ClientEarth founder James Thornton was a Wall Street lawyer who won over 80 cases to force the Reagan Administration to clean up polluted water. Then he moved to London, and ClientEarth was born.
Now we are over 200 people, with eight offices around the world, creating powerful change for life on Earth.
We take our first legal challenge against Kingsnorth Power Station, helping to quash plans for a new generation of coal plants in the UK.
In response to our work the UK Government agrees to do environmental assessments before approving new coal plants. A new generation of climate-damaging coal power is shelved.
We opened our doors in Brussels, where our first case forced the EU to let people go to court to protect the environment.
James Thornton was named by The New Statesmen as one of ’10 people who could change the world’.
We start our climate and forests programme, dedicated to defending carbon-sink forests and the people who depend on them.
We open our office in Warsaw. Our climate lawyers there will spend the next decade preventing many new coal power plants being built across Poland.
We are key players in getting an EU-wide law banning illegally harvested rainforest timber passed, significantly reducing CO2 emissions and protecting fragile habitats.
We setup the Sustainable Seafood Coalition with the vision of ensuring all fish and seafood sold in the UK comes from sustainable sources.
In the US, ClientEarth lodges a first-of-its kind “friend of the court” brief when the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate carbon pollution comes under attack.
We win our court case against the UK government for failing to tackle dirty air.
Coal is the main cause of life-limiting air quality in Krakow. We convince the authorities to ban coal for domestic heating.
We launch our climate litigation team, which brings challenges against businesses and governments to drive action on climate change.
We begin to train judges and prosecutors in China to use environmental law. We've now trained over 1,500 Chinese judges and supported the development of more than 600 environmental courts.
James Thornton received the Special Achievement Award at the FT European Innovative Lawyers Awards
ClientEarth was voted the most effective environmental organisation by its peers.
We opened our Beijing office at a critical time in China’s environmental legal history.
We took the pioneering Sustainable Seafood Coalition concept to Spain, replicating our model in one of the EU’s largest seafood markets.
We opened our Berlin office, putting ClientEarth in a key EU capital and a coal and diesel heartland.
Our UK air pollution victory made legal history. Ruling on the case, High Court judge Mr Justice Garnham gave exceptional praise, calling ClientEarth “an expert claimant” and a “valuable monitor” of the UK government’s actions.
In a world first, our lawyers act on behalf of a group of indigenous Australians to challenge their government’s climate failings at the UN.
We win a novel shareholder lawsuit against Enea, the co-owner of a planned coal-fired power plant Ostrołęka C, on the basis that the investment posed major financial risks to the company and its shareholders.
James Thornton, ClientEarth founder, is recognised as one of the world’s Most Influential People in Climate Policy by Apolitical.
BP announced they were pulling their Possibilities Everywhere ad campaign after we made a complaint about greenwashing.
In a landmark decision in our case against Europe's biggest coal plant, the judge ordered the coal plant operators to negotiate with our lawyers to accelerate the plant's closure.
After a 13-year-long fight, we won the right for all people to challenge the EU in court on decisions that break environmental law. Previously, only NGOs could do this – so this reform gives members of the public the opportunity to hold the EU to account over climate change and biodiversity loss.
We launched the Greenwashing Files, investigating the advertising claims of some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies and exposing the reality behind the greenwashing.