Riding the Train With the KlimaSeniorinnen
The group of older Swiss women fighting against heat waves.
MAY 16, 2023
Heat is the stealth killer of climate change. Once it gets a few degrees hotter than the temperatures we know, our body struggles. Blood vessels dilate while the body tries to increase blood pressure, sending the heart into overdrive. The longer the heat lasts, the higher the number of strokes, seizures, and kidney failures. Air pollution increases in heat, too, triggering respiratory conditions. A rise in temperatures can worsen chronic health conditions. One study has tied heat waves to an increase in suicides. The tipping point between a pleasant summer day and a stay in the hospital depends on geography and general health. But overall, the prognosis for higher temperatures is not good: In 2019 the worldwide toll for heat-related deaths was 356,000. More than a third of these deaths are tied to climate change.
The older you get, the more you suffer. Cooling the body becomes harder. The volume of our sweat glands generally reduces as we age. Heat deaths are often hard to track. Though some may break down in the middle of the street, most occur in people’s homes or in hospitals, making them almost invisible.
A group of women who are among the most vulnerable to this fate—the elderly themselves—are leading a legal battle to ensure that these invisible deaths do not become the norm. Together, the women are known as KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection Switzerland.
Last month, the KlimaSeniorinnen, could be found on a train traveling from Bern, Switzerland, to Strasbourg, France. They were on their way to the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR), where they would appear as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against their home country Switzerland for neglecting the effects of climate change. Theirs is the first-ever climate case the court would hear.
On the train, they broke out into the protest anthem “Bella Ciao”. They had adapted the lyrics, such that the chorus went:
“We need to wake up
We need to rise up
We need to open our eyes
And do it now now now,” .
“We need to build a better future
And we need to start right now.”
“We hope that the court recognizes that allowing the climate catastrophe to take its course poses a direct threat to our lives, and that it is therefore a human rights issue,” says 74-year-old Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti, a former kindergarten teacher turned couple’s counselor who is now the co-president of the KlimaSeniorinnen.
The Swiss women’s journey started seven years ago, when they lodged a complaint accusing their own government of failing to properly address the climate crisis. Several Swiss courts have since rebuffed their arguments, on the basis that the women were not singularly affected by the change. Now, they have taken the case to the ECHR, the top court on human rights for 46 countries, including all members of the European Union as well as countries like Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. A ruling in the women’s favor would not only be legally binding for the Swiss government, but would also open the door to similar cases, and serve as a warning to other member nations.
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Early in the morning on March 29, just outside the court, a group of supporters, many of them also elderly women, waved colorful pinwheels and banners proclaiming, “We love KlimaSeniorinnen.” The applicants patiently answered questions by journalists. Then, they made their way through the security check, crossed the wide courtyard and walked up the spiral staircase in the court building’s center, right into the Grand Chamber. “It feels historic, doesn’t it?” Wydler-Wälti said as she took her seat just behind the KlimaSeniorinnen’s legal defense team.
The ringing of a bell announced the entrance of the 17 judges from across Europe. Each dressed in dark blue robes, their left shoulder adorned by the star-spangled flag of the European Union, they took their seats on the half-circle bench, their eyes fixated on the two opposing sides of the case Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland.
“We were just thinking: Do they want us to come crawling on the floor, panting and close to death?”
The Swiss government missed its own goal of cutting 20 percent of its emissions by 2020 – albeit narrowly – and is far from being on track to meet its targeted cut of 50 percent by 2030. Climate Action Tracker, which evaluates national climate plans, calls Switzerland’s actions “insufficient.” The bulk of its emissions stems from cars and air travel as well as private homes, through gas and electricity.
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A lifelong grassroots activist, Wydler-Wälti knows the power of protest, and says that being part of a community that stands up for a good cause feels invigorating. As a young mother, she took to the streets to protest plans for a nuclear power plant, and later helped start a feminist party, always working in the background. “The situation is so catastrophic that we have to make use of all avenues we can,” she said a few hours before she boarded the train to Strasbourg in her cozy living room in Bern, a plum tree in her garden and blooming narcissus flowers in view. She is cautious not to get on the nerves of her now adult children or grandchildren by banging on about climate change. Still, “we need to do whatever is possible, all at the same time.”
The case has been ongoing for seven years. In 2020, Switzerland’s Federal Court ruled that the government’s alleged failings in dealing with the climate crisis did “not sufficiently affect” the KlimaSeniorinnen’s right to life. “It was hard to take it seriously,” Wydler-Wälti said. “We were just thinking: Do they want us to come crawling on the floor, panting and close to death?”
The KlimaSeniorinnen aren’t the first trying to sue over the state of climate neglect (though they are among the first to do so at the ECHR). In recent years, the number of climate change cases brought across the globe has been rising, but the field is still new, and legal precedents are scarce.
2023 will bring decisions from courts in Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, all of which are due to hand down verdicts in precedent-setting trials. In the US, where a number of climate lawsuits were thrown out in the past, a group of children and young people aged between 5 and 21 have succeeded in taking a case all the way to trial. In June, they will face off against their home state of Montana, which they accuse of violating their state constitution’s promise of “right to a clean and healthful environment” by supporting the fossil fuel industry.
In Europe, one of the first successful climate change cases was a 2015 ruling by a Dutch court ordering its government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by the end of 2020. Though the Dutch government twice appealed the ruling, the supreme court of the Netherlands eventually upheld the judgment in 2019. A few months later, the Dutch government announced the closure of several coal power plants, billions in subsidies for renewable energy and a number of other policies to cut emissions, like lowering speed limits.
