Adaptation and Victim Status in ECtHR Climate Litigation

Since 2020, 23 applications concerning climate change have been made to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The ECtHR delivered its first climate decisions on April 9, 2024, when the Grand Chamber gave a controversial and groundbreaking 260-page judgment in Verein Klimaseniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland (“KlimaSeniorinnen”). The approach adopted by the ECtHR in these cases was extensively discussed among the scholarship, giving ground to hundreds of papers and disputes within academia, including this blog symposium. Some of the most discussed aspects of the decisions made by the ECtHR, and particularly KlimaSeniorinnen, were causation, victim status, and extraterritoriality. Also, after the Advisory Opinions rendered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), other climate cases were treated by the Court of Strasbourg, finding no violations of the rights and freedoms protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Primarily, the victim status argumentation provoked several different reactions from authors throughout the world. This blog post aims to analyse one of the less argued points, which revolves around the role of adaptation and adaptability in determining victimhood, by exploring the possible outcomes of the currently pending cases before the ECtHR, with a specific focus on the application challenging the United Kingdom’s insufficient adaptation programme before the ECtHR.

Adaptation in KlimaSeniorinnen 

KlimaSeniorinnen, the first climate case judged by the ECtHR, has widely influenced the debate around climate change and human rights within and beyond Europe, becoming a pivotal case in international jurisprudence. The case, brought by an association of elderly women, alleged various omissions by the Swiss authorities in the area of climate‑change mitigation, relying on Articles 2, 6, 8 and 13 of the Convention. The ECtHR found Switzerland responsible for the violation of Article 6(1) and Article 8 of the Convention.

The judgment came as a result of detailed legal reasoning in which the Court explained which measures States need to take to tackle climate change, including mitigation and adaptation measures, which are States’ obligations according to the Paris Agreement.

The ECtHR stated that individual applicants, to be considered as victims under Article 34 of the ECHR, are supposed to demonstrate a relationship between State actions or omissions and the harm affecting them (para. 478). In doing so, the ECtHR underlined that the applicants, in order to claim victim status, must be subject to a high intensity of exposure to the adverse effects of climate change and a pressing need to ensure the applicant’s individual protection owing to the absence or inadequacy of any reasonable measures to reduce harm, emphasizing that the threshold for fulfilling these criteria is especially high, and that the Court will have due regard particular circumstances such as local conditions, individual specificities and vulnerabilities (para. 487-488). In this framework, the ECtHR puts the spotlight on “reasonable measures to reduce harms” when estimating individual applications, stressing that none of the individual applicants were suffering from “any critical medical condition whose possible aggravation linked to heatwaves could not be alleviated by the adaptation measures available in Switzerland or by means of reasonable measures of personal adaptation” (para. 533). As a reminder, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation is “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects, to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities” and human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects, including by reducing the risks associated with increasingly severe natural hazards, which may develop into disasters where adequate preventive and responsive measures are lacking.

Hence, this approach appears to suggest that the State’s positive obligations may not be claimable where individuals can rely on “reasonable measures of personal adaptation”, which are framed almost as alternative measures to be exhausted before State responsibility, and a consequent violation of the Convention, can be established.

Adaptation Legitimacy in the ICJ Advisory Opinion

Further support for the ECtHR’s interpretation of States’ positive obligations may be drawn from the ICJ’s 2025 advisory opinion about obligations of States in respect of climate change, which, in a different legal context, recalled that adaptation measures constitute international legal obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, as set out in different provisions of those treaties. The ICJ considered that the fulfilment of adaptation obligations of parties needs to be assessed against a standard of due diligence, making it incumbent upon parties to enact appropriate measures that are capable of “enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change”, such as provided by Article 7.9 of the Paris Agreement (para. 258), among which are weatherproofing of buildings and land management. The ICJ observes that the adaptation obligations under the Paris Agreement complement mitigation obligations in preventing and reducing the harmful consequences of climate change (para. 259), underlining the importance of Article 7. In addition to that, the ICJ underscores that, to comply with the Paris Agreement and with the adaptation obligations deriving from its Article 4, all parties must take measures that make an adequate contribution to achieving the collective temperature goal, reflected in parties’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in line with due diligence obligations (para. 270).

Finally, the ICJ reinforced the connection existing between climate change and human rights and highlighted that States must protect the climate and environment so people can fully enjoy their human rights, by taking inter alia adaptation measures, with due account given to the protection of human rights and to take necessary measures in this regard under international human rights law (para. 403).

KlimaSeniorinnen as a Paradigm

The ECtHR has been fully convinced in pursuing the victim status test adopted in KlimaSeniorinnen in deciding the other complaints brought before the Court of Strasbourg in the following months, as demonstrated, for instance, by Engels and others v. Germany, Fliegenschnee and others v. Austria and Greenpeace Nordic and others v. Norway, in which the applicants saw their application rejected for the same reasons illustrated in KlimaSeniorinnen. The Court found that the applicants had failed to demonstrate specific vulnerabilities or that exceptional circumstances existed in relation to climate change that could not be alleviated by adaptation measures of the respective country or by means of reasonable individual adaptation, by also citing para. 533 of KlimaSeniorinnen. In the same way, Uricchio v. Italy and 31 others and De Conto v. Italy and 32 others, were considered incompatible ratione personae with the provisions of Article 35(3) of the ECHR, by relying upon para. 533 of KlimaSeniorinnen.

