Climate change storytelling and masterplots at the European Court of Human Rights

Talk of climate change litigation is on everyone’s lips. While some hope binding rulings will drive climate action, others question courts’ expertise, legitimacy, and enforcement capacities. This article adds to the growing literature on climate change litigation by adopting a narrative perspective and centring climate change storytelling, which has so far received little attention in legal circles. To draw broader conclusions about climate narratives in law and pave the way for further research, this article studies the three climate rulings rendered by the European Court of Human Rights on April 9, 2024, through the lens of the concept of ‘masterplots’, that is, story-types that structure our collective narrative expectations.