Published 2025-09-15
Keywords
- Climate litigation; fundamental rights; protection; amparo; collective actions; structural remedies.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This article comparatively analyzes the argumentative strategies and structural remedies of climate litigation and the constitutional protection of fundamental rights in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, and the Inter-American System from 2015 to 2025. Through a directed review of documents and a curated corpus of 30 publications with DOIs, the article categorizes rights frameworks, principles, and remedial designs. There is a predominance of the rights-centric approach (life, health, a healthy environment, and participation), which is reinforced by OC-23/17. There is also an expansion of the rights of nature and intergenerational justice. Regarding remedies, structural orders are reinforced with verifiable goals, schedules, monitoring mechanisms, and interagency coordination. Ecuador emphasizes restoration and material limits, Chile emphasizes liability for damages and preventive-reparative measures, and Colombia emphasizes dialogic sentences about the Amazon. The article proposes a typology of strategies and remedies and outlines conditions of effectiveness, such as regulatory clarity, indicators, polycentric governance, and participation, as well as bottlenecks, such as capacities, metrics, and distributive conflicts. In conclusion, remedial design is as important as strategy. Its density determines compliance and impact and offers transferable principles that can be applied to different institutional and territorial contexts to bridge the gap between recognized rights and effective climate protection.