Climate change attribution and corporate responsibility beyond borders
A claim brought in the UK courts against Shell arguing that the oil giant’s emissions directly led to the strength of Typhoon Odette, which devastated parts of the Philippines in 2021, may have significant implications for both the attribution of liability for transboundary harm and corporate accountability for climate change impacts, argue Catherine Higham, Jameela Joy Reyes and Nicholas Petkov.
Shortly before Christmas 2021, the Philippines was ravaged by Typhoon Odette (international name ‘Rai’). Within 48 hours, what began as a severe tropical storm transformed into a Category 4-equivalent typhoon, sustaining wind speeds of 240 kilometres per hour. Almost one million people had to be evacuated, more than 12,000 people were displaced and 2.1 million homes were damaged.
Four-and-a-half years on from Typhoon Odette, dozens of individuals are making a legal claim against energy giant Shell before the UK courts, seeking to hold the company liable for damages caused by Odette, arguing that the typhoon was made stronger as a result of Shell’s greenhouse gas emissions. The claimants are basing their case on advances in climate attribution science, which they argue show how Shell’s historical emissions have measurably increased the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events like Typhoon Odette. The case is all the pertinent right now as Super Typhoon Bavi recently entered the Philippine Area of Responsibility, having already ravaged other neighbouring countries.
This claim is the first of its kind to be brought before a UK court but it builds on two earlier trends: first, a group of UK cases have grappled with the legal responsibility of UK-domiciled multinationals when their activities – and those of their subsidiaries – cause major human rights and environmental damage to communities outside the UK’s territorial borders. Second, there has been substantial growth in climate litigation, particularly against companies, which builds on advances in climate attribution science. The claimants in the Odette case will face both legal and scientific challenges; but these earlier trends may increase the likelihood that the claim will proceed beyond initial hurdles – so the case may have significant wider implications in relation to attributing liability and corporate accountability.
Responsibility beyond borders: recognising the reality of control
To bring a claim against a UK-based company for damage to communities in other countries, claimants must deal with a series of legal questions before their case can be heard on the facts. These include: whether the UK courts are the right place to hear the claim, whether the UK company is the right defendant to be held responsible, and which law should apply if the case moves forward. Such questions are largely determined by rules of private international law, including the provisions of the Rome II Regulation, as retained in UK Law.
Recent years have seen a series of decisions from the UK courts which recognise the realities of how large multinational companies operate across borders and between legal entities. This line of cases includes the UK Supreme Court’s decision on jurisdiction in Lungowe v. Vedanta Resources plc. This case was filed by more than 2,000 Zambian claimants and concerned the health and environmental impacts affecting communities living near water polluted by a copper mine operated by one of Vedanta’s subsidiaries.
Vedanta argued that the UK court did not have jurisdiction to hear the claim, and that it could not be held liable for the actions of its subsidiary. However, the Supreme Court, in its judgment in 2019, unanimously held that Vedanta could in principle be held responsible because of the level of operational control it maintained over activities at the mine. The case was ultimately settled, but the principles established were confirmed in a subsequent case, Okpabi v. Shell in 2021, a case brought on behalf of more than 40,000 residents of the Niger Delta affected by oil spills and water contamination.
More recently, in November 2025, the UK High Court gave a landmark judgment in a case against mining company BHP brought by victims of the Fundão Dam collapse near Mariana, Brazil. In November 2020, the High Court of England and Wales had declined jurisdiction to hear the case but the decisions was overturned by the Court of Appeal in 2022. In the 2025 decision, the court clarified that BHP, as parent company of the dam operator, was responsible under Brazilian law for the damage caused. In May 2026, BHP was refused permission to appeal the judgment, and the case has now proceeded to questions about the extent of the losses suffered by the claimants and the amount of the damage that the defendants should be required to compensate.
Lost in (legal) translation?
One of the most interesting questions arising in cases like these is which law should be applied. In environmental claims, the Rome II rules mean that claimants are able to rely on the law of the country in which the environmental damage arises, even when the harm is attributable to the actions of a parent company domiciled in the UK and is being heard by the UK court. Campaign materials for the Odette case suggest that the claimants there are likely to seek to reply on Philippine substantive law to make their claim. While this is not the first time that this approach will be central to an environmental proceeding – the Mariana Dam case, for example, was ultimately decided under Brazilian law – it is the first time it will be applied in a climate case.
