The Austrian NGO AllRise, which focuses on climate lawsuits, today filed a state liability lawsuit against the Republic of Austria because of land use. The lawsuit was filed with the Constitutional Court, AllRise co-founder and lawyer Wolfram Proksch said at a press conference in Vienna. The initiator of AllRise, Johannes Wesemann, spoke of a “systemic failure” that made soil protection inadequate and resulted in enormous damage.
According to Wesemann, the citizens would have to bear the consequences of decades of political failure. “We believe that the fight against the climate crisis will take place to a large extent in the courts of law, because we simply need clear decisions and politicians are not delivering them.”
Land use in Austria is high
Austrians can live on or farm 37 percent of the area. “That’s not very much,” said Wesemann. Land consumption in Austria is high. “A fifth of our area has already been built up. That’s twice the size of Vorarlberg. And Eisenstadt is added every year.”
“Even if we only list Lower and Upper Austria as federal states in our lawsuit, we also see omissions in the other seven federal states and reserve the right to sue them at a later date,” said Proksch, who submitted the brief together with his formulated by my colleague Theresa Stachowitz.
“Our global ecosystem does not only consist of air, there is a very strong interaction between all elements,” said meteorologist and climate researcher Helga Kromp-Kolb, who supports the project. “The soil is a very important factor in the climate discussion.” And the soil is very often overlooked. “It’s an ecosystem. There are an incredible number of creatures living in this soil that we urgently need to preserve our nature, for the entire ecosystem,” said the scientist.
