A Rights Revolution in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the IACtHR Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency

Abstract

In July 03, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) recognized for the first time a right to a healthy climate in its Advisory Opinion No. 32 (2025) on the “Climate Emergency and Human Rights”. The IACtHR derived the standalone right to a healthy climate from the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, which the International Court of Justice in its 2025 Advisory Opinion on “Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change” considered “a precondition for the enjoyment of many human rights, such as the right to life, the right to health and the right to an adequate standard of living, including access to water, food and housing.” Based on these developments, authors trace the emergence of the right to a safe climate within and outside the Inter-American Human Rights System, both in scholarly works and domestic case law. We then examine the nature and content of the right to a safe climate, including new right holders, duty bearers and corresponding obligations that stem from this right. In this sense, the authors depart from the IACtHR's proposition and detect lacunae and corresponding opportunities for the right's further development in theory and practice. Finally, the authors analyse how this rights revolution sparked by the IACtHR Opinion may boost rights-based climate litigation, as it moves from aspiration to enforceable law.

Introduction

The year 2025 has become yet another year of climatic and Earth disbalance records. So far, the planet has seen continued high global temperatures with an 86% chance of at least one year exceeding the 1.5°C warming threshold above pre-industrial levels from 2025 to 2029. ¹ Already at the beginning of the year, it became clear that January 2025 was the warmest in the 176-year global climate record. ² These dire examples of climatic escalation and continuing Earth system disequilibrium may lead to feelings of hopelessness and despair in light of the dramatic deterioration of a disturbing scenario characterized by alarming cascade of domino effects that still awaits the blue planet in the future. Nonetheless, the year 2025 has also brought with it some outstanding legal developments that, at the very least, offer potential for hope and gives cause for very cautious optimism. Two of the most significant, long-awaited, and hard-fought decisions regarding State obligations in the context of climate change have been communicated in the same month.

Climate emergency and human rights

At the beginning of July, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) announced its Advisory Opinion (AO-32/25) on the “Climate Emergency and Human Rights”, ³ whereas the International Court of Justice (ICJ) followed about three weeks later with its Advisory Opinion on “Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change”. ⁴

One particularly groundbreaking momentum in this accumulation of international climate change-related decisions is the emergence of a new right to a healthy climate (RtHC) within AO-32/25. The IACtHR derived this standalone RtHC from the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, ⁵ which the ICJ considered “a precondition for the enjoyment of many human rights, such as the right to life, the right to health and the right to an adequate standard of living, including access to water, food and housing” in its own 2025 climate advisory opinion. ⁶ Besides specifying the obligations operating under this new right, the IACtHR further set out procedural and remedial standards fit for adjudicating climate disputes. In this sense, it is the most developed articulation to date within a human-rights system of how climate protection translates into justiciable duties. The RtHC responds to two structural limits of earlier doctrine: (i) the difficulty of tethering the causes and impacts of climate change to breaches of substantive rights (life, health, integrity), given their diffuse nature and temporal dispersion, and (ii) procedural hurdles (standing, evidence, causation) that historically foreclosed adjudication on the merits. The Opinion addresses both by articulating a stand-alone climatic right and by adapting access to justice to the realities of an existential threat to humanity and nature.

Against this background, the present contribution first traces the history of the emerging RtSC within the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS), locating it within the broader context of this rights revolution. In this sense, it is argued that the RtHC is the product of a decade of jurisprudential “greening” in the IAHRS, read alongside convergent developments in national practice and scholarship. In a second step, the contribution distils the right's content, individual and collective dimensions as well as the core State obligations that operate under the RtHC, thereby clarifying its object and normative architecture and identifying corresponding right holders and duty bearers. Finally, the authors seek to demonstrate if and how the major jurisprudential innovation provided by the IACtHR in its Advisory Opinion No. 32 may provide a new boost to rights-based climate litigation, as the right to a safe climate is moving from aspiration to enforceable law. In this context, the contribution analyses new developments concerning access to justice in climate litigation that render the RtHC justiciable and identifies litigation fronts focused on climate change mitigation. Based on this analysis, the contribution finds that by developing novel access to justice standards fit to deal with the complexities of climate disputes, AO-32/25 is poised to catalyze at least two complementary streams of rights-based litigation in the region: framework suits to raise mitigation ambition and secure implementation, and project-focused suits to deter high polluting activities, especially fossil fuel developments.

