Lliuya v. RWE trial “will kickstart a wave of climate litigation”, new book claims

The verdict in the landmark Lliuya v. RWE trial is likely to lead to more climate litigation against fossil fuel corporations, according to a new book by Dr Noah Walker-Crawford of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which is published today (30 March 2026) by Duke University Press. 

In May 2025, a German court ruled for the first time anywhere in the world that major corporate emitters can, in principle, be held legally liable for their contribution to harm caused by climate change. 

The ‘Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet’ tells the inside story of how the landmarkLliuya built its case against RWE over a decade – from its origins in a remote Peruvian Andean village to the historic verdict. 

The book is based on Noah Walker-Crawford’s decade-long involvement in the case, providing the first detailed account of how the legal strategy was developed and how scientific evidence was assembled and translated into legal arguments.  

The book points out that the case on behalf of Saúl Luciano Lliuya seemed outlandish to some at the time: “a small-scale farmer from a Quechua-speaking community, taking the German energy giant RWE to court over its contribution to climate change impacts in the Andes.” But after a decade of work, Lliuya’s team were able to secure a landmark verdict.  

Walker-Crawford, while working for the German NGO Germanwatch, brought a small team in December 2014 to meet Lliuya in the Peruvian Andes after COP20, that year’s United Nations climate change summit, in Lima. He acted as interpreter at that first meeting and went on to serve as coordinator between the German legal team and the farmer Lliuya, as a farmer’s scientific adviser on the case, and as an ethnographic researcher studying the lawsuit for his PhD and subsequent academic work.  

The book provides the first in-depth account of the arguments put forward by RWE, as the defendant, alongside the plaintiff’s, offering a more complete picture than previously available of how corporate climate litigation plays out in practice. Dr Walker-Crawford argues in the book that “RWE’s lawyers did not deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, or that the company’s emissions have contributed to global warming.”           

RWE’s strategies instead included questioning whether climate models and attribution science meet legal standards of proof, attacking the credibility of individual climate scientists by citing their social media posts, and funding supportive research that was published in academic journals without adequate disclosure of the company’s involvement.  

Dr Noah Walker-Crawford, Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said:   

“One lawsuit will not save the climate, but a critical mass of cases may push the needle in the right direction.  

“The Lliuya v. RWE trial verdict was a huge victory and will likely kickstart a wave of legal action.  

“Climate litigation has become one of the most important tools for addressing climate change, but very few people understand how it works in practice.  

“This book opens that up – for lawyers on all sides of these cases, for scientists whose research is being used as evidence, for policy makers watching the legal landscape shift, and for anyone who wants to understand what climate justice looks like when it moves from a slogan to a courtroom.”