Thirteen young Hawaiians secured a monumental victory last week in a closely tracked case that strengthened children’s constitutional rights, documented transportation’s outsized role in producing planet-warming greenhouse gases, and underscored the youngest climate activists’ ability to upend business as usual when and where it counts: in the courts. The settlement marks the first time that state agencies have agreed to work alongside youth plaintiffs on climate change constitutional issues. Only Hawaii and a handful of other states—Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island—grant specific environmental rights in their state constitutions.
In 1978, Hawaii added a provision to its constitution that states, “Each person has a right to a clean and healthful environment.” These rights take shape under the state’s environmental quality laws through mechanisms that include pollution controls, conservation monitoring, and natural resource improvements. But most importantly, these provisions also specify that “Any person may enforce this right against any party, public or private, through appropriate legal proceedings, subject to reasonable limitations and regulation as provided by law.
” Fast-forward nearly five decades, and in 2022, 13 young people, then aged 9 to 18, took the state transportation department to court to force it to move faster to protect natural resources that were disappearing in sometimes spectacular fashion. Both sides t.
