Climate Litigation Has a Big Evidence Gap
https://eos.org/articles/climate-litigation-has-a-big-evidence-gap
Excerpt: Climate change has found its way into courtrooms around the world more and more often in recent years: Plaintiffs have brought more than 1,500 cases of climate litigation since 1986, and an increasing number of cases are filed each year. ... However, climate litigation has failed more often than not to hold greenhouse gas emitters accountable for climate-related impacts like flooding and damage from drought or wildfires. ...The researchers examined 73 cases across 14 jurisdictions worldwide that made a claim that a defendant’s emissions negatively impacted the plaintiffs. In those cases, courts did not dispute the general idea that greenhouse gases cause climate change. “What was more of a challenge,” Stuart-Smith said, “was establishing a causal relationship between greenhouse gas emissions of an individual entity…and specific impacts on a specific location.” Making that causal connection is key for the success of climate litigation, he said, and is the goal of climate attribution science, or science that quantifies the extent to which climate change alters an event. ...However, 73% of the cases the team examined did not bring forward peer-reviewed climate attribution science as evidence....