The Philippine legal system is mixed, combining civil law, common law and customary law, a result of almost 400 years of colonisation by Spain and the USA. It also has a partial implementation of Islamic law (Shari’ah) within the legal framework that is limited solely to personal and family laws for Filipino Muslims. Against this backdrop, the Odette case raises a challenging set of questions as to how a UK court will interpret and apply Philippine substantive law, especially where doctrinal concepts and standards of liability might align with established English tort principles yet remain distinct from them. It also foregrounds the practical and epistemic challenges of ‘legal translation’ (and not simply literal translation, as Philippine laws are in English), requiring the court to engage deeply with foreign legal sources while maintaining procedural coherence within its own system.
If the case moves beyond the early procedural stage, it will require the UK courts to apply Philippine law to a novel set of issues. This highlights some of the conceptual challenges associated with the concept of choice of laws, not least: what is lost when the first decision on the application of Philippine law to a corporate climate case is decided by judges who are so far removed from the legal and political culture of the Philippines?
There are also practical challenges. To bring a claim in a different country using domestic substantive law typically requires passing a jurisdictional threshold to convince the UK courts that there are sufficient connecting factors to make it appropriate for them to hear the claim. While passing this test adds an additional obstacle for the claimants, a key benefit of bringing the claim in the UK is the likelihood that claimants may find it easier to enforce any judgment ultimately entered in their favour – though of course this not guaranteed. Protracted legal battles over the legitimacy of damages decisions issued by courts in countries of the Global South against multinational corporate defendants have been a feature of past environmental cases.
Attribution science and addressing loss and damage
The Odette case also brings to the UK courts the novel challenge of corporate liability for climate change, raising questions of both legal principle and evidentiary requirements. The claimants in this case argue that Shell is directly responsible for harm caused through the full extent of its global operations and supply chains: this is in contrast to the Lungowe, Okpabi and Mariana cases, in which it was claimed that parent companies had a duty to oversee the conduct of specific subsidiaries in one geographical location that resulted in local pollution and damage.
Central to the Odette claim is attribution science: a rapidly evolving field of climate science that claimants worldwide have relied on to construct causal arguments that link company emissions to specific climate impacts. In Odette, the claimants refer to attribution research that shows extreme rainfall and wind speeds from storms like Typhoon Odette have become more likely and intense as a result of anthropogenic climate change, to which the claimants allege that Shell has contributed significantly.
This is not new to the courts. In fact, courts in other jurisdictions have begun to engage with attribution science in corporate climate litigation, including in cases such as Lliuya v. RWE (heard in Germany), where the Peruvian claimant relied on scientific evidence linking corporate emissions to climate-related harm in his home country. Similar arguments also emerged in the Pakistan Climate Cost Case, demonstrating the capacity of litigants to learn from past cases and deploy the most effective evidence to underpin litigation strategies.
The Odette claim and the use of science must be understood in context – a broader turn in litigation emerging from perceived political failure. With the UN-backed Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage projected to run out of money as early as next year, cases like Odette represent an attempt to secure support for climate-related damage through litigation, where the international political process has failed to deliver. This dynamic also unites Odette with Lungowe, Okpabi and Mariana: in each of these cases, communities in the Global South have borne the cost of harm originating primarily from operations and benefits accrued in the Global North.
Yet a turn to litigation raises structural questions about which losses the law is willing to recognise, with direct implications for the science on which claims depend. Attribution research relies on historical baseline data, and uncertainties are greater if there is less historical baseline data, as is often the case in the Global South. Whether conditioning access to reparations on the availability of such studies is an adequate response to those most affected remains an open and pressing question. The growing numbers of climate court cases around the world highlight the urgency of tackling this problem, but a proper resolution of the issues is likely to require in-depth engagement from both legislators and negotiators.
The authors thank Harj Narulla at Doughty Street Chambers for his helpful review of this commentary.
About this commentary series
This commentary is part of a series coordinated by the Grantham Research Institute’s climate law and governance team exploring corporate climate litigation and the boundaries and interactions between science, the law and policy. The series contains contributions from legal scholars, economists and other social scientists, reviewed by practising lawyers. It is co-hosted with the Global School of Sustainability at LSE.