Indigenous Communities, Activists in Africa Gird for Legal Battles with Governments over Climate Harms

A lawsuit filed in the Ugandan district of Mbale in 2020, shortly after weather experts warned that eastern Uganda would receive some of the heaviest rains in years is indicative of a broader, if still uneven, movement across Africa in recent years: Communities and activists are increasingly turning to the courts to challenge governments and corporations over climate and environmental harm.

The Uganda case was filed on behalf of 48 survivors of the 2019 landslide disaster in the country’s coffee-growing district that killed 53 people and destroyed hundreds of houses. It argued that the government’s failure to provide financial compensation to victims, and its lack of an effective disaster management system, violated their constitutional rights and the country’s existing laws.

Judith Nansubuga, a lawyer with Greenwatch, briefs the plaintiffs on the progress of their case during a recent meeting in Bududa District, eastern Uganda. Credit Greenwatch

“The applicants want to hold government and its agencies accountable for failing to put in place adequate adaptation and preventive measures despite the known risk of landslides,” said Judith Nansubuga, a lawyer with Ugandan activist group Greenwatch. “The affected communities have not received adequate support to address the risks they continue to face.”

Across Africa, Indigenous communities and activists are increasingly suing governments and multinational corporations for their role in both exacerbating climate change and more near-term pollution connected to pipelines and other oil projects. Africans are increasingly turning to litigation as a tool for climate accountability on a continent that has historically lagged behind the rest of the globe when it comes to civil suits.

Over the past five years, some 221 million people in Africa were affected by floods, droughts and heatwaves, according to data from the International Emergency Events Database. During that period, a total of 27 climate suits have been filed across Africa.

In South Africa, campaigners are battling power utility Eskom over  polluted water being discharged from its coal-fired power stations and contaminating downstream water resources. In East Africa, civil society groups are fighting to halt the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP, a 900-mile pipeline from western Uganda to the Indian Ocean port city of Tanga, a project that is estimated to emit some 379 million tons of CO2 equivalent over its lifespan. Ugandan farmers this year filed a suit against the project in the U.K. as well. In Ghana, environmental activists are battling the government in court to stop a proposed mining project in a protected national forest, which they say endangers their health and wellbeing.

Though climate litigation is surging all over the globe, in Africa these cases are often inseparable from wider struggles over land, human rights, natural resources and environmental protection.

In eastern Uganda, for example, the highlands around Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano straddling Uganda’s border with Kenya, have become too dangerous for people to live in. Since 2010, the government has had plans to relocate residents from the area, but progress has been sluggish. Landslides have killed more than 1,000 people around Mount Elgon since the 1960s, according to data from Uganda’s Disaster Ministry. Among those killed were two relatives of Jennifer Kalenda, one of the plaintiffs in the Mbale case.

During the rainy season, 58-year-old widow Kalenda starts her day by inspecting her mud-and-wattle house, perched on a steep slope next to banana plants, for any cracks. Then, as the clouds gather in the sky, the mother of four has to hurriedly scale the steep hills to flee her home to the lowlands, returning afterward with the knowledge that her house may or may not still be standing.

 Kalenda lost her mother and grandson during the 2019 disaster. The landslides also buried her half-acre garden, where she grew coffee, bananas, yams and beans, and swept away her cows, goats and hens. But years after the disaster, Kalenda still lives in the same place.

“Our government can do much better to protect us from this threat,” she says. “They know it’s a dangerous area to live in, yet they leave us here.”

In 2020, a local campaign group, Greenwatch, lodged the civil suit in Mbale, in which survivors and relatives of victims of the 2019 landslides in Bududa District accused the Attorney General, the National Environment Management Authority and the Bududa Local Government Council of failing to protect communities living in one of the country’s most landslide-prone areas.

The 48 plaintiffs, including survivors and relatives of victims, argued that the deaths and destruction caused by the landslides were not simply an unavoidable natural disaster. They said the government had known for years that the area was highly prone to landslides but failed to take adequate measures, including putting in place effective early-warning systems and relocating people from high-risk areas.

Meanwhile, landslides continue to devastate the area, including a deadly landslide in the neighboring district of Bulambuli in 2025, which killed 15 people and destroyed more than 60 houses.

“Uganda still needs stronger mechanisms for handling climate and environmental cases expeditiously. Climate cases involve urgent threats to life, livelihoods and the environment, yet they take years to conclude,” said Nansubuga from Greenwatch.