Emerging right to a safe climate

In July 2025 a community of States, Indigenous communities, legal practitioners, civil society movements and academics, many of whom have contributed to the decision through the provision of written and oral statements, ⁷ watched as the Court broke new legal ground in the Anthropocene through AO (32/25). ⁸ With this landmark decision, the IACtHR became the very first human rights monitoring body to recognize that a healthy climate constitutes an autonomous and justiciable right. ⁹ The recognition of the RtHC in this AO can be considered the result of a process of gradual jurisprudential evolution within the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS), which has also been influenced by developments in legal practice and academia. The different strands of legal development within the IAHRS have coalesced – within the underlying narrative of progressive environmentalization of human rights standards – to form part of a coherent fabric, no matter whether one subscribes or not to the specific interpretative approaches taken by the Court on the journey to the recognition of the right to a healthy climate. ¹⁰

The tensions arising between human rights protection and the global phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change within the IAHRS became evident as early as 2005, when Sheila Watt-Cloutier with support of the Inuit Circular Council filed a petition on behalf of the Inuit people of the Arctic regions of the United States and Canada with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). ¹¹ The petitioners claimed the violation of several human rights, including the right to life, preservation of health, property and the right to enjoy the benefits of culture due to the failure of the USA to adequately regulate its greenhouse gas (GHG) emmissions, which had led to widespread environmental changes. ¹² Nevertheless, the petition was dismissed before the proceedings could even gain momentum, as according to the IACHR the “information provided does not enable us to determine whether the alleged facts would tend to characterise a violation of rights protected by the American Declaration.” ¹³ While the decision itself and the remarkably short reasoning of the Commission was perceived as disappointing, ¹⁴ the decision reflects that at that time the system was still ill-equipped to tackle a complex anthropogenic phenomenon with transnational and intertemporal impacts involving multiple polluters and intricate causality chains, that poses a serious threat to the protection of fundamental human rights. ¹⁵

Twelve years after the Inuit petition, the IACtHR issued its advisory opinion on the “Environment and Human Rights” (AO-23/17), ¹⁶ which is based on a previously unknown extent of human rights “greening”, ¹⁷ characterized by an incorporation of principles originally rooted in international environmental law, such as prevention, precaution and cooperation, ¹⁸ into protection granted by well-established human rights norms. ¹⁹ In this sense, the Court followed an approach of evolutive interpretation of the rights to life and personal integrity enshrined in Arts. 4 and 5 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR), ²⁰ which is oriented towards defragmentation.

Although climate change remained at the peripheries of this decision, one of the most important preparatory steps for the development of a right to a safe or healthy climate taking place in the context of AO-23/17 was the Court's decision to pave the way for the direct justiciability of the right to a healthy environment (RtHE) as derived from Art. 26 ACHR. ²¹ Yet, it should not go unmentioned that the approach taken by the IACtHR involved methodological inconsistencies and dogmatic ruptures, which also resulted in a division amongst the Court's members themselves. ²² Still, the determination of the direct justiciability of the RtHE constituted the critical catalyst for the emergence of an autonomous RtHE under the ACHR and the further development of its substantive and procedural elements in the consecutive environmental case law of the Court. In particular, AO-23/17 opened the door for the first determination of a violation of the autonomous and directly justiciable right to a healthy climate in the Case of the Indigenous Communities of the Lhaka Honhat Association (Our Land) v. Argentina. ²³

In addition to strengthening the position of the RtHE in the IAHRS, AO-23/17 also provided the IACtHR with the opportunity to establish legal standards that signaled an ecocentric turn in its jurisprudence. ²⁴ In particular, it emphasized that the RtHE constituted a “universal value” owed to present and future generations, which protected the components of the environment as legal interests in themselves, “even in the absence of the certainty or evidence of risk to individuals.” ²⁵ Remarkably, the Court also found that the RtHE “protects nature and the environment, not only because of the benefits they provide to humanity or the effects that their degradation may have on other human rights”, but rather due to “their importance to the other living organisms with which we share the planet that also merit protection in their own right.” ²⁶ These rather general statements did not in and by themselves constitute a recognition of nature possessing rights under the Convention. Nevertheless, this new development was a considerable approximation to enshrining “rights of nature”, and created an ecocentric twist, which was constantly recurred to and upheld in the Court's following environmental case law. ²⁷

