Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant has called upon the 56 Commonwealth countries to work towards developing a shared judicial approach to climate justice, stressing that the effects of climate change are borne disproportionately by communities that have contributed the least to the crisis.
Addressing the High-Level Commonwealth Policy Dialogue on Climate Justice at Marlborough House in London on Thursday, organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth Legal Education Association (CLEA), CJI Surya Kant said legal institutions inherited from an earlier era must demonstrate “sufficient imagination” to respond to what he described as the defining challenge of the present time.
Rather than beginning his address with case law, the CJI referred to a 23-century-old example from Sri Lanka’s Rajarata Plains, where ancient communities constructed tanks to withstand prolonged periods of drought. Drawing a connection between the past and the present, he observed that while the nature of the challenge may not have fundamentally changed, society’s anxiety about it has increased significantly.
The CJI identified two major challenges for the judiciary in the context of climate change. The first concerns the unequal impact of climate change and the transition towards clean energy, while the second relates to the expanding responsibility of courts to protect natural resources in situations where legislation and existing legal categories do not provide complete answers.
Highlighting the issue of climate injustice, Justice Surya Kant said climate vulnerability is not distributed equally. Communities whose livelihoods depend directly on natural resources, including small landholders and fishing families, are often among those most severely affected by environmental crises despite having played little role in causing them. Such losses, he noted, can threaten the foundations of livelihood, dignity and equality.
The CJI referred to developments in Indian environmental jurisprudence, including MC Mehta v. Kamal Nath and MK Ranjitsinh v. Union of India (2025), as well as Zambia’s Nyasulu v. Konkola Copper Mines, to emphasise the importance of judicial learning across Commonwealth jurisdictions.
He said countries need not develop entirely separate jurisprudential vocabularies whenever climate-related disputes reach their courts. Instead, courts across the Commonwealth should remain open to borrowing legal ideas, approaches and solutions that have worked elsewhere, while adapting them to their respective constitutional, social and environmental circumstances.
Justice Surya Kant also highlighted the emerging legal difficulties faced by people displaced by climate change. He pointed out that climate-displaced persons may fall outside traditional legal classifications because refugee law generally focuses on persecution, while conventional migration laws were not designed to address circumstances such as disappearing coastlines and environmental displacement.
According to the CJI, this gap demonstrates how the climate crisis is likely to challenge established legal categories and require the development of new legal responses. He stressed that the law should not become most uncertain at the very point when people are at their most vulnerable.
The CJI further called for significant changes in legal education, arguing that environmental law can no longer remain a specialist subject studied only by a limited number of students. He emphasised the need to integrate environmental and climate-related concerns more broadly into legal education and judicial thinking.
Concluding his address, CJI Surya Kant described the Commonwealth dialogue as “tectonic” and expressed hope that it would generate thoughtful and practical ideas capable of making a lasting contribution to climate justice across Commonwealth countries.
