Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled.

In a landmark decision on one of three major climate cases, the first such rulings by an international court, the ECHR raised judicial pressure on governments to stop filling the atmosphere with gases that make extreme weather more violent.

The court’s top bench ruled that Switzerland had violated rights of a group of older Swiss women to family life, but threw out a French mayor’s case against France and that of a group of young Portuguese people against 32 European countries.

“It feels like a mixed result because two of the cases were inadmissible,” said Corina Heri, a law researcher at the University of Zürich. “But actually it’s a huge success.”

The court, which calls itself “the conscience of Europe”, found that Switzerland had failed to comply with its duties to stop climate change. It also set out a path for organisations to bring further cases on behalf of applicants.

The Swiss verdict opens up all 46 members of the Council of Europe to similar cases in national courts that they are likely to lose.

Joie Chowdhury, an attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law campaign group, said the judgment left no doubt that the climate crisis was a human rights crisis. “We expect this ruling to influence climate action and climate litigation across Europe and far beyond,” she said.

The facts of the three cases varied widely, but they all hinged on the question of whether government inaction on climate change violated fundamental human rights. Some of the governments argued that the cases should not be admitted, and that climate policy should be the subject of national governments rather than international courts.

The plaintiffs attending the hearing in the court in Strasbourg, some as young as 12, celebrated after a member of a panel of 17 judges read out the verdicts. The climate activist Greta Thunberg joined a gathering outside the court before the hearing to encourage faster action.

The KlimaSeniorinnen, a group of 2,400 older Swiss women, told the court that several of their rights were being violated. Because older women are more likely to die in heatwaves – which have become hotter and more common because of fossil fuels – they argued that Switzerland do its share to stop the planet heating by the Paris agreement target of 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.

The court ruled that Swiss authorities had not acted in time to come up with a good enough strategy to cut emissions. It also found the applicants had not had appropriate access to justice in Switzerland.

But it also rejected the cases of four individual applicants who had joined the KlimaSeniorinnen.

“I’m very happy,” said Nicole Barbry, 70, a member of the KlimaSeniorinnen who had come to Strasbourg. “It’s good that they’re finally listening to us.”

The Portuguese children and young people – who because of their age will see greater climate damage than previous generations – argued that climate-fuelled disasters such as wildfires and smoke threatened their right to life and discriminated against them based on their age.

The court did not admit the case, deciding that the applicants could not bring cases against countries other than Portugal and adding that they had not pursued legal avenues in Portugal against the government.

“Their [the Swiss] win is a win for us, too,” said Sofia Oliveira, a 19-year-old applicant in the Portuguese case. “And a win for everyone.”

The French case, brought by the MEP Damien Carême, argued that France’s failure to do enough to stop climate change violated his rights to life and privacy and family life. Carême filed the case when he was the mayor of Grand-Synthe, a coastal town vulnerable to flooding. The court did not admit the case because Carême no longer lives there.

The ECHR rejects about 90% of all applications it receives as inadmissible but fast-tracked the three climate cases to its top bench because of their urgency. It delayed hearings on six more climate cases to get a result on the rulings on Tuesday.

The rulings will influence three other international courts that are examining the role of government climate policy on human rights.

Charlotte Blattner, a researcher at the University of Berne who specialises in climate law, said the court had delivered a bold judgment in favour of a viable future. “The nature and gravity of the threat of climate change – and the urgency to effectively respond to it – require that governments can and will have to be held accountable for their lack of adequate action,” she said.

Opinion on Stoney Middleton is divided. Henry Salt, an animal rights campaigner and friend of Gandhi, relied on the village for his wildflower fix when he lived near Chesterfield. He regularly walked seven miles across the moors to get to Stoney’s dramatic gorge, the nearest limestone within his reach. But it was not, he decided, “one of the pleasantest of Peakland villages”. Though “naturally beautiful”, he wrote, it was also “sadly deformed”.

