Campaigners have launched a new initiative to phase out ‘corporate courts’ which are now a “major impediment to climate action.” 

ISDS is being used to challenge governments for taking a wide range of policy actions including prohibiting oil drilling and fracking, and phasing out coal power. 

The system, formally known as investor-state dispute settlement, has been embedded in hundreds of trade and investment deals.

Emissions

Britain faces its first climate-related case, lodged after the high court effectively put an end to the opening of a coal mine in Cumbria.

Fossil fuel companies globally have been by far the biggest beneficiaries of this system, winning over $80 billion in ISDS claims with UK investors among the most aggressive users of the system. 

Recent research shows the UK protects more potential annual greenhouse gas emissions than any other country via its ISDS treaties.

UK investors have claimed £19 billion in fossil fuel-related cases – almost twice as much as the international climate finance paid by the British Government.

Impediment

Irene Vélez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, spoke at the event, following a much-lauded announcement earlier this week in which Colombia said it would protect its part of the Amazon from fossil fuel exploitation. 

She said ISDS made such decisions far more difficult because Colombia is one of the most affected countries in the world by ISDS, with 23 known cases already, and as many as 280 potential cases if the country continues to take ambitious climate action. 

“No government should have to chose between protecting nature and its people, and protecting itself from arbitrators,” she told the conference.

Nick Dearden, the director of Global Justice Now, said: “It could not be clearer now that ISDS is a major impediment to climate action. 

Coalition

"Here at COP30 we’re talking about how we protect the Amazon – but far from protecting these precious forests and their peoples, it is those ripping up the Amazon who are protected by ISDS. 

At COP30 a key issue is climate finance, but ISDS mean climate finance in reverse, those who have caused this crisis are being compensated by their victims."

He added: "This is obscene. We will work in the coming year to build a coalition of governments to demand that a world that can tackle climate change must be ISDS-free.”

Also speaking at the official event was Fernando Hernández and Raul Gabriel Benet Keil and it was sponsored by Global Justice Now, SEATINI, War on Want, E3G and CIEL.

This Author

Brendan Montague is an editor at The Ecologist online.