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In what EDO chief David Morris describes as a "delicious irony", the court got to hear about the project's detrimental impact on climate change and the town's social fabric - despite Gloucester Resources arguing such intervention would be a "sideshow and a distraction".

Future generations will wonder why it took so long for any court in the land to hear such evidence when considering a coal mine project.

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But Justice Brian Preston didn't just allow the EDO to provide expert evidence of the role greenhouse gas emissions play in driving climate change. He also accepted it as part of the critical reasons to reject the mine. "The decision forms part of what is a growing trend around the world on using litigation to fight climate change," Martijn Wilder, a prominent climate lawyer from Baker & McKenzie, says. "While early on some of this litigation was not successful, increasingly it is."

Moreover, decisions like Justice Preston's also reflect the fact that "courts unlike some of our political representatives will accept sound scientific evidence on the causes of climate change," Wilder adds. "It will make it harder for courts to ignore it."

The Minerals Council of NSW was quick to dismiss Friday's judgment as in no way a "landmark case", and the Berejiklian government said court decisions were "made on a case-by-case basis".

But the climate litigation door is now ajar and it will be harder for future cases to ignore the climate impacts of digging up or drilling for fossil fuels - even if somebody other than Australians burn them.