This article examines a UK human rights appeal allowed primarily on the basis of climate-related harms under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Decided by First-tier Tribunal Judge Adio on 13th November 2025, the case concerned a Filipino national whose home had been destroyed during Typhoon Ondoy and who suffered from PTSD and depression linked to climate-induced trauma. The Tribunal accepted expert psychiatric and country evidence. They found that climate change contributed directly to the appellant's vulnerability, mental illness, and "very significant obstacles" to his reintegration. This article analyses the doctrinal significance of the judgment, its placement in evolving human rights jurisprudence, and its implications for the future of climate-related protection claims.
1. Introduction
Human rights litigation is increasingly confronting the realities of climate change, even as the 1951 Refugee Convention remains limited in its ability to address environmental displacement. While the UN Human Rights Committee's 2020 decision in Teitiota v New Zealand cautiously acknowledged that climate-related risks might trigger non-refoulement obligations, national courts have been slow to integrate environmental harms into their adjudicative frameworks. Against this backdrop, the November 2025 decision of First-tier Tribunal Judge Adio marks a significant development in UK jurisprudence: climate impacts were central to the assessment of Article 8 ECHR rights, rather than peripheral in context.
When this case first came to us, its legal prospects were perceived by some as limited: it did not engage any recognised Refugee Convention reason and environmental displacement was seen as falling outside the traditional structures of asylum law. We considered that in fact climate impacts were the central cause, with the other individual harms (e.g. psychological) resulting from this.
We consequently developed the initial approach, collecting evidence across both environmental, societal and governmental sources as well as undertaking the more traditional assessments. Working on the case alongside Counsel, Ronan Toal, we reconsidered the evidential landscape to explore whether the interplay between climate-induced trauma, systemic governance failures and the appellant's psychiatric vulnerability might engage established human rights protections.
What emerged was a legal route that enabled the ability of Article 8 ECHR to accommodate climate-related harms when properly framed. What some initially dismissed as an unwinnable case became, through careful analysis and collaboration, a test of how existing rights frameworks can respond to new global challenges.
2. Factual Background and Evidence
2.1 The Appellant's Experiences in the Philippines
The appellant, a Filipino man born into a modest socio-economic background, migrated to the United Kingdom in 2013. Before leaving the Philippines, he had worked as a farmer and tuk-tuk driver after leaving school at seventeen. In Marikina City, he built a small home that was destroyed during Typhoon Ondoy in 2009 one of the most devastating climate-linked disasters in Philippine history, affecting over four million people and causing widespread infrastructure collapse.
Despite the scale of the disaster, the appellant received no state aid. Evidence showed that corruption in disaster relief distribution favoured politically connected families and registered local voters, leaving poorer households with no access to rebuilding assistance.
Following the destruction of his home, the appellant lived in extreme hardship and later relocated to Alabang. Shortly after he left for the UK, Typhoons Maring (2013) and Yolanda (Haiyan, 2013) struck the Philippines, reinforcing his fears of further environmental catastrophe.
2.2 Intensifying Climate Instability
The Philippines has consistently ranked among the world's most climate-vulnerable countries. Between 2024 and 2025, it was struck by multiple typhoons including Entang, Julian, Kristine, Emong, Marisol, Nando, and Opong as well as damaging earthquakes. In September 2025, a corruption scandal undermined the government's flagship "Anti-Flood Project," exposing deep institutional failures in climate governance.
The appellant's family home in Tarlac was flooded to the ceiling in July 2025, forcing an eight-day evacuation without electricity or essential medications for his 84-year-old father.
3. Climate Change Litigation Strategy:
Identifying the crux of the case required focus on what might have seemed legally irrelevant details: the appellant's untreated trauma from Typhoon Ondoy, the chronic instability caused by recurring national disasters, and the structural failures in the Philippine disaster-response system. Each element, though not a "Convention reason" in itself, became a key part of an Article 8 analysis once assembled into a coherent narrative. The strategy demonstrates that a strong case could initially appear as a weak case when the full legal relevance of the facts has not yet been fully explored.
4. Expert Evidence Accepted by the Tribunal
4.1 Psychiatric Evidence
A consultant psychiatrist, provided a detailed assessment diagnosing the appellant with:
- moderate depressive episode;
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) directly related to the destruction of his home;
- heightened suicide risk in the event of forced removal;
- long-term vulnerability due to repeated exposure to climate-driven disasters.
The Tribunal accepted that climate change played a causal role in the appellant's mental deterioration.
4.2 Country Expert Evidence
An anthropologist and physician gave evidence confirming:
- the appellant's account was plausible;
- corruption routinely distorts disaster relief;
- climate change has significantly intensified typhoon severity;
- poor and marginalised communities face disproportionate environmental risk;
- climate impact is increasingly associated with mental health deterioration across the Philippines.
Judge Adio accepted the expert's findings in full.
5. Judge Adio's Legal Findings: Climate Change as an Article 8 Factor
The judgment contains a critical passage:
"Climate Change has contributed to the typhoon that destroyed the Appellant's home, it has contributed to his current mental illness. It has caused massive social and economic dislocation in the Philippines which would compound the Appellant's difficulties in trying to reintegrate there."
The Tribunal found:
- climate change contributed to individually experienced harm;
- the appellant's mental health conditions would be exacerbated by return;
- the instability caused by climate-driven disasters created "very significant obstacles to reintegration";
- removal would be a disproportionate interference with private life.
This case reflects a developing approach in which climate change directly shapes the Article 8 proportionality analysis.
6. Significance for Human Rights Doctrine
The decision demonstrates that climate-induced harms can be accommodated within existing human rights frameworks, without the need to construct new or exceptional legal categories. As highlighted by Counsel Ronan Toal in his commentary on climate-related case law at Garden Court Chambers' seminar "Climate Change Immigration: Protection and Human Rights Claims" on 16th January 2025, the question is not whether we must expand the law, but why we overlook the tools that already exist.
The reasoning in this decision also signals an incremental shift in judicial awareness of climate vulnerability as a human rights concern. Although First-tier Tribunal decisions are of course not binding, the analysis adopted here provides optimism for future jurisprudence. It offers a replicable template for framing climate impacts through the lens of fundamental rights, reinforcing the idea that established doctrines are sufficiently adaptable to meet emerging environmental challenges.
7. Conclusion
The evolution of this case underscores the importance of creative yet principled legal reasoning. In close collaboration with Ronan Toal, we witnessed firsthand how assumptions about what constitutes a "strong" or "weak" claim can ignore the full capacity of human rights law. What began as a case dismissed for lacking Convention grounds became, through careful evidential construction and doctrinal reframing, a step forward in recognising climate change as integral to the Article 8 analysis. By recognising climate change as part of the matrix of vulnerability, the Tribunal has recognised climate-related protection claims. As climate instability intensifies globally, this reasoning may become increasingly central to human rights adjudication.