The Climate Litigation Accelerator (CLX) – placed within the Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic and NYU Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice – is a global collaborative hub that nourishes, catalyzes, and disseminates the ideas, tools, strategies, and partnerships needed to secure urgent and ambitious action on the climate emergency.

As a field catalyst, CLX coalesces the climate change and human rights field, connects its participants, and facilitates interdisciplinary dialogue – all with an eye towards adding coherence to the field and improving its overall efficacy.

Moreover, CLX recognizes the complexity of the challenges posed by the climate crisis. Indeed, climate change is not one problem, but rather a bundle of interconnected problems that includes mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and climate finance. For that reason, the topical and regional scope of CLX’s work is broad and crosses traditional disciplinary lines.

CLX’s Strategic Aims

Develop, nourish, disseminate, and catalyze the ideas, tools, strategies, and partnerships necessary speed up and scale global climate litigation. CLX achieves this through strategic lawsuits and advocacy, sociolegal research, case workshops, capacity building, and its global community of practice.

Create public goods for the climate litigation field. Public goods can have a catalyzing effect, helping to accelerate the rate at which different actors can learn from others and implement relevant lessons.

Facilitate the sharing of interdisciplinary knowledge and regional perspectives, which strengthens the climate litigation field and helps bridge the Global North-South divide within the field. In service of this strategic aim, CLX acts as a connector – of organizations, peoples, and ideas.

Serve as a catalyst for the climate change and human rights field. CLX is driven by an awareness of the urgency of the climate challenge. Time is of the essence. CLX is fundamentally concerned with speeding up impactful litigation and legal actions that can produce results in the short to medium-term. Our activities also accelerate the development of the field, working to ensure that it is capable of responding quickly and effectively to the challenges posed by climate change.

Support youth advocates and climate defenders, especially in the Global South. CLX’s theory of change understands that, without direct and urgent grassroots mobilization, legal victories will not attain the legitimacy, scale, and speed that are needed to address the climate emergency. We thus act as key partners and sources of strategic and legal support for the global climate movement and climate defenders, with an emphasis on activists based in the Global South.