Saúl Luciano Lliuya is a mountain guide from Huaraz, Peru. His house sits below a glacial lake that could burst its banks and flood the town below. He wanted one company, a German energy giant on the other side of the world, to pay its calculated share of the cost of protecting his home: about 0.38% of it, matching the company's estimated share of historical global emissions. That's roughly 17,000 euros.
It took almost ten years, a site visit to the Peruvian Andes, and a 139-page ruling for a German court to answer him. And in the same decade, courts in the Netherlands and the United States were asked versions of the same question, using completely different legal tools, and arrived at three very different answers about who, if anyone, has to pay when the atmosphere itself causes the harm.
Germany: a property dispute, extended to the sky
Lliuya's lawyers didn't invent a new kind of climate law. They reached for something old and ordinary: a nuisance claim under Section 1004 of the German Civil Code, the same provision a homeowner might use against a neighbor whose tree roots are cracking a shared wall. It lets a property owner demand that whoever is impairing their property stop doing so, or pay to prevent the impairment before it happens.
The novelty was aiming that provision at a coal-burning utility roughly 10,000 kilometers away. RWE argued that letting one emitter be sued for its fractional contribution to a global phenomenon would open the floodgates to lawsuits against nearly everyone. In May 2025, the Higher Regional Court of Hamm ruled against Lliuya, but not on that argument. The court rejected it. Instead, it found that Lliuya hadn't proven his specific property faced a sufficiently concrete flood risk right now, a factual gap, not a legal one.
Buried inside that loss was something bigger: the court confirmed, for the first time in German legal history, that a company can in principle be held civilly liable for its proportional contribution to climate damage, even damage caused by the combined emissions of thousands of other sources, thousands of kilometers away. Legal commentators have called it a defeat that reads like a roadmap for the next plaintiff who can produce sharper evidence of imminent risk.
The Netherlands: not a company, but a government
Dutch courts took a different route entirely, and picked a different defendant: the state itself. In Urgenda Foundation v. the Netherlands, a Dutch environmental group argued that the government's own emissions targets were too weak to satisfy its existing legal obligations, not new climate legislation, but the country's binding commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights.
The argument was straightforward once you accept its premise: Articles 2 and 8 of that Convention guarantee the right to life and the right to private and family life. A government that knowingly allows emissions at a level scientists say will cause severe, foreseeable harm to its own citizens is arguably failing those existing duties, the same way a government that ignored a known industrial poisoning risk would be. In December 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court agreed, and ordered the government to cut emissions by at least 25% from 1990 levels by the end of 2020.
Notice the structural difference from the German case. Lliuya sued a private company using property law. Urgenda sued the government itself using human rights law. Two entirely different legal theories, aimed at two entirely different kinds of defendant, but built on the same underlying idea: that existing legal obligations, written for other purposes, already reach climate harm if a court is willing to read them that way.
The United States: the courthouse door stays shut
Twenty-one young Americans, then between eight and nineteen years old, tried a third approach. Lead plaintiff Kelsey Juliana, then a teenager from Oregon, and the twenty others named in Juliana v. United States, filed in 2015, argued that the federal government's decades of fossil-fuel-friendly policy violated their constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment, and breached the public trust doctrine, the old legal principle that government holds certain natural resources in trust for its citizens.
For years, the case survived motion after motion, gathering support from over a hundred members of Congress and hundreds of thousands of supporters. Then, in May 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed it again, on a narrower and more technical ground than either the German or Dutch courts relied on: standing. The court held that even if everything the plaintiffs alleged were true, a federal court couldn't grant a remedy that would actually fix the problem: ordering a coordinated national climate policy was, in the court's view, a job for Congress and the President, not judges. The Supreme Court declined to review that ruling in March 2025, closing the case for good.
It's worth a caveat: this wasn't the end of youth climate litigation in America, just of this particular federal strategy. Around the same time, a similar case in Montana, built on that state's own constitution rather than the federal one, went to trial and won. The pattern that emerges isn't "American courts refuse climate cases", it's that American federal courts have drawn a much sharper line around what they consider a properly judicial question versus a political one, a line German and Dutch courts simply didn't draw in the same place.
Three courts, three theories of who owes what
Line the three rulings up and the differences aren't really about climate science. All three courts treated the underlying science as essentially settled. The differences are about something older: each legal system's own inherited theory of when a court is allowed to act at all.
Germany reached for property law and let a private citizen sue a private company directly, on the same legal logic as a boundary dispute. The Netherlands reached for human rights law and let a citizen sue their own government for failing a duty it already owed them. The United States, at the federal level, decided that questions this large belong to elected officials, not judges, regardless of how compelling the underlying facts are.
None of these courts were disagreeing about whether the glacier is melting. They were disagreeing, using tools built decades or centuries before anyone had heard of a "climate case," about who a court is actually allowed to hold responsible when the harm is everywhere and the cause is everyone.