That landmark ruling inspired Greenpeace Switzerland to hire experts to discern how similar cases could be successful under Swiss jurisdiction. With support by Greenpeace, former Swiss Green party politician Anne Mahrer and Wydler-Wälti formed the KlimaSeniorinnen in 2015. Since then, the association has grown to more than 2,000 members, all of whom are women over the age of 65.
Data from a study of the 2003 heatwave in France show that mortality rates among women are 15 percent higher than men, most likely because women generally sweat less than men, meaning that their bodies cannot regulate temperature as well.
In Switzerland, average temperatures have warmed by 2.5 degrees Celsius since record-keeping began in 1874, according to Reto Burkard, who works on climate issues for the Swiss government. The most visible effect is the rapid melting of the country’s glaciers, which have already lost 50 percent of their ice. Switzerland alone has seen a four-fold increase in heat deaths compared to 50 years ago. An average of 200 people die from heat each year. Research shows that the number of deaths from heat waves will rise to about 1,300 annually in the country, even if global warming stays below 2 degrees Celsius. “It’s a public health emergency,” says Evan de Schrijver, who researches the links between heat waves and climate change at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern.
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“When I open the window, I can barely breathe,” Margrit Stahli, a 74-year old member who used to work as a doctor’s assistant in a small city not far from the German border told me. Others spoke of being confined to their homes on hot days, often with curtains drawn closed in an attempt to block out the sun. “This past summer, two or three times as I was walking up the stairs, I noticed that I’d better lay down and put the laundry off until later,” Wydler-Wälti said.
Data from a study of the 2003 heatwave in France show that mortality rates among women are 15 percent higher than men, most likely because women generally sweat less than men, meaning that their bodies cannot regulate temperature as well.
The lawyers representing the KlimaSeniorinnen have to take into account Switzerland’s legal peculiarities. Swiss law allows only people who are “particularly affected” to sue. This means that while many people suffer from the heat, the KlimaSeniorinnen must show that elderly women suffer the most.
On March 29, each side – KlimaSeniorinnen, the applicant, and Switzerland, the respondent – faced the seventeen judges. The proceedings lacked much of what one might expect in a trial: there was no witness stand or time for testimonies. Those had to be submitted in advance. Instead, each merely had 30 minutes to present their oral arguments, followed by a round of questions from the judges. The women crowded the room, filling the seats along with their supporters and trial observers. Dozens of journalists who’d come from across Europe were led into a room in the basement with a live video feed.
Switzerland went first. The country sees itself as a leader on climate action, and was represented by a number of government officials, though only two of them spoke. Alain Chablais, Switzerland’s main legal representative at the court, said that it was "baseless to claim or suggest that Switzerland is doing nothing." Switzerland was “constantly raising its ambitions,” he said. Furthermore, he said, the court had “no business becoming the place where national climate protection policy is decided.”
Then, the Swiss environment ambassador, Franz Perrez, addressed the court.
Perrez is a regular fixture at climate conferences; he is known for pushing other countries to take action. “We would clearly have liked to see more ambitious climate protection targets,” he said after the last COP meeting. Here, he cautioned the judges of setting a “risky” precedent that could open the floodgates to all sorts of climate litigation.
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The KlimaSeniorinnen’s argument centered around human rights. The lawyer pointed to Article 8 of the European Human Rights Convention, which stipulates the right to respect for private and family life as well as the protection of mental and physical integrity, and Article 2, which protects the “Right to Life.” Because Article 2 stipulates that that a state must not only “refrain from the intentional and unlawful taking of life but also to take appropriate steps to safeguard the lives of those within its jurisdiction,” Switzerland must do everything in its power to help keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, the KlimaSeniorinnen’s lawyer, Jessica Simor, told the court. “Switzerland’s actions come nowhere close,” she said.
In 2021, Swiss voters rejected the revision of a quarter-century-old law on emissions, leaving the country without legislation to adequately slash its greenhouse gasses by 2030. Voters worried that air travel would get more expensive, and the law faced the anger of the farming lobby and the conservative media, which has a strong voice in the country. Perrez said that the country was “constantly reviewing” and “improving” its climate policies. There was still time.
Perrez also made an argument familiar to the women: As they weren’t the only ones suffering from heat waves – babies, and people with cardiovascular disease or those carrying a pregnancy, for instance, were also affected – Swiss law did not afford them the legal grounds to sue.
He added that better insulation for buildings or air-conditioning units, which are rare in Switzerland, are viable options. People could also just stay indoors.
Perrez seemed increasingly flustered and defensive, especially once he had started answering the judges’ questions. In past newspaper interviews, Perrez has highlighted how Switzerland, though a small nation, could have an outsized influence by leading by example. Now he argued that the nation of just 8 million made for such a small fraction of global emissions, it could not be held accountable for the suffering of older women. “This is a global problem, and we need global solutions,” Perrez told the judges.
Around noon, the hearing drew to a close. The courts heard two more climate cases that day – a group of youth from Portugal suing several European governments and a former mayor of a French coastal town whose home could be submerged within the next seven years – but experts say the KlimaSeniorinnen’s suit is more likely to succeed. It was the narrowest case and had the best optics.
The ECHR’s judgement will be legally binding, and could force Switzerland to adopt adequate policies to rectify its violation of human rights. But the consequences for ignoring them are minimal for the country; Switzerland has only implemented 19% of the ECHR judgements against it.
Still, if global warming is capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius, Europe will see about 30,000 heat deaths annually. With 2 degrees warming, that number rises to close to 50,000.