Courts around the world are now confronting climate change. Their judgments often contain detailed graphs, carbon budgets, and scientific projections. But the people behind those numbers, those already living with heatwaves, floods, and loss of livelihood, often remain invisible. Their vulnerability appears as statistical background rather than lived experience.
This gap reveals the fact that climate cases are not only about legal doctrine. They are also about how judges perceive harm, responsibility, and uncertainty. Judicial temperament—a judge’s interpretation of risk, empathy, and time—shapes the outcome of climate litigation as much as constitutional text.
Research in cognitive psychology shows that decision makers rely on intuitive shortcuts when assessing risk or deciding what counts as evidence. Studies by Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey Rachlinski, and Andrew Wistrich and by Cass Sunstein suggest that judicial reasoning often reflects an underlying moral sense of fairness. Climate change intensifies these tendencies because its harms are slow, unequal, and often affect socially disadvantaged people.
Courts around the world respond to the challenge of addressing climate–related harms in very different ways. Some take a narrow, procedural view of harm. Others adapt their interpretation to account for long-term and unequal risks. The range of responses show how the psychology of judicial decision-making shapes climate justice.
When vulnerability is only partly visible: the KlimaSeniorinnen case
In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights heard a case brought by a group of older Swiss women who claimed they are more vulnerable to heatwaves than younger persons. The Court accepted scientific evidence that climate change increases the health risks they face. But it denied “victim” status to the individual women under the European Convention of Human Rights, ruling their exposure was not specific enough.
At the same time, the Court recognized the association’s standing and held that Switzerland must protect people from serious climate harm by adopting a coherent mitigation pathway and an adequate carbon budget.
This creates a mixed picture. The Court treated climate science and gendered and age-related vulnerability as legally meaningful. But it also kept the women’s experiences at a distance by applying a strict definition of who counts as a victim. Feminist scholars have long argued that such criteria can hide structural inequality behind seemingly neutral rules.
The result is a transitional judicial temperament: Climate harm becomes actionable, but the people most affected remain only partly visible.
When courts recognise slow violence: the South Korean Constitutional Court
A very different approach appears in the 2024 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Korea (seated in Jongno, Seoul) that the government’s failure to set clear emissions-reduction targets for 2031–2049 was unconstitutional. It held that leaving future generations with unclear responsibilities for mitigation violated citizens’ rights to a healthy environment and to life.
The Court ordered the South Korean legislature to adopt stronger, science-based targets by 2026. It treated climate harm as real even when its effects are statistical, long-term, or spread across future generations.
This reflects a judicial temperament rooted in relational empathy: an ability to recognize that slow-moving risks still harm people and that young and future generations experience these risks in distinct ways.
Psychological studies show that humans react more strongly to immediate and identifiable victims. Recognizing distant or cumulative harm requires deliberate effort. The South Korean Constitutional Court of Korea’s judgment shows what happens when a court overcomes this bias and adjusts doctrine to match social and scientific reality.
When global authority reframes responsibility: the ICJ’s 2025 advisory opinion
In 2025, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on climate change, as requested by the UN General Assembly. The opinion looks cautious at first. It relies on familiar principles: preventing transboundary harm, exercising due diligence, and cooperating in good faith.
But the Court takes two important interpretive steps.
First, it calls climate change an “urgent and existential threat” that justifies a higher standard of due diligence. This matters because people tend to underestimate long-term risks. By stating that uncertainty strengthens rather than weakens state obligations, the Court challenges a common psychological bias.
Second, the Court foregrounds the interests of future generations. Many legal systems only symbolically gesture toward intergenerational equity. The Court treats it as a real interpretive standard. This resists the “identifiable victim effect”: the tendency to focus on visible present harms and overlook diffuse future harms.
The opinion does not prescribe national carbon budgets or assign precise responsibility among states. But it sends a clear signal that climate obligations deepen as risks intensify. States cannot hide behind scientific uncertainty or political delay.
The human variable in climate adjudication
These cases show that climate change forces courts into a new kind of decision-making. Legal systems were traditionally built to recognize immediate, local, and individualized harms. Climate change is the opposite: slow, cumulative, and deeply unequal. It affects women, older people, and children and members of Indigenous communities and low-income groups in particular ways. It also creates harm across generations.
Some courts respond by relying on old procedural rules that keep climate harm outside the effective frame of the legal system. Others update their interpretation but remain emotionally distant from lived experience. And a small but growing number treat slow and uneven climate harm as constitutionally meaningful.
These differences cannot be explained by constitutional text alone. They reveal something about judicial psychology. Different judges take distinct approaches to how they imagine harm, whose stories they recognize, and how they understand responsibility under deep uncertainty.
Seeing slow violence
Climate cases require courts to decide not only what the law says but also what the law is able to see. Judicial temperament now shapes whether slow, uneven, and long-horizon climate harm becomes legally visible or remains buried beneath impersonal scientific data.
As climate litigation expands worldwide, the future of climate justice will depend on whether courts develop the ability to recognize slow violence and treat it as a matter of rights rather than statistical noise.