Another critical step in the emergence of the RtHC worth mentioning is the Commission's signature resolution on human rights protection in the context of climate change titled “Climate Emergency: Scope of Inter-American Human Rights Obligations”. ²⁸ While the Commission did not explicitly mention the right to a safe or healthy climate in Resolution 3/2021, it still underscored that “States have an obligation to cooperate in good faith in order to prevent pollution of the planet, which entails reducing their emissions to ensure a safe climate that enables the exercise of rights.” ²⁹ Two years beforehand, then Special Rapporteur Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, David R. Boyd, had stated that a safe climate is “a vital element of the right to a healthy environment.” ³⁰ He explicitly referred to a right to a safe climate when stating that “States must not violate the right to a safe climate through their own actions; must protect that right from being violated by third parties, especially businesses; and must establish, implement and enforce laws, policies and programmes to fulfil that right.” ³¹ In his last report as mandate holder, Boyd emphasized that a “safe climate” belongs to the six substantive elements of the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, besides i) clean air, ii) safe and sufficient water, iii) non-toxic environments, iv) healthy ecosystems and biodiversity as well as v) healthy and sustainably produced food. ³² However, Boyd neither clarified the content of the right nor specified the rights’ corresponding right holders and its duty-bearers. ³³ Still, Boyd was neither the first nor the only one that had referred to the existence of a climatic human right. In 2016, in the case of Kelsey Cascada Rose Juliana et al. v. United States of America, Judge Aiken highlighted that “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.” ³⁴ In late 2025, the case would be elevated before the Inter-American Commission alleging the USA's acceleration of fossil fuel production, consumption, and combustion violates the petitioners’ right to a healthy climate. ³⁵

The last relevant dogmatic stepping stone for the emergence of the right to a safe or healthy climate within the IAHRS was laid in the IACtHR's decision on Case of La Oroya Population v. Peru from 2023. ³⁶ In this decision, the Court specified the substantive elements of the RtHE, ³⁷ which include air, water, food, the ecosystem and – most notably – the climate. ³⁸ The non-exhaustive list of substantive elements protected by the RtHE constitute either components of the environment itself, such as air and climate (atmosphere), water (hydrosphere) or the ecosystem (biosphere), or are sub-components that can be attributed to one of the environmental elements. ³⁹ After concretizing the substantive elements of the RtHE, the Court proceeded to derive the rights to clean air and water from this environmental rights, ⁴⁰ implying that these new rights function as sub-rights to the RtHE. ⁴¹

While the standards developed in the realm of La Oroya Population v. Peru do not explicitly refer to a right to a safe climate, the derivation of two sub-rights from the substantive elements of the RtHE foreshadowed the emergence of further sub-rights under this same right in the future, including the right to a safe or healthy climate. ⁴² In 2024, the authors of this contribution had already pointed to the possibility that a right to a safe climate could arise from the RtHE in the context of AO-32/25 based on the jurisprudential developments in Case of La Oroya Population v. Peru, ⁴³ an idea that was further developed in the 2024 doctoral thesis on “The Right to a Safe Climate: Leading Human Rights Law into the Anthropocene”. ⁴⁴

This theoretical anticipation was elevated to jurisprudential reality when the IACtHR in its AO-32/25 finally recognized the right to a healthy climate as an independent right that “responds to the need to provide the Inter-American legal order with a basis in its own right, allowing for the clear delineation of specific State obligations in the face of the climate crisis and the enforcement of these obligations independently of other duties related to environmental protection.” ⁴⁵ Even though the right is derivative in character, the Court articulated the right to a healthy climate as an autonomous, stand-alone right, whose denomination not only resembles, but explicitly connects to its “mother right” when using the adjective “healthy”. ⁴⁶ In this sense, the Court implicitly rejected the adjective “safe” as characterizing adjective, referencing the variability inherent to the climate system, a distinction that could possibly be based on considerations of what States could reasonably foresee and prevent. ⁴⁷ This first ever recognition of the right to a healthy climate by a human rights tribunal comes after a long journey in the consolidation of Inter-American human rights jurisprudence regarding the complex disentanglement of human rights protection and climate change. It is therefore worth highlighting some of the outstanding elements of this new right in the following analysis.

