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Not slashing emissions? See you in court

A pioneer in sustainable innovation explains why she has spent the past decade fighting the first lawsuit to force a government to act on global heating.
  1. Marjan Minnesma

    1. Marjan Minnesma is co-founder and director of the Urgenda Foundation in Amsterdam, which this year received an honorary doctorate as an institute from the University Saint-Louis in Brussels. She lectures at many universities and is a board member of the energy co-operative OM | new energy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Twitter: @marjanminnesma

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I live in a nation where more than one-quarter of the land is already below sea level. For much of the past decade, I’ve been on a journey for climate justice. With 886 of my fellow Dutch citizens, the Urgenda Foundation that I co-founded brought the first lawsuit aiming to find a national government guilty of failing to safeguard its people from the ravages of climate change. We have won repeatedly, at several levels of the court.

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Nature 576, 379-381 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03841-5

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 20 December 2019: On 20 December 2019, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled that the judgment of the Court of Appeal should be upheld, ordering the Netherlands to lower its greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020, compared to 1990 levels.

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