Big oil faces a rising number of climate-focused lawsuits, report finds

The authors of the analysis found 86 cases have been filed and 40 are currently pending. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Big oil is facing a soaring number of climate-focused lawsuits, a new analysis has found. It’s a sign that more communities are demanding accountability for the industry’s contributions to the climate crisis.

For the report, published on Thursday, Oil Change International and the climate research organization Zero Carbon Analytics pulled data from a Columbia University database, focusing on cases in which the world’s 25 largest fossil fuel producers were named as defendants.

The number of cases filed against those companies globally each year has nearly tripled since 2015 – the year the UN Paris climate agreement was signed – with 86 cases filed and 40 currently pending, the authors found.

“No major oil and gas company is pledging to do the bare minimum to prevent climate chaos, so communities are taking them to court,” said David Tong, a campaign manager at the research and advocacy group Oil Change International, who worked on the report.

The suits were filed by cities, states and other government organizations, as well as environmental groups, Indigenous tribes and individuals. Fifty were filed in US courts, while 24 were filed in European countries, five in Australia and four in Nigeria.

The largest growth in litigation was in complaints demanding compensation for climate damages, which account for 38% of cases, the authors found. Thirty-three such lawsuits have been filed since 2015, 30 of which were brought since 2017. A key reason for the increase in these cases is that “the science has just gotten a lot better”, Noah Walker-Crawford, a research fellow at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Institute, said on a Tuesday press call.

Attribution science allows scientists to “link specific extreme weather events to climate change with greater accuracy”, and also quantify the climate impacts attributable to specific fossil fuel companies’ emissions, explained Walker-Crawford, who did not work on the report.

No fossil fuel company has yet been forced to pay climate damages, but the potential liabilities are massive, with previous reports estimating the sector’s largest polluters are responsible for trillions of dollars in lost homes, livelihoods and infrastructure.

The climate damage case that has progressed the farthest was brought by a Peruvian farmer in 2015 against energy giant RWE, which he accuses of contributing to climate impacts that are threatening his Andean home. In an unprecedented move in 2022, judges from Germany visited Peru to determine the level of damage caused by RWE, which is also Europe’s largest emitter. RWE did not respond to a request for comment.

In the US, the lawsuits seeking climate damages also accuse defendants of intentionally sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of the planet-heating impacts of their products.

The report’s authors documented an increase in other kinds of climate lawsuits, including challenges to allegedly misleading advertising. Such suits today make up 16% of all climate complaints against oil majors and are a “are a winning legal tactic”, the authors wrote. Nine cases have concluded, of which judges ruled in favor of the defendant in only one.

About 12% of climate lawsuits in the analysis were brought against fossil fuel companies over their failure to implement emissions reduction plans that align with the Paris climate accord. A landmark 2021 ruling wherein a Dutch court ordered Shell to cut its emissions by 45% by 2030 came in response to one such lawsuit. Shell declined to comment.

Ryan Meyers, senior vice-president at the fossil fuel lobby group American Petroleum Institute said the study described an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers”, and called the efforts “nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of taxpayer resources”.

New kinds of climate litigation are also emerging. This year, victims of climate disasters and NGOs filed the world’s first-ever criminal climate lawsuit in France against the CEO and directors of the French oil company TotalEnergies; it alleges the defendants have contributed to the deaths of victims of climate-fueled climate disasters. TotalEnergies did not respond to a request for comment.

The analysis does not account for all climate litigation filed worldwide. Other complaints target companies working in other parts of the fossil fuel supply chain, such as pipeline companies, and still others challenge governments for their pro-fossil fuel policies.

Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, who did not work on the analysis, said that although the fossil fuel industry faces a “formidable number of cases”, “none of them have broken through” except some focused on advertising. But he added that the coming years “may bring some important and possibly decisive developments in this campaign”, and that new legal theories are in development.

These lawsuits “will not solve the climate crisis alone”, said Tong of Oil Change International, but they can be an important vehicle to hold polluters accountable.

“The growing number of lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations underlines how their historic and continued role in driving and profiting from climate change is catching up to them,” he said.