We sat down with Jessica Palairet, Executive Director of Lawyers for Climate Action NZ , to hear how the months since receiving The Climatics grant have gone and what's coming next. It’s been quite the quarter for their work.
In court
Last week, Lawyers for Climate Action and their co-litigants at the Environmental Law Initiative walked into the Wellington High Court to challenge the government's Emissions Reduction Plan. The case argues that the Minister's decisions breach the law and put Aotearoa's climate goals at risk. Specifically, they argued that the government has gutted climate policies without proper public consultation, and the plan now relies too heavily on planting pine trees as a substitute for actually reducing emissions at the source. It's believed to be the first case globally to challenge a government's overreliance on tree planting to reduce emissions.
The legal team left the hearing feeling good about how the arguments landed.
We often think of climate litigation as a tool to hold powerful actors accountable using the law. However, the impact of these cases can extend beyond the courtroom, by increasing transparency and therefore public accountability, and by shifting norms of what is and isn’t acceptable. This case was covered in twenty-three media articles, shining a spotlight on what's actually happening with the government's climate commitments. These lawyers are asking a question that matters beyond this one case - can governments quietly dismantle climate commitments without consequence? Clarifying that in law is worth doing regardless of who's in power.
Given the attention the case has attracted, people will be watching that judgment closely when it does land. With this in mind, and the complexity of the case, the judge was upfront about the verdict taking time, and Lawyers for Climate Action expect it will be somewhere in the three-to-six-month range. We’re hopeful that this will come out before the November election.
Building capacity
What you won’t find in the headlines but is totally worth knowing is how much of the preparation work Lawyers for Climate Action brought in-house this time around. Submissions, evidence, discovery. Historically, that work has been shared among volunteer lawyers. Asking people to contribute that level of work for free poses a sustainability question, and it’s one of the structural tensions that small, high-output organisations like LFCANZ constantly navigate. How do you do ambitious work sustainably when the funding landscape wasn't really designed with that in mind?
Doing the prep work internally meant a significant lift; however, it also means Lawyers for Climate Action is building internal capability to complement the huge amounts of input from their tireless network of legal volunteers. The team has also grown recently, with Laura MacKay joining as an energy specialist. Her work spans LNG, offshore oil and gas, subsidies, and trade law. These areas are suddenly very much at the centre of New Zealand's energy conversation, so calling her arrival at Lawyers for Climate Action ‘good timing’ feels somewhat like an understatement.
The first New Zealand Climate Litigation conference
At the end of March, Lawyers for Climate Action is co-hosting the New Zealand Climate Litigation Conference 2026: Climate in the Courtroom, alongside the University of Auckland’s New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law, and the Legal Research Foundation. Lawyers, law students, judges, and academics are coming together to work through where climate law is heading.
The line-up is exciting and includes Vishal Prasad, Director of Pacific Island Students Fighting for Climate Change, which led the campaign for the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on states’ climate change obligations.
Not every conversation at the conference will be straightforward. Climate litigation raises real questions about the role of courts and what we're asking of them. Lawyers for Climate Action isn't shying away from those tensions. These kinds of collegial engagement are part of what makes this community-building work incredibly valuable. The field is growing fast, and the people working in it need spaces to think together.
What comes next
As ever, climate law and policy is a fast-moving area - with particular focus at the moment on energy and booming petrol prices. Lawyers for Climate Action is busy preparing for likely legislative amendments to New Zealand’s central climate framework law, law changes to our resource management laws, and is keeping a close eye on decisions relating to oil and gas - particularly whether they comply with our climate obligations.
It’s also focused on issues relating to whether New Zealand is meeting its international legal obligations - particularly under the Paris Agreement, and as clarified by the International Court of Justice. It is continuing to grow its membership, and will be focused this year on growing its pro bono matching network, where it connects community climate groups with its member lawyers from across Aotearoa.
What your funding is doing
The Climatics grant is helping fund Lawyers for Climate Action’s core operational capacity, which helps to enable everything else they do. They now have a small team of three, and this funding helps support their in-house legal preparation, the energy law workstream, the team having the ability to show up to a high court hearing well-prepared and with all the details.
Funding that backs the long work, rather than a specific, short-term deliverable, is currently rare in the NZ philanthropic landscape. That's part of what The Climatics exists to help with.
We think it's work worth backing. Thanks to your generosity, it's happening.
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