Front Public Health. 2026 May 18;14:1860605. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1860605. eCollection 2026.
ABSTRACT
To safeguard public health, ecological and environmental rights, and ecological security, China enacted the Ecological Environment Code in 2026, which includes a dedicated chapter on climate change. However, climate civil public interest litigation addressing climate-related health damage still relies on general ecological and environmental litigation provisions and lacks a specialized institutional framework. Climate change not only disrupts ecosystems and carbon cycle balance, but also increases disease burden, intensifies pressure on medical resources, and exacerbates health inequalities, posing systemic challenges to public health and medical security systems. For example, extreme weather events raise the incidence of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, ecological imbalance promotes the spread of vector-borne and infectious diseases, and vulnerable populations face increased health risks and medical burdens. Although closely related to ecological destruction and air pollution public interest litigation, climate civil public interest litigation differs in its theoretical foundation, value objectives, normative scope, and legal methods, thus requiring independent institutional design. In China, courts often apply general environmental liability rules, resulting in insufficient scientific precision and inadequate responses to climate-related health risks and medical cost burdens. This paper fills the research gap by proposing a specialized climate civil public interest litigation system within dedicated climate change legislation, grounded in the risk prevention principle and the right to public climate health. It constructs a climate-health-medical big data-supported evidence rule system, improves carbon emission monitoring rules, and designs a prevention-oriented civil liability framework supplemented by relief mechanisms, including medical insurance, while strengthening coordination with existing environmental public interest litigation systems and provides an interdisciplinary bridge between climate governance, public health protection, and multilevel medical security.
PMID:42232953 | PMC:PMC13223088 | DOI:10.3389/fpubh.2026.1860605