Court Orders South Korea to Take Stronger Action on Climate Change

A top South Korean court on Thursday ruled the nation’s measures for fighting climate change insufficient for protecting the rights of citizens, and ordered the government to set firm carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond. It is the first climate litigation ruling of its kind in Asia.

Since 2020, the Constitutional Court has been reviewing a series of complaints filed by more than 250 plaintiffs — one-third of them children or teenagers at the time of the filing — who said that the government’s greenhouse gas reduction targets and its implementation plans were partly unconstitutional and too weak to safeguard the rights of citizens, particularly those of future generations.

South Korea’s Carbon Neutral Act, first enacted in 2010, required the country to set a goal of cutting carbon emissions by at least 35 percent by 2030 compared with 2018 levels. Under the law, the government has set a goal of a 40 percent reduction. The plaintiffs argued that this was not enough to manage the impact of climate change.

In its decision on Thursday, the Constitutional Court did not find fault with the 2030 goal. But it declared that because the law failed to specify carbon-emission reduction targets for the years between 2031 and 2050 — when the country said it would achieve carbon neutrality — the constitutional rights of future generations had been violated.

The court gave the National Assembly until the end of February 2025 to revise the law.

“Future generations will be more exposed to the impact of climate change, but their participation in today’s democratic political process is limited,” the court said. “So the legislators have the duty and responsibility to make concrete laws for mid- and long-term greenhouse gas reduction