Areas of work

Advancing innovative legal research, education, and action to address the climate emergency.

Since 2020, CLX has collaborated with individuals and organizations around the world to explore new legal terrain and help shape the now-established field of rights-based climate law and policy. Our work has contributed to the development of new jurisprudence, strengthened accountability mechanisms, and supported climate action grounded in human rights. Now, with the rights-based climate law field firmly established, our work draws on a wide range of legal foundations beyond human rights alone to address neglected areas in climate law and policy, including climate adaptation and climate reparations.

The climate emergency continues to intensify. Its impacts are upending lives across the globe, especially in vulnerable regions and communities. And while climate law has advanced rapidly, climate action increasingly lags behind. CLX works to help close this gap, continuing to open new legal pathways through three core areas of contribution.

Our approach

Our work is guided by three core pillars that structure our interventions, research, and educational initiatives.

Pillar 01

Centering underdeveloped areas of climate law through action-oriented research

CLX prioritizes legal action in areas that have received comparatively less attention. Climate policy and litigation remain heavily focused on mitigation, even as climate harms accelerate, particularly in the Global South. By centering communities experiencing the crisis first and most acutely through adaptation and loss-and-damage research and interventions, CLX helps expand the field toward legal frameworks that reduce future harm while responding to the profound losses already unfolding.

Pillar 02

Advancing education and knowledge as public goods

CLX focuses on education and research as much as legal action. As a program embedded within an academic institution, CLX produces open-access resources for the climate law field, including publications, trainings, clinical projects within law schools, and other educational initiatives.

Pillar 03

Building bridges across disciplines and movements

CLX forges connections between climate law and other fields of research and practice. Working alongside scientists, storytellers, Indigenous leaders, and other thinkers and doers, CLX operates at the intersection of climate, biodiversity, rights of nature, and related ecocentric approaches to law and governance.

Research that drives action.

Explore our full library of resources to explore our learning kits
or search by theme, resource type (from amicus briefs to
expert testimony to reports and educational videos), or
keyword.

Explore our full library of resources to explore our learning kits or search by theme, resource type (from amicus briefs to expert testimony to reports and educational videos), or keyword.