South Korean youth call for end to fossil fuels in historic court ruling on climate change

Yoon Hyeonjeong, a 19-year-old South Korean activist, says the fate of her years-long battle for more action on climate change hinges on what could be a historic decision by the country’s highest court on Thursday.

Yoon is among nearly 200 plaintiffs, including young environmentalists like him and even infants, in petitions filed at the Constitutional Court since 2020, who say the government is violating the rights of its citizens by not effectively addressing climate change.

Climate advocacy groups say it will be the first high court to rule on government climate action in Asia, potentially setting a precedent in the region where similar cases have been filed in Taiwan and Japan. In April, Europe’s highest human rights court ruled that the Swiss government had violated the rights of its citizens by failing to do enough to combat climate change.

“Street hacking, policy proposals, these campaigns were not enough to bring about real change,” said Yoon, who hopes the court’s decision will help break down barriers to climate policy.

Government lawyers say authorities are doing everything possible to reduce carbon emissions.

Han Wha-jin, a former environment minister, said in May that the government’s policies to reduce pollution did not violate human rights, although the constitutional petition provided a public forum on the severity of the climate crisis.

In 2019, Yoon was in his third year of middle school when he watched a documentary about the weather that he says shocked him into action.

Despite not being very successful, she decided to try to follow in the footsteps of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist who inspired a global youth movement that calls for drastic measures to combat climate change.

Yoon wrote slogans with crayons to pick out at schools, telling his seniors to stop destroying the planet. He later dropped out of high school and left his hometown to focus on climate change in the capital city of Seoul.

South Korea’s constitutional court does not award damages or order enforcement measures but can rule that existing laws are unconstitutional and ask parliament to revise them.

Germany’s constitutional court ruled in 2021 that the country must revise its climate law to set out how it will reduce carbon emissions to nearly zero by 2050.

Scientists say a global temperature increase of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average will have catastrophic and irreversible impacts on the world, from melting glaciers to collapsing ocean currents.

South Korea wants to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, but remains the second-largest coal polluter among the G20 countries after Australia, data showed, with less adoption of renewables.

The country last year revised its 2030 targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial sector but maintained its national target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% of 2018 levels.

Calling for an end to the use of fuel, Yoon said that floods and rising temperatures caused by climate change have immediate effects on people’s lives.

“We already have tools to curb carbon emissions. That is, stop using fossil fuels,” he said.

– Ju-min Park, Reuters