Climate protection: Environmental aid is suing five federal states

Together with 16 young people, Deutsche Umwelthilfe has filed climate action against five other federal states before the Federal Constitutional Court. The goal: Legally anchored climate protection.

Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH), together with children and young adults, has filed new climate action against five other state governments. As the DUH announced, the new constitutional complaints before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe are directed against the state governments of Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Saarland.

According to Umwelthilfe, the complaints are intended to force the state governments to pass state climate protection laws that correspond to the Paris climate protection agreement and the Basic Law.

Five federal states without a climate protection law

None of the five federal states have a climate protection law, although the constitutional court stated in the spring that climate protection must be regulated by law. This also applies to federal states, said attorney Remo Klinger, who leads the legal proceedings.

The federal government alone cannot be successful in protecting the climate. For example, traffic is primarily a matter of the country. The complainants invoked their fundamental rights, said Klinger.

“Why are we not doing anything?”

The new five lawsuits were submitted by 16 young complainants, including climate activists from Fridays for Future, students and schoolchildren from the respective federal states. Deutsche Umwelthilfe supports the process because, as an association, it cannot appear as an individual plaintiff before the Federal Constitutional Court.

The student Alena Hochstadt from Hessen said she was afraid that she would have no future in her home state. “We are calling for binding climate protection measures to be anchored in law,” she said. Hannes Damm from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania said his country had the “most hours of sunshine in the republic and wind in abundance”. “So why aren’t we doing anything?” He asked.

Federal states are not exploiting potential

DUH Federal Managing Director Jürgen Resch emphasized that the federal states also had leeway to pursue a more ambitious climate policy, for example in the expansion of wind and solar energy or in transport policy. So far, the potential of renewable energies has not been sufficiently exploited in any of the federal states.

The DUH is in close contact with Fridays for Future, said Resch. Adolescents and young adults were asked whether they were interested in filing constitutional complaints.

Already lawsuits against other federal states

In July, the environmental aid had already filed climate action against Bavaria, Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia in Karlsruhe. In Bavaria, she is also suing the Constitutional Court in Munich, as Klinger explained.

At the end of April this year, several young people had success with their constitutional complaints before the Federal Constitutional Court: Karlsruhe declared the German Climate Protection Act to be partially unconstitutional at the time. The legislature must therefore regulate the updating of the reduction targets for the period after 2030 until the end of next year more precisely.