(CN) — A regional high court in Germany has invited a Peruvian farmer to bring a damage claim from 6,600 miles away. He blames RWE, one of Germany’s largest power companies, for contributing to global warming and causing a glacier above his home in the Andes to dangerously melt.
In London, some of the world’s biggest corporations — and biggest polluters — are being asked to appear in a few days before a human rights commission from 6,400 miles away — the Philippines. The commission is investigating whether climate change made the deadly Typhoon Yolanda in 2013 even more catastrophic.
Legal experts say these are crucial cases in a new legal assault: People around the world are bringing claims, sharpened by advances in science, against the world’s biggest corporate polluters.
The lawsuits aim to make companies pay for the destruction caused by a warming planet and force them to cut their carbon emissions.
Jessica Wentz, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said the increase in lawsuits against fossil fuel companies and carbon dioxide emitters is a response to “the growing urgency of the climate change problem and the inadequacy of government responses.”
Parallel to this strategic litigation is a wave of legal action against national governments to force them to reduce carbon emissions.
As of today, no one has successfully sued a private company for causing climate change — though they’ve tried. But some legal analysts think the pendulum may be shifting.
“A lot of it has to do with science, how science has evolved,” Joana Setzer said in a telephone interview with Courthouse News. She is a law researcher at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
In a recent analysis in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, she and her colleagues said new legal challenges “are by no means doomed to failure” because they draw upon “the existence of a robust scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.”
In particular, Setzer said they are buttressed by research that breaks down, in minute detail and down to fractions, how much of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions were emitted by each company.
In the case of RWE, that would be 0.47 percent, according to the 2015 lawsuit brought by Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian farmer. He is backed by Germanwatch, a German environmental group.
The lawsuit relies on a much-discussed 2013 study by Richard Heede, a climate change researcher and head of the Climate Accountability Institute in Snowmass, Colo.
Heede determined that 63 percent of greenhouse gas emissions between 1854 and 2010 could be traced to 90 entities — the big names in oil and natural gas production, power generation, cement making and coal extraction.
“Headquartered in 43 countries, these entities extract resources from every oil, natural gas, and coal province in the world, and process the fuels into marketable products that are sold to consumers in every nation on Earth,” the study said.
The case out of the Philippines relies on Heede’s study too.
The Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines, an independent constitutional office, is examining whether the so-called “carbon majors” — as the 90 entities are named collectively — should be deemed responsible for climate change. Typhoon Yolanda, also known as Haiyan, killed more than 6,000 people.