IPCC Report presents rallying call for lawyers, game changer for climate lawsuits- University of Oxford Climate Scientist

Aug 13, 2021 News

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Kaieteur News – For years, plaintiffs around the world have sought to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their contributions to climate change — often seeking compensation for damages like economic losses from floods or wildfires. But these cases have been stymied by a lack of causal evidence. That is, plaintiffs have struggled to prove in the courtroom that they have suffered economic damages due to the activities of the oil and gas companies they are litigating. This may soon change due to a recently released landmark report on climate change.

According to climate change news website, Grist, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, released on Monday, contained some of the group’s strongest language yet affirming the link between human activity and global warming. Humans have “unequivocally” warmed the planet, the IPCC report said, making heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires more extreme in the process.
The specific field of science that examines the connection between extreme weather events and human activity is called “climate change attribution.” According to the IPCC, scientists have gotten much better at this over the past decade, and can now more rigorously pin extreme heat, heavy precipitation, dry spells, and hurricanes on big carbon emitters.
This finding could have big implications for lawsuits seeking to hold polluters accountable for disaster damages. Rupert Stuart-Smith, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford said that “the IPCC report should be a sort of rallying call to lawyers to ensure that they are making use of the most up-to-date developments in climate science.”
Take, for example, the 2008 case of Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp., in which Native Alaskans sued ExxonMobil and 23 other energy giants for damages associated with coastal erosion. The plaintiffs said the erosion had been exacerbated by climate change. But the U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed the villagers’ case, citing a dearth of causal evidence. “It is not plausible to state which emissions — emitted by whom … and at what point in the world — ‘caused’ Plaintiffs’ alleged global-warming related injuries,” the court ruled.
According to Stuart-Smith, however, that’s no longer true. Thanks to the rapidly advancing field of attribution science, researchers now have the tools needed to attribute natural disasters to human-induced climate change, and to determine individual companies’ contributions to them.
“This kind of scientific evidence exists, the methods are robust, and they’re widely accepted in the scientific community,” Stuart-Smith said.
But that evidence isn’t yet being used in the majority of climate-related lawsuits. According to a paper Stuart-Smith co-published in Nature Climate Change this June, plaintiffs tend to claim that they have been damaged by oil and gas companies’ contributions to climate change without citing strong enough evidence: Nearly three-quarters of the 73 cases analysed in the study didn’t refer to any peer-reviewed attribution studies at all. Those that did incorporate attribution science tended to do so in a general way, drawing broad links between emissions and climate change impacts, rather than making a causal link to specific damages sustained by the plaintiff.
To build a better legal case in climate lawsuits, Stuart-Smith said, plaintiffs must first establish the contribution of an individual emitter to climate change using what’s known as source attribution. In other words, “How much has an individual fossil fuel company contributed to climate change?” Stuart-Smith explained. That calculation may be easier than it sounds, considering there is already a robust and well-used body of literature on the topic. Much of the field builds on seminal research from the Climate Accountability Institute, which in 2014 published a paper quantifying the top fossil fuel companies’ contribution to global warming.
The report has far reaching implications for currently pending Climate change lawsuits and can aid plaintiffs in their battle against the corporate giants that they face. A point of particular note for Guyana should be how the report will influence the Guyanese filed court challenge to ExxonMobil’s offshore oil exploration in Guyana.
On May 21, 2021, two Guyanese citizens filed suit alleging that Guyana violated their constitutional rights by approving oil exploration licences to an ExxonMobil-led group. The plaintiffs are Quadad de Freitas, an Indigenous youth, and Dr. Troy Thomas, a scientist and university lecturer. According to court documents, the plaintiffs allege that the constitutional rights to a healthy environment, sustainable development, and the rights of future generations require the government to stop issuing licences to activities that will exacerbate climate change. They point to evidence that the licences could lead to billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions, which would imperil the coastal nation.
Previously, various climate change proponents such as international lawyer Melinda Janki had attempted to elaborate on some form of climate change attribution, linking ExxonMobil’s activities to potentially devastating effects, however, in the wake of the IPCC’s report, the hope is that more direct concrete evidence can be proffered in the case against the oil Giant.

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