Symposium on Visual Investigations: Best Practice in Collaboration and Community-led Approaches – A Question that Sounded Simple – WITNESS and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic Ask, How is Audiovisual Evidence Actually Being Used in Climate Change Litigation?

[Shanice R. Guthrie is a law student at Yale Law School ‘27 and the Student Director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. Born and raised in Jamaica, she brings a personal understanding of climate harm to her work on legal accountability.]

The Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic partnered with WITNESS to conduct original research on the use of audiovisual evidence in climate litigation globally.

There has never been more footage of a planet coming apart. Nearly every person with a smartphone now carries the means to capture, preserve, and communicate site-specific evidence of climate harm. After a flood, a fire, or a storm, the videos arrive before the news crews do. They arrive before the lawyers do. In many places, the lawyers never arrive at all.

I know this because I grew up inside the footage. I was born and raised in Jamaica, and for years I have watched the island change in ways that no written report has ever fully captured. The beaches I played on as a child sit differently against the seas now. The storms that once had names we could shrug off became events, we planned our lives around. The heat arrived earlier, stayed longer, and pressed harder each year. My island has spent my entire lifetime giving testimony: in eroded coastlines, in ruined harvests, in the storms we remember not by their names but by the number of dead they left behind. None of this happened on its own. It was manufactured in the boardrooms of oil and gas giants an ocean away, by industries that knew what their emissions would cost islands like mine and buried the science while we buried our dead. I saw these changes with my own eyes, but how do we make a courtroom see them for what they truly were? 

That experience is one of the driving forces behind my work. It is also what made the central finding of the research I helped conduct this year so difficult to sit with. Over two academic terms, our team at the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, working in response to an inquiry from WITNESS, an organisation which works with frontline communities to strengthen their ability to document, verify, preserve, and safely use audiovisual evidence, while also examining how emerging technologies, verification systems, and platform policies shape the public’s ability to trust audiovisual documentation. We set out to answer what sounded like a simple question: how is audiovisual evidence actually being used in climate change litigation around the world? 

The honest answer is that, outside a handful of jurisdictions, it barely is.

A Question That Sounded Simple

The moment for this question could hardly be better. Climate Change litigation, the growing body of cases in which communities, advocates, and governments seek accountability for the human activities driving climate change, has surged over the past decade. These cases now span domestic courts across the Global South and Global North, regional human rights bodies, and international tribunals. In 2025, the International Court of Justice unanimously affirmed that States are bound under international law to protect the climate system, and that failing to do so is an internationally wrongful act. The legal architecture for climate accountability is being assembled in real time.

Yet every climate case eventually collides with two stubborn evidentiary problems. The first is establishing the fact of harm: showing that a community, an ecosystem, or a person has suffered an injury. The second is establishing causation: connecting a local, observable harm to a diffuse and global set of causes. Audiovisual evidence speaks to both. In Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia, the Torres Strait Islanders’ petition before the UN Human Rights Committee, video evidence of flooding, erosion, coral bleaching, and the loss of culturally significant marine species helped substantiate claims of cultural and territorial loss. Video made the harm legible in a way affidavits alone could not.

So, we went looking for how widespread this practice had become. We reviewed more than ten thousand cases in the Sabin Center’s Climate Change Litigation Database, identified sixty that met our regional and subject-matter criteria, and built a contact list of roughly 172 practitioners, researchers, and advocates spanning Latin America, the Caribbean, the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa, and the African continent. We surveyed. We interviewed. We waited.

The Silence Was the Finding

What came back was thin: twelve survey responses and five interviews. Among those, only six respondents reported direct experience using audiovisual evidence in climate-related proceedings, and they were concentrated almost entirely in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Latin America.

It would be easy to write this off as a disappointing response rate, a methodological footnote. I think that would be a mistake, and our report argues as much. The silence was itself the finding.

Many practitioners we reached told us they did not consider themselves the right people to talk to. Their work sat within environmental law broadly, they said, not climate litigation specifically. Others simply never responded, against a backdrop of funding cuts and shrinking civic space that leaves climate-focused legal workers with no bandwidth for anything beyond the urgent. The public case databases, for their part, rarely record whether or how visual evidence was used at all; that information sits buried in pleadings, annexes, and transcripts that are often inaccessible. And our outreach, conducted in English and Spanish only, reproduced precisely the exclusions that keep practitioners furthest from Global North legal networks out of these conversations, even though they are often the people with the most direct experience of climate loss and damage.

