This book focuses on Youth Climate Courts, a bold new tool that young people in their teens and twenties can use to compel their local city or county government to live up to its human rights obligations, formally acknowledge the climate crisis, and take major steps to address it.

Tom Kerns shows how youth climate leaders can form their own local Youth Climate Court, with youth judges, youth prosecuting attorneys, and youth jury members, and put their local city or county government on trial for not meeting its human rights obligations. Kerns describes how a Youth Climate Court works, how to start one, what human rights are, what they require of local governments, and what governmental changes a Youth Climate Court can realistically hope to accomplish. The book offers young activists a brand new, user-friendly, cost-free, barrier-free, powerful tool for forcing local governments to come to terms with their obligation to protect the rights of their citizens with respect to the climate crisis.

This book offers a unique new tool to young climate activists hungry for genuinely effective ways to directly move governments to aggressively address the climate crisis.

About the Author

Tom Kerns is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at North Seattle College, USA. His work brings human rights norms to bear on environmental issues, especially on the climate crisis. In 2015 he served on the drafting group for the international "Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change", and from 2014 until 2018 he co-organized the 2018 Permanent Peoples' Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. He is co-editor, with Kathleen Dean Moore, of Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change (2021), a book based on the testimony and findings in that Tribunal.

Reviews

"This little book is an empowering guide. It sets out a clear way for young people (and others) to hold governments and corporations to account for failures to take the climate crisis seriously. This powerful little book breaks new ground, offering a cost-free, barrier-free tool for activism. I highly recommend it! Go, set up a youth climate court, call power to account using this unique way of taking action. Do it everywhere."

Anna Grear, Founder and first Director of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, and Professor of Law at Cardiff University, UK

"Youth Climate Courts: How You Can Host a Human Rights Trial for People and Planet is a small but powerful guide for young people to use as one way to encourage their local city or regional governments to account for their human rights obligations, formally acknowledge the climate crisis and its impacts on a range of human rights and take steps to address it. This is the first practical guidebook to support and inspire inter>generational climate action written especially for young people."

Judith Preston, Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law

Book Information
ISBN 9781032109060
Author Thomas A. Kerns
Format Paperback
Page Count 108
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 154g