Climate Attribution Litigation: Holding Emitters Accountable

This is the absence of accountability between massive carbon emissions by industrial activities and the reported climate damage, which is one of the most impactful governance failures of modern times. Although the scientific evidence of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to a few identifiable producers of fossil fuels, the so-called carbon majors have theoretically immature and practically inadequate legal mechanisms through which the afflicted communities could seek redress, and have been fragmented. The article fills a key theoretical gap in the current body of literature: the literature on attribution science, climate litigation, corporate accountability, and climate governance has proceeded to develop individually, but no single theoretical model has ever brought together these four strands into a consistent accountability structure of emitter accountability. This article creates such a framework by relying on a systematic conceptual review of peer-reviewed scholarship in environmental law, climate science, governance theory, and tort doctrine. It is theorized that, when incorporated with the changing legal standards in causation and corporate knowledge-liability theory and climate governance theory, climate attribution science facilitates the creation of a plausible and analytically sound attribution chain between large emitters and reported climate damage and actionable claims to remedy. The article connotes four conceptual findings: causal-legal accountability chain; the typology of legal barriers and the theoretical resolutions; the nexus of corporate knowledge-deception-liability; and the reparative architecture in loss and damage with legal redress. These results are pulled together into a coherent and multi-strand theoretical model of emitter accountability arranged into four analytically separate strands of scientific accountability based on attribution, legal accountability based on tort and human rights, moral accountability based on the knowledge-deception nexus, and governance accountability based on litigation as a regulatory tool. With the rising development of attribution science and increasing judicial faith in probabilistic causal evidence, attribution litigation targeting climate change has an opportunity to rapidly become not just a fringe enforcement tool, but a structural-level implementative instrument of climate accountability with implications to both legal science and climate justice movement, and global regulation design.