Right to a healthy climate: core features and obligations

The IACtHR defines a “healthy climate” echoing the language of the object and purpose of the UNFCCC: a climate system “free of dangerous anthropogenic interference.” ⁴⁸ Only under such conditions, Nature and human beings of present and future generations may thrive. Because a healthy environment - and by extension, a healthy climate–is a “precondition for ensuring the enjoyment of other substantive rights”, States are “first and foremost, obliged to guarantee the right to a healthy climate through measures aimed at addressing the causes of climate change.” ⁴⁹ In short, the right to a healthy climate protects the component of the environment that is directly affected in the context of the climate emergency–the global climate system. ⁵⁰ The right thus requires immediate and progressive action, considering the best available science, to protect the climate system in benefit of present and future generations, Nature and its composing elements.

Just like the RtHE, the RtHC is characterized by individual and collective dimensions. Individually, it safeguards each person's ability to live within a climate system free from dangerous human interference. ⁵¹ Collectively, it protects the shared interest of future generations – human and ahuman – in sustaining a climate system fit for their wellbeing and mutual balance in the face of existential risk. ⁵² Two collective interests are therefore protected by the RtHC: the interests of Nature and the interests of future generations. The Court therefore stipulates that States must promote mechanisms to integrate these interests in their climate action. ⁵³

Climate change exponentially “affects multiple natural components and systems” and profoundly alters the cycles, processes, and forms of life that constitute Nature, demanding an urgent recognition of humanity as one more expression of Nature's interdependent web. ⁵⁴ Extending the RtHC's protection to Nature is based on its life guaranteeing function that requires the safeguard of ecosystems’ integrity and the living and non-living components sustaining it, while healthy climatic conditions are a prerequisite for maintaining ecosystem equilibrium. ⁵⁵ According to the Court, granting rights to Nature therefore strengthens environmental protection by providing effective legal tools to prevent existential harms before they become irreversible. ⁵⁶ In this sense, the IACtHR's evolutive interpretation also reflects a growing global trend to attribute legal personhood and corresponding rights to Nature and its individual components, as seen in pioneering Latin American constitutions and judgements. ⁵⁷

While traces of anthropocentrism persist in AO-32/25 – e.g., the Court links Nature's rights to the “availability of vital resources” for present and future generations – the IACtHR also stressed that acknowledging ecosystems’ own rights is essential to protecting their long-term integrity and functionality. ⁵⁸ This intertwinement of the pro persona and pro natura principles responds to the interdependence of humans with the state of the environment, including the climate system. ⁵⁹ Even though the Court neither recognized specific rights of Nature under the American Convention nor described such recognition as a binding State obligation, it nonetheless underscored that States “have a positive obligation to adopt measures to ensure the protection, restoration and regeneration of ecosystems.” ⁶⁰

The Court's recognition of the RtHC also reframes intergenerational equity and justice by highlighting that absent, insufficient or arbitrarily delayed climate action imposes disproportionate burdens on future generations. ⁶¹ According to the Court, the protections offered by human rights law, and specifically, the right to a healthy climate, transcend present generations, extending to “humanity as a legal and moral community that endures over time.” ⁶² Protecting future generations thus requires the adoption of measures that ensure “equity in both the effective enjoyment of rights by present generations, and in their transmission to future generations.” ⁶³

In a similar fashion to the German Federal Constitutional Court's approach to intergenerational equity in Neubauer et al. v. Germany, the IACtHR embedded intergenerational proportionality into mitigation obligations so that any omission, arbitrary regression, or delay must withstand a strict proportionality test. ⁶⁴ Read together with mitigation obligations guided by the principles of non-regression and progressive ambition, States must quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that their targets do not shift disproportionate burdens to future generations. ⁶⁵ Moreover, intergenerational equity has to inform climate impact assessments. As the Court puts it, climate change's impacts are “progressive, intensify over time, and fall more severely on certain age groups”, disproportionately affecting “today's very young people, who will have to live their entire lives in an increasingly adverse climate environment.” ⁶⁶ Accordingly, States must consider short-, medium- and long-term – partly irreversible – climate impacts of activities and projects within their jurisdiction or control.

According to the Court, the RtHC imposes upon States several key obligations to “protect the global climate system and prevent violations of human rights resulting from its alteration.” ⁶⁷ Regarding the core obligation of mitigation, this includes (i) adopting the relevant regulations that define a mitigation target and a rights-based mitigation strategy, as well as regulating the conduct of business enterprises, (ii) adopting mitigation supervision and monitoring measures, and (iii) determining the climate-related impact of proposed projects and activities. ⁶⁸

Even though the Court seems to focus on the normative content of the right with respect to mitigation, it can be argued that the right's protection also extends to adaptation, given their interconnectedness and interdependence. In this sense, it should be reiterated that – as stated by the Court – in its individual dimension, the right protects “each person's ability to live within a climate system free from dangerous human interference.” This ability is not the same for every person, as it is determined by factors such as vulnerability and exposure to risk, which in turn may also intersect with structural discrimination. ⁶⁹ And it is precisely through adaptation measures that the IACtHR seeks to bridge this divide and enhance everyone's “ability” to have a dignified life in a climate crisis.

