Can Climate Laws Truly Hear Human Experiences?

© Wix

Climate change does not affect everyone equally. Rising temperatures, floods, droughts, and other climate-related disruptions often place the heaviest burdens on people who are already socially or economically vulnerable. Children, Indigenous communities, low-income populations, women, and people with health conditions can experience climate impacts in very different ways. Yet these differences are rarely shaped by a single factor. Instead, multiple aspects of identity—such as age, gender, culture, health, or social status—interact with one another, creating unique experiences of risk and vulnerability. This interconnected perspective is known as intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2015).

As climate impacts intensify, another trend has also accelerated: climate litigation. Since the beginning of this century, legal actions against governments and corporations related to climate change have increased substantially (Savaresi & Setzer, 2022). Such lawsuits seek stronger climate policies, compensation for damages, or accountability for failures in mitigation and adaptation. Beyond legal outcomes, these cases have also become powerful tools for raising awareness about climate justice.

However, while climate litigation has expanded worldwide, an important question remains: can legal systems adequately recognize the complexity of human experiences?

A recent study by Schill and colleagues examined eleven intersectional climate litigation cases together with perspectives from legal experts. Their findings reveal both progress and tension. Increasingly, plaintiffs have introduced identities linked to age, cultural background, and health into climate cases. Scientific evidence is often used effectively to support claims. Yet courts frequently struggle to incorporate lived experiences—such as the loss of Indigenous traditions, cultural identity, or community heritage—into legal assessments (Schill et al., 2026).

At the heart of this challenge lies a deeper clash between two ways of understanding reality. Legal systems often operate within scientific and material frameworks that favor things that can be quantified, measured, and simplified. Courts typically require evidence that can be counted: medical impacts, economic damages, or statistical risks. Human experiences, however, do not always fit neatly into these categories. The grief of losing ancestral lands, the fear of an uncertain future, or the erosion of cultural identity cannot easily be converted into numbers.

As a result, plaintiffs are often forced to compress complex realities into simplified categories in order to prove vulnerability. Ironically, a framework intended to recognize complexity can itself become simplified.

Climate vulnerability is not simply an individual characteristic but an expression of relationships among ecological conditions, social structures, cultural identities, and power systems (Vuong, 2025; Khuc & Nguyen, 2026). Reducing people to legal categories risks losing important forms of information about how climate change is actually experienced.

Perhaps the challenge is not simply whether courts can recognize suffering, but whether legal systems can learn to recognize complexity itself. Climate justice may require moving beyond asking vulnerable people to repeatedly prove their pain and instead shifting attention toward those with greater power and responsibility. The question is not only what kind of climate laws we need, but whether our systems of justice can become sophisticated enough to understand the full complexity of being human in a changing world that is full of uncertainty (Nguyen & Ho, 2026).

References

Collins, P. H. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 8. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Khuc, V. Q., & Nguyen, M. H. (2026). Cultural Additivity Theory. Available at SSRN 6767760. https://ssrn.com/abstract=6767760

Nguyen, M. H., & Ho, M. T. (2026). The absurdist approach to unveiling possible paradoxical thinking for innovative socio-psychological research. MethodsX, 16, 103910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2026.103910

Savaresi, A. & Setzer, J. (2022). Rights-based litigation in the climate emergency: mapping the landscape and new knowledge frontiers. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 13(1), 7-34. https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2022.01.01

Schill, E., et al. (2026). Climate change litigation and intersectionality in climate justice. Global Environmental Change, 98, 103131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2026.103131

Vuong, Q. H. (2025). Wild Wise Weird. AISDL. https://books.google.com/books?id=C5dDEQAAQBAJ