Federal Justice Vânia Hack de Almeida issued a monocratic decision on August 19, stating that a public civil action whose central objective was compliance, by the State, with the legal obligations related to the mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHG) and the realization of the right to a stable climate, is not to be confused with a public civil action that seeks the implementation of the command-and-control measures of the environmental law.
In an article published in Jota, Caio Borges, the coordinator of Law and Climate at iCS, assesses that the decision of the TRF-4 “is happy in several aspects. There is the recognition that the delimitation of the jurisdiction for the provision of the effective legal protection in the context of actions that deal with climate change cannot be limited to a single element of the action, such as the request or the cause of action. The decision reinforces the notion that the right to a stable climate, although it can – and should – be protected through the application of the material and procedural doctrines of environmental law, cannot be attached or subordinated to this area of law.”
