Sweeping revisions to U.S. climate policy in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term have spawned a wave of protective litigation, legal challenges aimed not at advancing new climate goals but at preventing the rollbacks of existing regulation and preserving hard-won legal gains.
The challenges to the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks, funding freezes and dismantling of existing climate rules made up 20 percent of climate cases filed in the U.S. in 2025, up from 13 percent during Trump’s first term, according to a global analysis from the London School of Economics.
Both the scale of federal regulatory rollback under Trump and the surge in protective climate litigation in response are “without precedent,” the authors of the analysis wrote.
Although U.S. cases accounted for more than half of all climate litigation brought worldwide last year, battles over the dismantling of climate policy are also emerging in other countries, wrote Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham, the report’s authors at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
Similar protective cases have emerged in Canada, where young Ontarians appealed a rollback of provincial climate legislation, and in Brazil, where a series of cases before the Federal Supreme Court are challenging state laws that would end financial incentives for companies that go above and beyond legally required environmental practices in the Amazon.
The global surge in protective climate litigation is a defensive response by civil society organizations as more and more federal governments enact legislation, litigation and executive actions to counter climate gains, wrote Setzer and Higham.
Nowhere is that federal pushback against climate progress more notable than in the United States.
The repeal in February of the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, a 2009 determination that greenhouse gases are a pollutant, illustrates “how the [U.S.] executive branch is deploying law offensively to foreclose climate action,” Setzer and Higham wrote.
The endangerment finding revocation threatened the foundation for greenhouse gas regulation in the U.S. and faced immediate legal challenges.
“We will see them in court,” announced Marvin Brown, senior attorney at Earthjustice, on the day the EPA released its decision.
Within days, the EPA and administrator Lee Zeldin were slapped with two lawsuits, one brought by a coalition of 17 health and environmental groups and one filed on behalf of 18 young people across the U.S.
Trump 2.0 Environmental Case Scorecard
Inside Climate News is tracking federal lawsuits on climate and environmental actions and policies in which the Trump administration is a party. To learn more, visit out our Trump 2.0 Environmental Case Scorecard.
The Trump administration has also taken an aggressive approach to repealing statutory provisions, regulations and guidance on climate change at the state and local levels. It has challenged local building electrification laws, for example, suing Morris Township, New Jersey, over its ordinance banning natural gas, propane and fuel oil-powered energy and appliances in new apartment buildings, alleging it preempts federal law.
And an executive order signed by Trump in April 2025 attempts to override states’ “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance.”
In fact, around 12 percent of climate cases filed worldwide last year can be understood as anti-climate litigation, which seeks to delay or dismantle climate regulation, Setzer and Higham report.
“This pattern is clearest and best documented in the U.S.,” they write. “Under the current administration, the federal government has built on the record of the first Trump administration and become an ever-more active anticlimate litigant.”
But repeated failures to follow the steps established by the Administrative Procedure Act as the executive branch flexes its muscle have also created significant litigation exposure for the administration, the authors note. Environmental organizations, state attorneys general and municipalities have been quick to capitalize on those missteps and pursue protective litigation.
The rise of lawsuits as a mechanism of resistance to regulatory rollbacks suggests that courts are taking on greater responsibility as referees of climate policy and progress.
“As attempts to roll back climate protections grow, courts are being called on to play an ever-more important role,” Laura Clarke, CEO of the environmental law nonprofit ClientEarth, said in response to the LSE report on Thursday. “But litigation should not be the primary mechanism for delivering climate progress.”
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Reporter, Iowa
Anika Jane Beamer covers the environment and climate change in Iowa, with a particular focus on water, soil and CAFOs. A lifelong Midwesterner, she writes about changing ecosystems from one of the most transformed landscapes on the continent. She holds a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a bachelor’s degree in biology and Spanish from Grinnell College. She is a former Outrider Fellow at Inside Climate News and was named a Taylor-Blakeslee Graduate Fellow by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.