Episode 49 – Holding Polluters to Account – Climate Trials

In this episode, 39 Essex Chambers’ barristers Camilla ter Haar and Ruth Keating are joined by Dr. Noah Walker-Crawford, a Research Fellow at LSE specialising in the socio-legal dimensions of climate litigation and attribution science. He is the author of The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet. Noah brings an insider perspective on the case of Saúl Luciano Lliuya, the Peruvian farmer who brought a groundbreaking case against German energy giant RWE.

Key takeaways from the episode include:

• Deflection: Fossil fuel companies have largely abandoned outright climate denial in court, shifting instead to deflecting responsibility by framing emissions as an inevitable, collective byproduct of societal energy demand.
• Neighborliness: To counter the defence that climate change is a global political issue, cases leverage civil legal concepts like ‘neighborliness’ to ground significant transnational corporate impacts in direct, local duties of care owed to affected communities.
• Causation: Advancing climate attribution science is increasingly able to tie specific corporate emission footprints directly to localised environmental harms.