Knowing something of its rich human history – the highwaymen, thwarted lovers, crystal meth cooks and Hollywood stars – I reckon the village can look after itself. Approaching Middleton Dale, on the other hand, a little to the west, I could appreciate Salt’s perspective. Centuries of quarrying tore chunks from this valley, and blasting out a turnpike in the early 19th century bequeathed the village a busy main road that must annoy those living near it. (In better news, the turnpike’s tollbooth, now a listed building, has been a notable fish and chip shop for the best part of a hundred years.)

Nature has done her best to heal the damage. When the fish and chip shop opened in 1926, the dale’s scars were more obvious. Now they’re cloaked in scrubby woodland, which in early summer is warmly vibrant. This spring, though, after weeks of unseasonable cold, upper branches have remained bare, while trunks have been wreathed in dark ivy, only somewhat lightened by emerging drifts of dog’s mercury – classic ground cover on a limestone woodland floor. Dropping into the dale from above can provoke a chill foreboding as the walls close in.

Today, though, the dale seemed lit up. Rafts of rock cress, having found a toehold in cracks and on ledges on the gorge’s rock faces, were now in blossom, smothering the bulging limestone buttresses with drifts of white flowers. It was so startling that I pulled off the road to marvel at this glorious transformation. The plant’s leaves were freshly green, snag-toothed and narrowing to the stem, the flowers’ cruciform petals arranged around lemon yellow anthers, the whole arrangement filling the void above my head to light the way.

England could produce 13 times more renewable energy than it does now, while using less than 3% of its land, analysis has found.

Onshore wind and solar projects could provide enough electricity to power all the households in England two and a half times over, the research by Exeter University, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FoE), suggested.

Currently, about 17 gigawatt hours of electricity comes from homegrown renewables on land. But there is potential for 130 GWh to come from solar panels, and 96GWh from onshore wind.

These figures are reached by only taking into account the most suitable sites, excluding national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, higher grade agricultural land and heritage sites.

Some commentators have argued that solar farms will reduce the UK’s ability to grow its own food, but the new analysis suggests there is plenty of land that can be used without impairing agricultural production. More land is now taken up by golf courses than solar farms, and developers can be required to enhance biodiversity through simple measures such as maintaining hedgerows and ponds.

Onshore windfarms were in effect banned in 2015 by the then prime minister, David Cameron. Rishi Sunak last year claimed to make moves towards lifting the ban, through small changes to the planning regulations, but campaigners say they were ineffectual and real planning reform is needed. No plans were submitted for new windfarms in England last year, and few new developments are coming forward, despite high gas prices, rising bills and onshore wind being the cheapest form of electricity generation.

The calculations of the land needed exclude rooftop solar panels. Ministers have resisted calls for solar panels to be made mandatory on new-build housing. Kitting out a new-build home with renewables, high-grade insulation and other low-carbon features costs less than £5,000 for a housing developer, but retrofitting it to the same standard costs about £20,000, with the cost borne by the householder. Housing developers are among the largest donors to the Conservative party.

FoE has produced a map that shows potential sites for onshore wind and solar generation. North Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire show particularly good potential. The sites total about 374,900 hectares (926,400 acres), or about 2.9% of the available land in England.

Tony Bosworth, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Unleashing the UK’s immense potential to generate cheap, clean homegrown renewables is essential to bring down our energy bills for good and meeting the UK’s vital international target to reduce carbon emissions by two-thirds by 2030. But the current government’s record on boosting our energy security through renewables is woefully inadequate and has left the UK lagging far behind in the global race to a zero-carbon economy. Meanwhile, Labour is looking increasingly shaky on climate after rolling back its planned investment in green growth.”

He called on all the main parties to commit to lifting restrictions on onshore windfarms in England; for local authorities to identify suitable areas for renewable development; for upgrades to the electricity grid to enable the vast expansion of renewable energy; and for tougher requirements on renewable developers to protect biodiversity.

