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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Sweeping revisions to U.S. climate policy in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term have spawned a wave of protective litigation, legal challenges aimed not at advancing new climate goals but at preventing the rollbacks of existing regulation and preserving hard-won legal gains.

The challenges to the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks, funding freezes and dismantling of existing climate rules made up 20 percent of climate cases filed in the U.S. in 2025, up from 13 percent during Trump’s first term, according to a global analysis from the London School of Economics.

Both the scale of federal regulatory rollback under Trump and the surge in protective climate litigation in response are “without precedent,” the authors of the analysis wrote.

Although U.S. cases accounted for more than half of all climate litigation brought worldwide last year, battles over the dismantling of climate policy are also emerging in other countries, wrote Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham, the report’s authors at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

Similar protective cases have emerged in Canada, where young Ontarians appealed a rollback of provincial climate legislation, and in Brazil, where a series of cases before the Federal Supreme Court are........

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