OPINION - The Swiss women who won their human rights climate battle must inspire us all

Earlier this month, a group of older Swiss women won a landmark climate case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court ruled that Switzerland’s weak climate policy had violated their rights to private and family life — an outcome that will change the legal landscape on the climate crisis.

In Europe, this binding court ruling means that 47 signatory states now have a clear legal duty to ensure their climate action is sufficient to protect human rights. And the outcome will potentially influence climate cases around the world, too. It was a privilege for ClientEarth to support their efforts by providing our legal expertise to the court.

The women behind the case had been building towards this moment for over nine years. The group, known as the “KlimaSeniorinnen” (literally “senior climate women”), first met in 2016, initially taking legal requests to Switzerland’s Federal Council. Four years later, in 2020, their case was dismissed by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, so they decided to go to the European Court of Human Rights. Another four years later, they won.

There are many things we can learn from their victory, but one lesson stands out to me above all: how, in spite of its urgency, strategic patience is crucial to winning the fight against the climate crisis. Moments of significant change in the world don’t actually happen in a moment; they require vision and long-term planning, combined with grit and determination to see the strategy through, despite setbacks.

Change is slow and often invisible, with hard work being done by dedicated people all around the world in grassroots movements, charities, politics and business. And occasionally, all of a sudden, the change becomes big and public — in the form of legal victories, political breakthroughs, big cultural moments, or breakthroughs in the energy transition itself, such as the falling costs of renewable power that we’ve seen in recent years.

At ClientEarth, our hard-fought legal victories have shown us that these qualities, of vision, determination and strategic patience, are crucial in building meaningful change. Our cases often take years of persistence. In February, for instance, we filed a fresh legal challenge, alongside 14 other NGOs, against a plastics facility being proposed in the port of Antwerp by the petrochemicals giant INEOS. We won an injunction in 2020 against what would be the largest plastic facility in Europe. And we’ve been fighting it for four years since.

Strategic patience is crucial for creating the systemic change we need, but sometimes the sheer scale of the crises facing our natural world, and the short time we have to address them, can induce a sense of panic. Our natural systems, like social systems, often change slowly and then very quickly. An exhibition this week in London by Lena C Emery called “The Mountains Between Us” — being held in support of ClientEarth — explores the devastating impact of climate change on the Rhône Glacier, and desperate attempts to save it. The melting of an Alpine glacier can cross a tipping point: as more dark rock is exposed, it absorbs more and more heat from the sun, dramatically accelerating the melting. The Rhône Glacier sits high up in the Swiss Alps, and has towered above the Swiss women all their lives. Over the years they spent working on their case, its decline has sped up.

We are in a race to save as much as we can from rapidly warming global temperatures. However, we can’t use that as an excuse to panic, or give up — because fighting this crisis requires patience and determination, and knowing how your contribution fits into a large movement of people trying to change the world. Those Swiss women are a reminder that, in spite of everything, we can still achieve game-changing victories that seemed unachievable only a few years ago.

Photographer Lena C Emery’s The Mountains Between Us is an exhibition in support of ClientEarth, sponsored by Danish home textiles company Tekla. The exhibition will be open to the public at Frieze’s No.9 Cork Street gallery, London, on 25-27 April, from 10am-6pm. Find out more at teklafabrics.com/the-mountains-between-us