The role of the Paris Agreement in domestic climate change litigation: diverse approaches to multi-level interactions. A comparative analysis.

The existential threat of climate change consequences has never been as present as today. Extreme weather events are now daily occurrences, and although international climate change agreements which are meant to tackle this challenge, such as the Paris Agreement, do exist Parties are slow, unwilling, or unable to make commitments which would be sufficient to “keep 1.5 alive”. This has resulted in a wave of domestic climate litigation where civil society members such as NGOs, children and indigenous groups are brining direct judicial action against the relevant authorities due to the lack of sufficient measures or ambitions to the climate crisis. This thesis discovers the different interpretative interactions between domestic law and the Paris Agreement used by the judges in the recent Urgenda, Royal Dutch Shell and the Neubauer (German Constitutional Court) decisions. Consequently, this is used to make the determination that the Paris Agreement plays a significant role in domestic climate litigation both as a complementary source next to national law as well as a more legally justiciable set of legal standards and principles