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Dozens of survivors of a “super typhoon” that struck the Philippines are suing fossil fuels giant Shell for its role in causing the climate emergency in a landmark lawsuit.
As reported by The Guardian, 66 victims of Typhoon Rai, a 2021 storm that killed more than 400 people and left millions more displaced, filed a lawsuit in the United Kingdom on Wednesday demanding that Shell provide them with financial compensation for their losses.
The Guardian noted that this is the first-ever civil complaint “to directly link polluting companies to deaths and personal injuries that have already happened in the Global South,” as most other lawsuits against fossil fuel companies have been focused on potential future risks.
In the US earlier this year, a woman named Misti Leon sued several fossil fuel giants, arguing they were liable for the death of her mother, who died in an extreme heatwave in the Pacific Northwest in 2021.
The attorneys representing the victims in the Philippines case have invited Shell to respond to their allegations, and said they will file the case with the UK High Court by the end of the year if the two parties do not come to an agreement.
The lawsuit centers on Philippine laws stating that citizens have the right to a healthy environment, and it cites leaked internal documents from Shell that suggest it possessed full knowledge about the negative impact its activities are having on the climate.
Greg Lascelles, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said the fact that Shell continued to aggressively expand its fossil fuel extraction operations “knowing the harm they would cause, coupled with deliberately misinforming the public, can be considered acting contrary to certain provisions of Filipino law.”
A spokesperson for Shell told The Guardian that it is not fair to blame their company exclusively for the global climate emergency.
“The suggestion that Shell had unique knowledge about climate change is simply not true,” they said. “The issue of climate change and how to tackle it has been part of public discussion and scientific research for decades.”
One 1988 document from Shell cautioned that “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation,” while another projected that “catastrophic weather events” could eventually trigger lawsuits against governments and oil companies.
“After all, two successive [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports since 1995 have reinforced the human connection to climate change,” wrote Shell scenario planners.
Although the lawsuit against Shell is the first to directly link fossil fuel companies to recent climate disasters in the Global South, Climate Home News noted in a Thursday report that many legal experts believe that a ruling earlier this year from a court in Germany “confirmed that climate science can establish legal liability for damage caused by emissions.”
Specifically, the court this past May found that companies can be held liable for climate damages, although it dismissed a specific claim from a Peruvian farmer who had sued German energy company RWE for allegedly putting his home at risk of floods due to melting glaciers.
As The Guardian reported at the time, the court ruled that polluters “must bear the costs in proportion to their share of … emissions” if they fail to take “preventative measures” to reduce environmental destruction.
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