Climate change attribution and litigation: induction of climate risk in the global financial system (CASE)

In his 2003 Nature commentary, Myles Allen posed the question: "will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?" (Allen, 2003). During the intervening decade-and-a-half, over 850 court cases have been brought for which climate change is a relevant factor (Nachmany et al., 2018), supported by advances in the science of climate change attribution (Ekwurzel et al., 2017; Otto et al., 2017; Marjanac and Patton, 2018; Harrington and Otto, 2019). Discussion of climate change litigation in the academic literature has hitherto focused primarily on its potential as a tool for delivering restorative justice to those affected by climate change impacts (Allen and Lord, 2004; Thornton and Covington, 2016). By contrast, investigation of the full causal chain of attributing climate change impacts to emitters, the potential for successful climate change litigation (Franta, 2017), and the resultant consequences for the global financial system remains a notable gap in the literature. In a recent review of academic research on the topic, the authors call for more scientific and economic perspectives on climate change litigation and its impacts: a call which this DPhil will answer (Setzer and Vanhala, 2019).
My research will examine the potential of climate litigation to act as a sensitive intervention point (SIP) in the transition to a post-carbon society (Farmer et al., 2019). Accordingly, future legal judgements could initiate a series of positive feedbacks encompassing public policy, corporate disclosure requirements, investor awareness of climate-related financial risk and financial repercussions for emitting firms, providing a perturbation of the financial system needed to initiate rapid decarbonisation. A complete understanding of how this SIP may be triggered and the likely consequences thereof requires the exploration of its full, multidisciplinary causal chain. This includes further development of scientific attribution methodologies (e.g. Hannart et al., 2016) to allow causality to be expressed in legal terms, increasing its relevance and providing formal causation before the courts, and anticipating the consequences of legal judgements for the financial system. Supported by an understanding of historic examples such as tobacco and asbestos litigation, complex system modelling can project the evolution of the consequences of triggering this SIP for the global financial system.