RWE's Weisweiler power station in Eschweiler, Germany. Legal rulings may provide grounds for cases against other companies for climate damages. Photo: Elke Wetzig / Wikimedia
Key points
- A new book details how a landmark German court verdict in a case against energy company RWE established the principle of corporate climate liability, ruling that corporate polluters can be held legally responsible for their contribution to climate harm, setting a global precedent.
- The case successfully established causal links between RWE’s emissions and specific climate risks, dismissing traditional “drop in the ocean” corporate defences which suggest an individual company’s emissions are relatively insignificant.
- Nicholas Walker-Crawford, the book’s author, says the ruling will persuade others to pursue similar climate litigation against large companies, increasing pressure on financial markets to transition away from fossil fuels.
The verdict in a landmark German trial that held energy company RWE accountable for climate damages in Peru will embolden other plaintiffs to bring similar cases against big corporations, according to a new book.
“The court established the principle of corporate climate liability with this verdict,” said Noah Walker-Crawford from the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics. “If we don’t come up with adequate solutions there are going to be more and more cases.”
Last May, a German court ruled that major corporate polluters like RWE can, in principle, be held legally liable for their contribution to harm caused by climate change, even though it dismissed the plaintiff’s individual claim for damages.
The case was brought by Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a small-scale farmer from the Peruvian Andes, who argued that climate change meant there was an imminent threat of a glacial lake flooding his property. The court ruled that the risk was not high enough to hold RWE liable for Lliuya’s property.
Walker-Crawford helped initiate the case in 2014 and went on to study the lawsuit as an anthropologist and while working for the nonprofit Germanwatch, which supported the case. His book – The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet – details how the legal strategy was developed and how scientific evidence was assembled and translated into legal arguments.
The case drew on German law that is usually applied in conflicts between neighbours. “Climate change makes us all neighbors of some sort and that means there’s certain responsibilities we’ve had toward one another,” he said.
Speaking to Green Central Banking, Walker-Crawford said: “Climate change isn’t something that courts have been dealing with for very long at this point. Courts are still making sense of all of this. That’s why this verdict is likely to be influential going forward as one of the first cases to really deal with this issue.”
Similar cases have been brought in the UK against oil major Shell by victims of a typhoon in the Philippines, in Switzerland by Indonesian fishers against cement company Holcim, and in Germany by farmers from Pakistan against RWE and Heidelberg Materials. A Dutch court has also ruled that Shell is legally responsible for its carbon emissions.
“These sorts of cases put pressure on financial markets to move away from fossil fuels, from dirty forms of energy production, and this ultimately puts pressure on political processes,” Walker-Crawford said.
Law firm Paul Hastings said the RWE ruling has significant implications for oil and gas companies with operations or registered entities in Germany, or those subject to German law via their supply chains or corporate structure.
The law firm noted that the German court dismissed traditional corporate defenses that have historically shielded oil and gas companies from climate liability including the “drop in the ocean” argument about the relative insignificance of one company’s emissions.
It also accepted that climate science can be used to establish causal links between a specific company’s emissions and concrete climate-related risks, also called “attribution science”.
Walker-Crawford’s book documents RWE’s defence strategies including 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 academic research that was published without adequate disclosure of the company’s involvement.
“As the science is advancing, that’s providing a stronger basis for these sorts of cases,” Walker-Crawford said.
However, legal action cannot stop the climate crisis, he noted.
“We have so much climate litigation in the world because people aren’t satisfied with what’s happening at a political level internationally, nationally, locally,” he said.
“Litigation is really in some sense a climate governance gap filler,” he said. “I don’t think the problem is going to be solved through every small scale farmer bringing a lawsuit against a big company. Really this does need political solutions, ideally at a global level.”
This page was last updated May 28, 2026
Written by
Emma Thomasson is a British journalist, consultant and trainer based in Berlin. She is an expert in economics, politics, business and technology. She previously worked for Reuters as a correspondent and bureau chief in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, South Africa and the UK.
