Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant on Thursday urged the 56 Commonwealth countries to develop a shared judicial approach to climate change, warning that climate vulnerability disproportionately hurts those least responsible for it.
Addressing the High-Level Commonwealth Policy Dialogue on Climate Justice at Marlborough House, London, organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth Legal Education Association (CLEA), the CJI said the legal institutions inherited from an earlier century must show “sufficient imagination” to meet the defining challenge of our time.
Beginning his address not with case law but with a 23-century-old story from Sri Lanka’s Rajarata Plains, where ancient communities built tanks to survive eight-month droughts, CJI Surya Kant said, “At its foundation, I do not think the challenge has changed as much as our anxiety about it.”
He framed two core challenges for the judiciary.
First, the unequal burdens of climate change and the clean energy transition. Second, the growing responsibility on courts to protect natural resources where “neither legislation nor existing legal categories provide a complete answer”.
On climate injustice, the CJI noted: “Climate vulnerability is not distributed equally.” He added, “The effects of climate change are often felt first and most acutely by those whose lives and livelihoods depend most directly on the natural environment.”
When a small landholder or fisher family loses land or harvest to a crisis they did little to cause, he said, it threatens “the very foundations of livelihood, dignity, and equality”.
Citing Indian jurisprudence from MC Mehta v. Kamal Nath to MK Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2025), and Zambia’s Nyasulu v. Konkola Copper Mines, the CJI stressed the need for mutual learning.
“We need not develop a separate jurisprudential vocabulary in every country where a climate question reaches the Courts,” he said. “Rather, the Courts should be open to borrowing ideas, approaches, and solutions that have proved useful elsewhere in the Commonwealth, while adapting them carefully to their own constitutional, social, and environmental circumstances.”
He also flagged the legal vacuum facing climate-displaced people. They “fit neither our refugee law, which amounts to persecution, nor our migration law, which was never written with a receding coastline in mind,” he said, and deserve a status of their own.
“This, too, is a reminder that the climate crisis will test the boundaries of legal categories we have long taken for granted,” the CJI observed.
“Our task as judges and as institutions is to ensure that the law does not become most uncertain precisely where people are most vulnerable.”
Calling for reform in legal education, he said: “Environmental law can no longer remain a specialist subject encountered by a relatively small number of students by choice.”
Concluding, CJI Surya Kant termed the dialogue “tectonic” and hoped it would produce ideas that are “thoughtful, practical, and capable of making a lasting contribution to climate justice across the Commonwealth”.
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