Towards a new wave of rights-based climate litigation?

In the IAHRS, advisory opinions have binding interpretive authority based on the doctrine of conventionality control. ⁷⁰ All State authorities (judiciary, legislature and executive) must apply ex officio the American Convention and its authorized interpretation by the Court within the scope of their powers. ⁷¹ Against this background, the RtHC requires ambitious and specific public policies. The American continent, with its rich traditions in the protection of constitutional rights and constantly growing awareness towards the negative societal impacts of anthropogenic climate change, is poised for a surge of climate litigation that make use of the newly established RtSC. In the realm of AO-32/25, the IACtHR strongly clarifies that courts cannot remain indifferent to the climate emergency. To the contrary: the Court instructs judges to apply the conventionality control through the standards laid out in the opinion. ⁷² In the following, the contribution therefore turns to the procedural innovations developed by the Court that may open the door for future climate litigation and corresponding case law at the national and international level.

Initially, it is worth noting that the IACtHR anticipates collective and individual climate cases. Collective actions approximate actio popularis in the sense that anyone can file a claim to protect the climate system without proving individual harm. Consequently, States should establish domestic mechanisms for broad standing (collective actions, public interest suits) enabling legal representation of Nature, future generations, and the public. ⁷³ Individual cases remain available for comprehensive reparation where concrete rights are violated. Filing these complaints can be more challenging because climate change encroaches upon everyone's fundamental human rights. The Court's answer to this issue is recommending a case-by-case analysis of exposure and vulnerability to climate change-related impacts. ⁷⁴ In so doing, the IACtHR directs national judges to flexibly assess standing, considering factors such as geographical location, adaptive capacities, and – most importantly – the structural inequalities that may exacerbate their vulnerability to climatic impacts. ⁷⁵

In addition, the Court tries to lower the burden for applicants through the application flexible evidentiary and procedural standards. In particular, judges are required to apply the pro actione principle: When in doubt, they should favor adjudication on the merits rather than dismissal on rigid interpretations of procedural rules. ⁷⁶ This entails recognizing the standing of communities, collectives, environmental defenders, Indigenous peoples, and non-residents to file climate claims, consistent with the pro persona and pro natura principles. Furrhermore, a critical challenge for reparations-seeking climate litigation is to prove the causal link between GHG emissions and the specific harm suffered by an individual or community. The Court recognizes these difficulties and orders judges to ease evidentiary standards for plaintiffs. A direct and absolute causal link is not required. On the contrary, national courts are nudged to presume that (i) GHG emissions degrade the climate system and that (ii) such degradation creates serious risks to human rights. ⁷⁷

While these standards developed by the Court should assist future claimants in successfully litigating climate change-related harm before national courts, it should be noted that climate litigation is not a silver bullet. Courts must strike a delicate balance between dispute settlement, correcting structural inequalities and providing appropriate deference to other branches of government. Yet AO 32/25 requires governments to justify ambition levels against credible pathways and to correct inconsistencies between declared goals and concrete measures – opening the doors for more litigation. Although many of these cases can be litigated on the basis of different conventional rights, we propose that directly applying and referring to the Court's standards on the RtHC can especially boost collective forms of litigation targeting inadequate mitigation measures and excessive GHG emissions. We further anticipate a surge in adaptation-related litigation with a focus on intersectional discrimination and its relationship with disaster risk exposure and vulnerability. In this section, the contribution thus provides some insights into litigation avenues that may be supported by demonstrating violations of the RtHC, focusing on mitigation issues that have a preventive and collective reach and allow for broad standing, thus providing for the highest possibilities of proliferation.

