The era of untraceable climate damage is over. It’s time to name the polluters and hold them accountable.
Jun 29, Bengaluru: Every flood has a fingerprint. Every wildfire leaves a receipt. Every heatwave writes an invoice.
The problem with the climate crisis is a lack of accountability. Until now. For years, we treated extreme weather like a cosmic accident, something abstract, untraceable, “natural.” But science has caught up. We can now attribute specific climate events to specific corporations, and even tally the economic damage they’ve caused.
Climate change isn’t some slow apocalypse playing out in 2100. It’s right here, in our lungs, our fields, our homes. Still, the most crucial line in this story has gone unwritten: Who is responsible?
The $28 Trillion Invoice
A recent paper in Nature has found that 111 major fossil fuel companies have cost the world $28 trillion in heat-related economic losses.
That’s not a guess. That’s a receipt backed by models, data, and a century of records. These companies aren’t just passive participants in global warming, they’re architects of collapse. The top 5 petroleum companies have added 0.125 ℃ temperature increase since 1920, the paper explains.
| Company | Global mean temperature rise |
| Saudi Aramco | 0.030 ℃ |
| Gazprom | 0.027 ℃ |
| Chevron | 0.025 ℃ |
| ExxonMobil | 0.024 ℃ |
| BP | 0.019 ℃ |
The attribution concludes that each petroleum company’s operations have directly warmed the planet more. More importantly, these companies have cumulatively incurred irreparable economic losses to the tune of $9.39 trillion as of 2020.
| Company | Mean losses [scaled to 2020] |
| Saudi Aramco | $2.05 trillion |
| Gazprom | $2.00 trillion |
| Chevron | $1.98 trillion |
| ExxonMobil | $1.91 trillion |
| BP | $1.45 trillion |
The researchers also argue that the on-ground effects could be much higher because they exclude impacts like average sea-level rise and rainfall extremes. Global heat-related economic losses alone dent the GDP growth rate of the Global South countries by more than 1%.
The economic impacts of these corporations based in the global north are primarily borne by the countries in the global south. It’s like someone lit a fire in the forest that spread and burned down your house on the coast. Except, in this case, the scale is global, and the fire keeps burning.
A 2020 study established that starting from the 1850s, economically developed countries — including the USA, Canada, the UK, and others in Europe — have been the largest emitters of carbon dioxide. Since the emissions are linked to per capita development, the author argued that total emissions till the globe reaches net zero targets should be equally distributed globally. So, the author calculated the emissions for various countries and found that as much as 92% of the excess is from the industrialised nations.
The same calculations showed India had a 34% shortage of carbon emissions till 2015.
So, it’s no surprise that countries in the global north, including the European Union, the UK, and the USA, have a net-zero target of 2050, while China has its eyes on 2060. India has a net-zero target of 2070. This approach is tied to equity: those who start developing later get more time to move away from fossil fuels.
Delivering Justice With Science
A Bloomberg deep dive from 2021 explains how this new field called “extreme event attribution” is helping scientists do what courts haven’t: trace the blame. By analysing climate models, emissions data, and real-world records, researchers can now say things like:
“A South African drought in 2015–2016 was three times likelier because of the lack of rain.”
“Without climate change, the July 2010 heat record would not have occurred.”
Once, that would’ve been speculative. Now, it’s science.
In 1998, India suffered extreme heat waves across northern India, especially in Odisha and Bihar. More than 1700 human lives were lost.
The Nature paper pins down the contribution of the top five emitting companies to the five hottest days of that year, which caused the heatwave, to 0.08 ℃. Because of their emissions, “the heat wave that happened was more intense,” said Christopher Callahan, one of the co-authors.
More specifically, individual companies’ emissions contributed to these losses for India during this heatwave.
| Company | Mean losses to India during the 1998 heatwave [scaled to 2020] |
| Saudi Aramco | $1.18 billion |
| Gazprom | $0.89 billion |
| Chevron | $1.92 billion |
| ExxonMobil | $1.67 billion |
| BP | $1.24 billion |
“Scientifically, yes, we can draw that connection,” said Callahan.
What these numbers do is simple: pinpoint who is responsible, and by how much. It’s time for governments to take them to court, and for courts to hold the historical wrongdoers accountable.
The Courtroom v/s the Carbon Cartel
“Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate? Twenty years after this question was first posed, we argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed.”
— Christopher W. Callahan & Justin S. Mankin (2025),
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08751-3
The case for climate accountability in the courtroom arguably began in the Philippines in 1993 when several children filed a case against the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. They argued that the department had violated their right to a healthy ecology and health by granting timber license agreements to various organisations. The court agreed to the right of present and future generations to a healthy ecology. The ruling became a foundational precedent for rights-based and youth-led climate litigation globally, influencing similar cases in the U.S., Europe, and the Global South. It also reshaped legal discourse around environmental justice, making ecological protection a matter of enforceable human rights rather than mere policy.
In 2015, the Urgenda Foundation and Dutch citizens sued the Dutch government for failing to protect citizens from climate impacts. They employed the “duty of care” argument, which requires that every entity providing a service or selling a product must ensure it does not harm the recipient. The court agreed, mandating the Dutch government to raise its climate ambition.
It was the first time the argument was used in climate justice and has since been used in various litigations. But courts haven’t always favoured the public interest.
Recently, for example, New York City sued Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute for misleading the public about their role in climate change. The city alleged the companies portrayed themselves as climate change leaders while expanding oil production, deceiving the public about the impacts of their fossil fuel products. The court dismissed the case, saying the companies didn’t.
Oil and coal sector corporations have tried to stall international action on climate change since the 1980s. In 1989, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was formed by a coalition of American fossil fuel companies that lobbied hard against climate action.
The GCC succeeded in blocking the US government from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty mandating nation-states to reduce emissions. It sowed the seeds of doubts about climate change via massive public disinformation campaigns before yielding to scientific evidence in 2002.
But the damage is nearly permanent. Al Gore called the GCC “the most serious crime of the post-World War Two era.” There’s still lingering doubt on whether climate change is real and whether it’s human action or natural causes that cause catastrophic climate losses.
The Nature study doesn’t just tell us what happened. It hands us the legal ammunition to do something about it. Until now, climate lawsuits have struggled to stick, not because the damage wasn’t real, but because the link wasn’t traceable. For the first time, we can trace economic loss to specific emitters. We can drag polluters not just into the headlines, but into the dock.
Debdutta Paul 