized knowledge about “the acute and chronic mental and physical health injuries that children suffer due to climate change and the failure of governments to adequately address climate change.” In particular, these experts would inform the Court about the disproportionate injuries climate change inflicts on children and the results of a groundbreaking survey that illustrates the youth climate anxiety epidemic.

The Court will likely release its decision whether to grant the 100 mental health experts request to intervene in Greenpeace Nordic and Others v. Norway in the next 1-3 months.

In October 2016, inspired by Our Children’s Trust and the Juliana v. United States 21 youth plaintiffs, as well as supported by Our Children’s Trust, young people in Norway filed a constitutional climate lawsuit against their government for granting licenses to oil companies to drill for new oil in the Arctic Barents Sea. The plaintiffs, Nature and Youth and Greenpeace Norway, argued that Norway violated its youngest citizens’ and future generations’ constitutional right to a healthy environment. This right was added to the constitution in 2014 after Our Children’s Trust and its partner attorneys around the world convened and inspired a top team of Norwegian legal scholars, lawyers and activists to incorporate public trust principles and climate rights into Norway’s Constitution by amendment. In December 2020, after a several-day hearing before the Norwegian Supreme Court, the Court held that the government’s 2011 and 2013 authorizations to explore for oil in the Arctic did not violate the constitutional rights of the youth. While the Court acknowledged that “we are facing major climate challenges, that at least a substantial part of the temperature increase on our planet in the last hundred years has been caused by humans as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, and that the emissions must be reduced in order to stop and hopefully reverse the trend,” and that “Article 112 of the Norwegian Constitution grants individual rights that can be reviewed before the courts,” it held that the granting of the licenses for oil exploration do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation.

This case illustrates that courts have the duty and power to decide constitutional climate change claims. While similar to the Juliana litigation in that it was filed on behalf of youth and challenged affirmative government conduct that causes climate change as violative of fundamental rights, the case was narrow in scope in that it challenged ten permits for oil exploration as opposed to the government’s overall systemic conduct that causes climate change.

Having pursued every viable option in the courts of Norway, the plaintiffs took their complaint to the European Court of Human Rights on June 15 2021. See below for more details.