Today’s science is tomorrow’s litigation
Fast-moving developments in attribution science could see new types of litigation cases emerge.
“The science that’s being done now is essentially going to be the basis of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow’s cases,” said Dr Walker-Crawford.
At Imperial’s Grantham Institute, researchers are working to develop methods for rapid attribution studies that seek to pinpoint the extent to which climate change is responsible for damages caused by any given extreme event – a field of research which could eventually provide new evidence to demand the world’s biggest polluters pay for the impacts attributable to human activities.
The main purpose is to challenge the social license of these companies [to operate], to show that the model of producing energy in ways that result in emissions is just a bad idea.
In the US, researchers have developed a framework for climate litigation, which they say allows plaintiffs to quantify the economic damages attributable to extreme heat that individual fossil fuel companies are responsible for in a single causal chain.
“Drawing quantitative linkages between individual emitters and particularised harms is now feasible, making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims,” researchers wrote in a study published in Nature.
Others cases have started to focus on polluters’ future climate impacts.
In one such case four inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Pari are suing the Swiss cement giant Holcim based on its past, current and expected future emissions. They are demanding compensation for climate-related damages on Pari, a financial contribution for adaptation measures to protect themselves against future impacts, and argue that Holcim should reduce its emissions.
However, cases in which a citizen or a group of people sue a single polluter for a fraction of the costs of specific climate damages remain “insufficient” to deliver the scale of change that is needed, argues Dr Setzer.
“These cases create pressure, they push the boundaries, but they are never going to be close to the kind of solution [that is needed],” she said.
But if a region or a city like Dakar in Senegal brought a case demanding millions of dollars to improve adaptation measures, for example, that could make a bigger difference, she argued.
Ultimately, “the main purpose is to challenge the social license of these companies [to operate], to show that the model of producing energy in ways that result in emissions is just a bad idea”. Those, she said, are the cases that give her hope.