Testing the KlimaSeniorinnen Threshold

Although the two-fold criterion set by the ECtHR to assess victimhood in KlimaSeniorinnen has become the model to follow for climate cases in Strasbourg, the judgment does not necessarily establish a fixed or immutable pattern. Many hopes and expectations have been pinned on Müllner v. Austria, where the applicant suffers from a highly sensitive heat syndrome because of which he is constrained to a wheelchair when temperatures rise, which will (hopefully) soon be heard in court thanks to the application of Rule 41 of the Rules of the ECtHR. Even though the excitement surrounding Müllner is understandable, Austria may have a solid basis for contesting responsibility and any finding of a human-rights violation. Under the Bosphorus doctrine, a State is presumed to comply with the ECHR when, without exercising discretion, it implements binding obligations arising from membership in an international organisation that affords equivalent fundamental-rights protection. As an EU Member State acting in compliance with EU law, Austria may therefore seek to rely on that presumption.

Nonetheless, another case has the potential to shape a new avenue for climate litigation before the ECtHR. In July 2025, Friends of the Earth UK and others submitted an application against the United Kingdom before the ECtHR. Alongside Friends of the Earth, Doug Paulley and Kevin Jordan argue that their lives have been ruined by the rising temperatures and extreme weather caused by the climate crisis, and that the UK government’s response fails to respect their human rights, protected by Articles 2, 8, and Article 1 of Protocol 1 (read with Article 14) ECHR. Against this backdrop, Paulley represents a case similar to Müllner, having multiple disabilities exacerbated by rising temperatures, while Jordan saw his seaside home being demolished after severe storms and rising sea levels put it at risk of being washed away; therefore, he argues that the UK’s approach to the changing climate is flawed.

The case is extremely interesting because the applicants argue that the UK’s national adaptation programme (NAP) was insufficient, and that this non-compliance caused a violation of their human rights. The applicants argue that the UK’s NAP failed to consider the impact of climate change on marginalised groups, set out lawful “adaptation objectives” or adequately assess risks to the delivery of its plans.

The case was rejected by the English High Court in 2024, and the Court of Appeal refused the applicants’ application to challenge the ruling. However, in 2025, the English Climate Change Committee, the UK’s statutory climate watchdog, publicly declared that the “vast majority” of the UK government’s plans to prepare for climate hazards have made virtually no progress over the past years, underlining that adaptation implementation remains inadequate in the UK and needs to become a priority for the UK government, bolstering the application before the ECtHR and making clear that the UK is not complying with its international obligations.

Therefore, since KlimaSeniorinnen imposed that Article 2 requires a “real and imminent” risk to life sufficiently ascertainable in terms of material and temporal proximity to apply in a climate-change context (para. 513), and Article 8 encompasses a right for individuals to effective protection by the State authorities from serious adverse effects of climate change on their life, health, well-being and quality of life (para. 519), it would seem that both Jordan and Paulley have the potential to fulfil the criteria set out by the ECtHR in terms of climate victim status.

Conclusions

The ECtHR has relied so heavily on the KlimaSeniorinnen victim status test that its “especially high” threshold risks becoming almost impossible to meet. Yet, as Rundel argues, the “personal adaptation” burden of proof can be leveraged to assess the first victims of climate change before the ECtHR.

A concrete way to demonstrate that personal adaptation is no longer possible is to claim that the respondent State’s NAP has not been properly implemented, has failed to take adaptation measures, and is unable to protect its citizens’ human rights. It should also not be forgotten that the only individual climate victims identified so far by an international human rights body, in Billy v. Australia before the UN Human Rights Committee, were recognised as such after the Committee found that the respondent State had failed “to discharge its positive obligation to implement adequate adaptation measures to protect the authors’ home, private life and family rights” (para 8.12).

To conclude, as suggested by part of the scholarship, finding an individual, at least in a strict legal sense, as a victim of a State’s failure to mitigate climate change, is extremely challenging, if not impossible, considering the hurdles in proving a direct and proximate causal relation between a failure to mitigate climate change and an individual harm. Of course, adaptation and mitigation obligations must be both implemented and run in the same direction, and shall not be considered as alternative measures. Nonetheless, as adaptation cases gain momentum, and since a causal relationship between wrongful conduct and harm may be demonstrated through scientific evidence and the tangible consequences suffered by individuals, there may be victims of dis-adaptation, as illustrated by the case brought against the UK. As mentioned above, the ECtHR case-law has identified the impossibility of adapting to climate change as the final stage to be overcome before a person can claim a violation of human rights and be identified as a victim.

Is the Court of Strasbourg ready to accept its own conditions?