When climate science enters the courtroom

Can a farmer in the Peruvian Andes hold a German energy company responsible for the glacier melting above his home? In 2015 Saúl Luciano Lliuya sued RWE, Germany’s largest electricity producer, for 0.47 per cent of the cost of protecting his town from a swollen glacial lake.

Drawing on his book, The Climate Trial, Dr Noah Walker-Crawford follows the case from Peru to a courtroom in Germany. He asks what it means to treat climate change as a matter between neighbours, and what happens when climate science is asked to meet a court’s standards of proof.

Dr Noah Walker-Crawford is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. His research examines how climate science becomes legal evidence, and he followed the Lliuya v RWE case for a decade. His book, The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet, is published by Duke University Press.

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