About the project

A recent wave of legal actions is sweeping the globe, from demands for reparations to advisory proceedings, marking a 'rights turn' in climate litigation that links the unequal impacts of climate change to human rights violations. However, unlike most human rights abuses, the cascading effects of environmental destruction are widespread, long-term, and non-linear, increasingly tied to the boundaries of our planet's ecological limits. The NFR-funded Climate Rights project will develop artistic research methodologies to tackle the challenge of representing and integrating the diverse, multi-faceted nature of evidence in climate cases.

Rights-based climate litigation represents a global, civil society-led effort to address the accountability gap left by the lack of decisive action on climate change. The Climate Rights project aims to close the evidentiary gap in these cases by tackling critical questions of responsibility, causality, and the visibility of environmental destruction. To deepen the understanding of accountability and evidence, the project will reframe climate cases beyond conventional human rights and jurisdictional frameworks, towards territorial imaginaries rooted in political ecology and design research. Through a series of investigations, online platforms, and exhibitions both inside and beyond the courtroom, the project’s interdisciplinary team will use a novel combination of visual and spatial analysis, fieldwork, close cooperation with impacted communities, attribution studies, and digital media are reshaping the way scientific evidence and ecological knowledge of environmental destruction are produced, represented, and contested in legal contexts and in public debates.

The project in the Research Council of Norway's project bank