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No New Fossil Fuel Projects
A Fossil Fuel Research Hub to support legal practitioners challenging the legality of new fossil fuel supply projects
1 September 2022
Litigation challenging government licenses for new fossil fuel projects is a growing, and promising, mode of civil society-led climate action. But this type of litigation faces complex hurdles. Environmental lawyers would benefit from easier access to the burgeoning corpus of multidisciplinary research on fossil fuel supply in the context of climate change, of which the applicants are leading scholars.
The project proposes to establish a Fossil Fuel Research Hub to publish an accessible online database that provides litigation-relevant summaries tailored to legal practitioners' needs.
Survey of legal practitioners
Work done in collaboration with Earthjustice to field a survey of environmental lawyers on how the database should be structured so as to provide ready access to the empirical research needed when preparing cases challenging new fossil fuel projects
Research and compilation of database
Research for the database was completed by the project team with legal expertise. Data is then compiled into litigation-relevant summaries for the database, alongside category pages for browsable categories.
A website containing the database was subsequently developed by a professional service provider under the guidance of project leads
Launch of database
One of the article summary pages in Redline
Access to the database can be found here: https://www.redlinedatabase.org/
Dr Fergus Green discusses the database at a workshop on climate litigation in Melbourne, April 2023.
It is anticipated that the database would reduce litigation costs against new fossil fuel production projects and improve its evidentiary basis, increasing the likelihood such litigation succeeds. It will also spur new research to fill litigation-relevant knowledge gaps.