(i) Government Framework Cases and Fossil Fuel Supply-Side Litigation

Framework claims challenge the adequacy of State climate policy relative to its obligations under human rights law, climate treaties and national law. ⁷⁸ Within AO-32/25, the Court determined that States must qualitatively and quantitatively assess mitigation targets and set binding, time-bound implementation plans. ⁷⁹ As the Court understands that delayed or insufficient mitigation effectively jeopardizes future generations, cases filed by children and youth plaintiffs may see special success in the region. Already, youth litigating Kelsey Cascada Rose Juliana et al. v. United States of America have filed a climate case before the IACHR, in which they allege that “the U.S.'s deliberate policies to expand fossil fuel consumption and production while knowing the grave danger this posed to the global climate and humanity […] violate Petitioners’ fundamental right to a healthy climate, upon which all other human rights depend.” ⁸⁰

A second major potential front of climate litigation may target specific high-emitting projects or plans. Where project approvals appear incompatible with climate goals, litigants may challenge the adequacy of environmental impact assessments and permits for new fossil fuel developments on the grounds that these projects are incompatible with their human rights obligations under the RtHC. In this way, litigation may seek to block the expansion of fossil fuel operations and other sources of significant emissions, like mass deforestation, as prima facie prohibited conduct under international human rights law. ⁸¹

Although the Court stopped short of calling for a ban on new fossil fuel projects, a coherent interpretation of the decision leads to precisely this conclusion. The International Energy Agency has been clear in stating that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with the 1.5°C temperature target of the Paris Agreement, the scientific floor upon which States must determine their mitigation targets. ⁸² In this regard, the ICJ has stated that “[f]ailure of a State to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that State.” ⁸³ Accordingly, States should carefully consider whether to approve activities and projects that – in view of the best available science – pose a threat to the climate system, including by banning “conduct that irreversibly threatens the vital equilibrium of interdependent ecosystems which enable the survival of present and future generations.” ⁸⁴ In this regard, the Court already requires States to carry out climate impact assessments as part of their duties under the RtHC, as mentioned beforehand.

It should furthermore be born in mind that fossil fuel developments also threaten the basic needs and interest of future generations, including generations unborn, as these projects risk becoming “stranded assets”, assets that lose value abruptly. ⁸⁵ For instance, if a country develops a new oil field, but in 10 years strict climate policies or cheaper renewables force that plant to shut down, the asset is stranded and taxpayers bear the corresponding costs. Governments that nonetheless approve new polluting projects are arguably acting contrary to what is necessary to safeguard the climate system and thus undermine “the conditions necessary for the full enjoyment of human rights” under the ACHR. ⁸⁶ Judicial review of administrative approvals could invalidate decisions that ignore climate impacts or rubber-stamp projects that contradict climate goals and threaten fundamental interests and corresponding rights of Nature and future generations.

(ii) Rights-Based Climate Litigation in the IAHRS: Potential and Lacunae

Another potential strategic avenue is litigating climate cases in the Inter-American Human Rights System. Previously, such claims faced uncertainty, and were rejected ad portas, partly because the law remained unsettled. ⁸⁷ At the current stage, however, both the Commission and the Court have a clear framework to build on when evaluating such claims. Although the Court's decision in the context of AO-32/25 is quite prescriptive in establishing minimum guidelines for all judiciaries in the region, it omits guidance on the substantive and formal requirements that would enable climate litigation to succeed in the IAHRS. In this section, we outline these “loose ends” and offer plaintiffs guidance in accordance with the standards set out in the IACtHR's advisory opinion, particularly focusing on the exhaustion of domestic remedies, victim status and precautionary and provisional measures.

The IACtHR clarified that States must solve climate change cases within a reasonable time. In this regards, courts are ordered to consider “the imminence of the risks that motivate the legal action, the urgency of the measures required in accordance with the claims of the litigation, the impact of inaction on the human rights of the petitioners, and the situation of particular vulnerability in which they may find themselves in the face of the impacts of climate change.” ⁸⁸ But what happens when the passing of that timeframe implies the materialization of irreversible damage to the climate system and corresponding rights violations? In these scenarios, those litigating before the system could make use of already existing exceptions to the exhaustion of domestic remedies provided in Article 46 of the ACHR. Importantly, the IACHR prioritizes cases related to “urgent matters in which serious violations of rights are alleged, and due to the particular circumstances of the presumed victim, there is an imminent danger that the passage of time may cause irreversible harm.”, including cases of irreversible violations of the rights of children, youth and the elderly. ⁸⁹

As regards to victim status, it is important to note that the IACHR allows petitions to be submitted by anyone, even without the initial participation of the alleged victims, in the interest of protecting the public interest. ⁹⁰ However, as the process progresses, greater victim engagement with the proceedings is required for key decisions to be taken, such as those concerning settlements or referring the dispute before the Court. ⁹¹ Based on AO-32/25, the Commission is likely to face a request to relax its standards concerning victim status, in order to allow, at the very least, for factors, such as vulnerability, geographic exposure, and structural inequalities, to define the parameters for standing before the organs of the IACHRS in climate change-related cases, even when the victims cannot be fully identified.

