In January 2017, over 50 BC-based environmental groups asked the province’s local governments to consider a class action lawsuit to recover a share of their climate-related costs from global fossil fuel companies. Since then the State of Rhode Island, New York City, San Francisco and a dozen other local governments in the U.S. have launched such lawsuits, and in BC there is growing interest in ways to pay for rising costs of climate change and to press fossil fuel companies to pay a fair share of those costs.
This backgrounder explains why climate lawsuits matter for our communities, and addresses common questions and concerns about proposed actions that local governments can take to recover local climate costs from the fossil fuel industry.