Julius Butsiba lost his three-year-old son, Mukwana Emma, when a landslide struck the area. He also lost his home, livestock, food and other belongings, leaving him with almost nothing.“I lost my house. I lost my animals, and then the food. I lost everything in my home.” He had about one acre of land where he grew coffee and other food crops, all of which were destroyed by the landslide. He says the loss has made it difficult for him to care for his remaining children. He wants the government to provide financial compensation and relocate his family to a safer area away from landslide-prone ground.

Julius Butsiba ( blue shirt) who lost his three-year-old son during the 2019 Landslides in Bududa district.Credit : Greenwatch

“I want the government to give me money and another place which is not in the dangerous areas,” he said.

Five years later, the Bududa case remains unresolved. As survivors wait for justice, communities around Mount Elgon continue to face the threat of landslides and increasingly extreme rainfall.

The Sabin Center Climate Litigation Database lists South Africa and Kenya among the African countries with the highest number of cases. But the database uses a specific definition: cases must raise a material issue of fact or law relating to climate change. Cases in which climate change is only a peripheral issue, or where litigation indirectly affects climate outcomes without expressly addressing climate change, may not be included. The gap is particularly significant in Africa, where cases over pollution, deforestation, land and community rights may have important climate implications without being framed as climate cases.

Dr. Maria Antonia Tigre, the Director of Global Climate Litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, says that this interconnectedness is one of the defining features of litigation on the continent.

“The distinctive features are the close relationship to extractivism and local environmental injustices,” she says. “Cases concerning pollution or deforestation or land and community rights are then excluded, and this doesn’t provide the full picture of what’s happening in the region because of that limitation.”

Across Africa, successful climate litigation has often been less about asking courts to order governments to cut emissions and more about challenging fossil-fuel projects through existing environmental, constitutional and human-rights laws.

In Nigeria, one of the earliest examples of an environmental case, a 2005 ruling in Gbemre v Shell linked gas flaring in the Niger Delta to violations of the constitutional rights to life and human dignity, and ordered the practice to stop. However, the case highlights the gap between winning a case and delivering justice on the ground because gas flaring continued despite the court ruling.

In Kenya, in 2019, campaigners succeeded in having the environmental license for a proposed 1,050MW coal plant in Lamu revoked after the National Environment Tribunal found inadequacies in the project’s environmental assessment and public participation.

In South Africa, the Constitutional Court recently halted energy giant Shell and its local partner, Impact Africa, from conducting offshore oil and gas exploration along the Eastern Cape coast, ending a five-year legal battle involving affected communities and environmental groups. The court found that the companies had failed to meaningfully consult affected communities and had not adequately considered the project’s potential impacts on the environment, cultural rights and livelihoods.

Angela van der Berg, director of the Global Environmental Law Centre and an associate professor of public law and jurisprudence at the University of the Western Cape, says the significance of the case extends beyond the specific oil and gas project.

“Fossil-fuel development cannot simply be treated as a technical licensing exercise,” she says. “Governments and companies cannot bypass procedural rights, environmental obligations, cultural rights and community interests simply because a project is presented as economically or strategically important.”

Climate litigants face several barriers on the continent. In countries where climate-specific laws are limited, litigants frequently rely on constitutional rights, environmental legislation and human rights,  exposing cases to procedural battles. Litigation is also expensive and technically complex, particularly when cases require climate science and environmental-impact evidence. Communities may also struggle to access lawyers, information, scientific expertise and funding. Such delays mean that communities continue to live with the very conditions they are asking courts to address, sometimes for years.

Beyond the courtroom, environmental and climate defenders face threats, particularly when they challenge powerful political or corporate interests. Van der Berg says intimidation and strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPs, can have a profound chilling effect.

“A SLAPP can turn litigation on its head,” she says. “Civic space and access to justice are themselves preconditions for meaningful climate litigation.”

Africa is among the regions of the world projected to suffer most from the impacts of climate change while being the least able to adapt to its impacts. The World Bank projects that by 2050, more than 86 million people will be displaced by climate change in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Last year, the Pan African Lawyers Union, together with other civil society organizations, asked the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights to clarify African states’ human-rights obligations in relation to climate change. They want the court to issue an advisory opinion just like the International Court of Justice opinion on climate change.

“An advisory opinion could articulate a genuinely African climate-justice framework rather than simply importing jurisprudence developed elsewhere,” Van der Berg says.