Finally, the IACHR may order precautionary measures at the request of any person or group under the jurisdiction of an OAS member State, or even ex officio. Their adoption requires a prima facie demonstration of the seriousness, urgency, and irreparability of the alleged harm. ⁹² In environmental matters, the Commission has resorted to this mechanism in significant cases. In the Case of La Oroya Population v. Peru, the Commission ordered the Peruvian State to conduct medical diagnoses on dozens of people exposed to mining pollution, while in the Comunidades del Pueblo Maya (Sipakepense y Mam) v. Guatemala, it required Guatemala to suspend gold mining activities, conduct an environmental impact assessment, decontaminate water sources, and provide medical care to affected communities. ⁹³

The Court, for its part, may order provisional measures pursuant to Art. 27 of its Rules of Procedure, at the request of victims and their representatives, as well as the Commission, or even ex officio. These measures have traditionally been aimed at protecting the rights to life and personal integrity, but recent practice demonstrates a broader scope, including monitoring compliance with judgments, protecting freedom of expression, and ensuring the safety of environmental defenders. ⁹⁴ In the absence of an actio popularis in the system and given the potential delay in exhausting domestic remedies, precautionary and provisional measures would potentially allow citizens, human rights defenders, and civil society organizations to request interim measures to prevent the most serious harm before it occurs, for example in order to suspend the approval of a highly polluting project or to prevent arbitrary regressions in climate policy.

Conclusion

With the development of the RtHC, the IACtHR has sparked a watershed moment in human rights history, the effects of which will extend far beyond the Americas. This rights revolution stands in particular contrast to the widespread unwillingness of decision-makers worldwide to adopt timely, effective and adequate measures urgently needed to confront the worsening climate crisis, an inertia that has also paralyzed meaningful progress in annual climate negotiations under the UNFCCC.

Nonetheless, the birth of the right to a healthy climate comes much less as a surprise when considering that law in general and human rights law in particular has always been shaped by a process of continuous transformation and adaptation to new social, economic, environmental, technological and other developments and tensions, which have both challenged and required human rights to evolve and expand their protection. As an existential threat for humanity and interdependent ecosystems, the climate crisis – together with other anthropogenic factors encroaching upon the planet's boundaries – triggers human rights expansion through evolutive interpretation.

That such a development has now been crystallized in the Global South and more concretely within the IAHRS can be explained by the fact that individuals, groups, communities and States located in spaces, which are shaped by a deterritorialized geography of capitalism's externalities ⁹⁵ and (neo)colonial experiences, are disproportionately affected by the detrimental effects of climate change. In this sense, jurisprudence stemming from courts in the Global South has proven outstandingly open-minded and far-sighted. ⁹⁶ At the same time, the IAHRS seems well-suited in taking the lead in recognizing the emergence of a new RtHC considering the logical evolution of its environmental jurisprudence, which has consolidated the ACHR's “environmentalization” or “greening” by mode of judicial interpretation.

The IACtHR's landmark decision to recognize future generations and Nature as rightsholders pushes traditional human rights law beyond its temporal and anthropocentric boundaries. This disruptive move can be both celebrated and criticized for its revolutionary reimagination of human rights law in the Anthropocene. Yet, confronted with an existential climate crisis that most severely impacts those whom history has perpetually racialized, gendered, commodified or otherwise marginalized, a transformation of (human rights) law aimed at restoring planetary equilibrium is a logical and indispensable step to secure the wellbeing of present and future generations of all kind and protect our interdependence with nature.

Properly understood, AO-32/25 furnishes a template for justiciable climate duties. Framework cases can require governments to justify and correct their mitigation targets and policy to keep the 1.5°C temperature target within reach. Supply side fossil fuel litigation can test whether approvals for high-emitting projects can objectively survive climate impact assessments, and stop climate harm at the source. Now it is up to individuals, communities, legal practitioners and civil society to uphold this right in national and international legal frameworks in order to push for its implementation.