Local communities can also be helped to benefit from renewable developments, for instance through being offered cheaper power or a share in the development.

Bosworth said: “We urgently need our political leaders to pull their heads out of the sand and produce a strong, ambitious and fair new climate plan that lifts the barriers to onshore wind and solar power and secures investment in the infrastructure needed to support the switch to renewables. These are win-win policies for creating long-term jobs, boosting our ailing economy and protecting our planet for future generations.”

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “Onshore wind power capacity has almost quadrupled since 2010 and renewables account for nearly half of our electricity, up from just 7%. We’ve also streamlined planning rules in England to make it easier for councils to identify suitable land for onshore wind. Our latest renewables auction has its largest ever budget of £1bn, including a record £800m pot for offshore wind, to further strengthen our world-leading clean energy sector, supporting a range of renewables from onshore wind to solar.”

The world’s biggest economies have continued to finance the expansion of fossil fuels in poor countries to the tune of billions of dollars, despite their commitments on the climate.

The G20 group of developed and developing economies, and the multilateral development banks they fund, put $142bn (£112bn) into fossil fuel developments overseas from 2020 to 2022, according to estimates compiled by the campaigning groups Oil Change International (OCI) and Friends of the Earth US.

Canada, Japan and South Korea were the biggest sources of such finance in the three years studied, and gas received more funding than either coal or oil.

The G7 group of biggest economies, to which Japan and Canada belong, pledged in 2022 to halt overseas funding of fossil fuels. But while funding for coal has rapidly diminished, finance for oil and gas projects has continued at a strong pace.

Some of the money is going to other developed economies, including Australia, but much of it is to the developing world. However, richer middle income countries still receive more finance than the poorest.

The most recent G7 pledge, in the study, is to phase out all overseas fossil fuel funding by the end of 2022. The OCI study concentrates on the period from the beginning of the fiscal year of 2020-21 for each country, to the end of the fiscal year of 2022-23.

However, the researchers also found that Japan had continued to make new fossil fuel investments overseas in the past few weeks, up to mid-March 2024, exploiting loopholes in its promise to end fossil fuel funding.

The World Bank provided about $1.2bn a year to fossil fuels over the three-year period, of which about two-thirds went to gas projects.

The US, Germany and Italy also provided billions in funding a year to overseas fossil fuel projects before the end of 2022-23, according to the report published on Tuesday. The UK supplied about $600m a year on average.

Canada supplied just under $11bn a year on average, in the 2020-22 period studied, while South Korea put forward $10bn and Japan about $7bn.

Over the same three-year period, the G20 economies put about $104bn into clean energy developments overseas, according to the report.

Claire O’Manique, a public finance analyst at OCI, said: “While rich countries continue to drag their feet and claim they can’t afford to fund a globally just energy transition, countries like Canada, Korea, Japan and the US appear to have no shortage of public funds for climate-wrecking fossil fuels.

“We must continue to hold wealthy countries accountable for their role in funding the climate crisis, and demand they move first and fastest on a fossil fuel phase-out, to stop funding fossil fuels, and that they pay their fair share of a globally just transition, loss and damage and adaptation finance.”

Makiko Arima, a senior finance campaigner at OCI, called on Japan particularly to stop supporting fossil fuels. Japan has lobbied behind the scenes to stop G7 countries adopting a stronger stance on fossil fuels, and in favour of some key projects.

Arima said: “Japan is derailing the transition to renewable energy across Asia and globally. Despite its G7 commitment to end fossil fuel financing, its public financial institutions like the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) continue to support new fossil fuel projects, including the Scarborough gasfield in Australia and gas power plants in Mexico.

“JBIC is currently investigating a claim that it failed to follow its social and environmental safeguards in developing the Philippines’ first LNG [liquefied natural gas] terminal in Batangas. Japan needs to put people and planet over profit, and shift its finances from fossil fuels to renewables.”