U.S. Climate Litigation During the Biden Years

By Margaret Barry

Using cases collected in the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law’s Climate Litigation Database, this report analyzes the 630 climate change lawsuits filed in United States courts while President Joseph R. Biden was in office. During the Biden administration, the federal government reversed course on the first Trump administration’s climate deregulation and embarked on a “whole-of-government approach to combatting the climate crisis.” Many states and municipalities pursued their own efforts to mitigate and prepare for climate change, while other states undertook climate deregulatory efforts. During the four years of the Biden administration, many areas of the U.S. experienced disasters linked to and intensified by climate change, including hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires. This report assesses characteristics of the climate cases filed in federal and state courts during this time period, with these policies and climate events as their backdrop and subject matter. The report’s analysis does not assess the outcomes of these cases, many of which remain pending. Instead the report distills elements of these cases: what goals the litigation aimed to achieve, who the parties were, and the underlying subject matter and substantive law. The analysis — which builds on the Sabin Center’s reports on climate litigation during the first Trump administration — provides a quantitative overview of these characteristics of climate litigation. The report concludes with a discussion of how the trends in U.S. climate litigation may be evolving during the second Trump administration as the U.S. federal government once again reverses course on its climate agenda.

Read the report, U.S. Climate Litigation During the Biden Years, in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.