Abstract
The article examines one judgement of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) of Germany, released in March 2021, in the case Neubauer et al. v. Germany. The case concerned the constitutionality of some provisions of the KlimaSchutzgesetz, the German Federal Climate Change Act adopted in 2019, which laid down emission reduction targets for Germany in a horizon to climate neutrality until 2050. The article both describes the main novelties and show the main idiosyncrasies in the reasoning of the BverfG with respect to five main aspects: the human rights approach to climate protection, the advance interference-like effect (eingriffsähnliche Vorwirkung) doctrine, the duty to protect fundamental rights in relation to the constitutional protection of climate, the reliance on science, and the reliance on international law. The analysis of these aspects shows that the Neubauer decision combines innovative legal reasoning on the intertemporal dimension of fundamental rights and freedoms with more conservative positions on the scope of the duty to protect, the environmental content of protected rights and freedoms, the role of precaution, and the importance of international law.