Hawaii reaches pathbreaking climate settlement with children

Youth-led lawsuits over climate change are rising around the world. A case in Hawaii stands out, as the state agrees to a settlement with plaintiffs. 

In a groundbreaking legal agreement, Hawaii’s government yesterday acknowledged young people’s right to a stable climate and agreed to eliminate emissions from its transportation sector by 2045. 

The lawsuit by 13 young people from across the Hawaiian Islands was the world’s first youth-led case that mounted a constitutional challenge to climate impacts in the transportation sector.

According to Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit law firm representing the youths, the settlement marks the first time U.S. government defendants have decided to resolve a constitution-based climate case in partnership with young plaintiffs.

Officials drew on the islands’ cultural heritage in describing the settlement of the 2022 case, Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation.

“Climate change is indisputable. Burying our heads in the sand and making it the next generation’s problem is not pono,” said Ed Sniffen, Hawaii’s Director of Transportation, using the Hawaiian term that means “righteous.”

Youth efforts to tackle climate change go beyond the courtroom. The Monitor’s “Climate Generation” series highlights how this is playing out globally, through innovation, community building, arctic science, adaptation, as well as lawsuits and more.

In Hawaii, the new agreement says that the Hawaii Department of Transportation will take several immediate and ongoing steps to create a climate-friendly sea, air, and road transportation system, including establishing a greenhouse gas reduction plan within a year. The goal: decarbonizing Hawaii’s transportation system within the next 20 years. 

Other steps include creating positions within the transportation department to coordinate climate change mitigation and adaptation, changing the budgeting process to analyze and disclose transportation projects’ greenhouse gas impacts, and establishing a youth council to advise the department.

The state also agreed to dedicate at least $40 million to expanding its public electric vehicle charging network by 2030 and completing bicycle and pedestrian transit networks within five years.

All of this, says Julia Olson, founder and chief legal counsel of Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit law firm representing the youths, shows how young plaintiffs have “activated the courts and inspired true democracy in action.”

Young people “across the country and around the world will follow in their footsteps, carrying the same values of care, defense, and love of the land to action,” she said in a written statement. 

For years, young people around the world have been suing governments and demanding action by policymakers to address what scientists agree is an environmental crisis directly caused by human behavior. By 2022 there had been 34 global climate cases brought on behalf of plaintiffs ages 25 and younger – part of a global climate litigation explosion, according to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Last summer, young plaintiffs in Montana won the first youth climate case to go to trial in the U.S., with the judge ruling that Montana policymakers had violated the young people’s rights under the state’s constitution by ignoring the climate impacts of their energy decisions.  

Oral arguments in the state’s appeal are scheduled for next month in the Montana Supreme Court.

Young plaintiffs have filed climate cases in a handful of other U.S. states, including Virginia, Utah, and Alaska.