Read together, these silences trace the outline of a field that does not yet know itself. Climate litigation is producing landmark judgments, but the evidentiary practice underneath it remains improvised, undocumented, and unevenly distributed. The communities recording the most are connected to the courtrooms the least.

Too Much Evidence, and Too Little

The practitioners who did engage with us described a paradox that should unsettle anyone who cares about climate accountability. There is simultaneously too much evidence and too little.

Too much, because affected communities are already documenting everything. People film the flood as it enters the house. They photograph the reef before and after the bleaching. They record their elders describing what the coastline used to be. Members of impacted communities, one theme from our interviews made clear, do not need to be instructed to document; people record what matters to them.

Too little, because almost none of that material survives the journey to evidentiary use. Files are lost when phones are replaced. Metadata is stripped by messaging apps. Contextual details, the who, when, and where that authentication demands, are never written down. Lawyers representing climate-affected communities frequently work pro bono and lack the time or resources to process hours of footage; the specialized third-party producers who can turn raw material into courtroom-ready exhibits cost money that claimants do not have. The result is a heartbreaking asymmetry: an ocean of documentation, and a trickle of admissible evidence.

Layered on top of this are newer anxieties. The rise of AI-generated media gives hesitant courts one more reason to distrust video, and may soon require experts to defend the provenance of every pixel.  Rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence are reshaping the global information ecosystem – making it easier to manipulate, distort and dismiss audiovisual evidence, whilst the AI detection field has largely been built to detect faces and manipulated human features, rather than environments and landscapes, which all could increasingly undermine the credibility of frontline documentation of climate change. 

And there are older, deeper obligations too: communities are not homogeneous, and practitioners told us that gathering footage without cultural understanding, without asking who within a community may consent to what being shared, risks missing precisely the evidence that matters most, or causing harm in the collecting. This is a crucial reason why WITNESS advocates for a community-led approach to audiovisual documentation, preservation, and verification, foregrounding the community-held knowledge and narratives which are always central to justice.

What the Courtroom Cannot Feel

Why does any of this matter, when expert reports and statistical models can establish the same facts? Because courts are human institutions, and visual evidence does something in a courtroom that numbers cannot. Respondents in our study described judges engaging differently with visual material, and scholarship has long made the same point; Kelly Matheson, writing on climate visuals in the courtroom, traces the practice back to the film evidence shown at Nuremberg, where the footage became a turning point in the proceedings.

The ICJ’s 2025 Opinion set out a two-step causation inquiry: whether a climatic event can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, and to what extent damage can be attributed to particular States. That framework is an invitation. Longitudinal footage of a single shoreline, filmed from the same vantage point across years and paired with expert testimony, is exactly the kind of evidence that can bridge a local harm and its global drivers. The communities best positioned to produce it are the ones being left out of the evidentiary conversation.

Building the Bridge

Our report closes with recommendations, many of which organisations like WITNESS and others exist with the aim to fill the gaps. Adapt existing video-documentation guidance to the climate context, with concrete reference to cases like Daniel Billy and Pabai and Kabai v. Australia. Teach preservation and verification, not just capture: original files, intact metadata, chain of custody, contemporaneous notes. Build directories connecting under-resourced litigators with forensic modelers, geospatial analysts, and AV producers, and better still, build the capacity, resources, and protections of community documentors and investigators to lead this alongside litigators. Communities at the centre of climate litigation are active defenders of our most vital ecosystems, frequently facing direct violence and intimidation as they resist. Treat cultural counsel as seriously as legal counsel. Push for procedural reforms, like the routine use of remote testimony already accepted in Australia and New Zealand, so that a witness whose homeland is disappearing does not have to leave it to be heard.

None of this is dramatic. All of it is infrastructure. And infrastructure is what turns a recording into a reckoning.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Jamaica

I said at the outset that I grew up inside the footage, and I want to end there, because it is the reason I do this work at all.

Somewhere in Jamaica right now, someone is filming a swollen gully after rain that came too hard and too fast. Someone is photographing what the sea took from a beach they have known their whole life. Twenty-seven years of watching that slow transformation taught me that the people living through climate change are already its most faithful documentarians. What they lack is not evidence. It is a bridge between what they know and what a court will accept.

My hope, the one that carried me through this research, is that I will one day be in a position to offer real guidance on protecting the environment I grew up in, so that the island that raised me is not something future generations encounter only in old videos, introduced as exhibits, showing what was lost. The cameras are already rolling. The question our research leaves me with is whether the law will learn to watch.

Photo attribution: Sander Weeteling on Unsplash