Climate change and its impacts cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage each year. As the scale of losses increases, so too will the number of legal cases apportioning blame to those most responsible. There have already been over one thousand litigation cases related to climate change, a number that is expected to rise dramatically as climate change continues, and legislation and regulations increase. However, there is another factor driving the number of legal cases: advances in climate science and the tools to interpret it.

When it comes to litigation, it is important to be able to identify some sort of loss, and also attribute that loss to the actions, or non-actions, of a legal entity. In the past, it has been difficult to apportion blame for climate change impacts to individual companies or governments. It has also been difficult to argue that their failure to act to build resilience to climate change constitutes negligence that has led to a specific loss. However, as the science of climate change advances, a new suite of tools is changing all of this.

In this interview, we speak with Marcella Scarpellini, a lawyer and legal analyst at right. based on science, a climate metrics and data services provider that is helping companies manage the financial risk of climate change. The company has developed its X-Degree Compatibility ("XDC") tool, a science-based climate metric that estimates how many °C the Earth would warm by 2050 if all companies were to operate as emissions-intensively as the company under consideration. 

The XDC tool can be used by companies, investors, governments or others who want to better understand their contribution to climate change, and gauge how to best respond. It is also useful for lawyers to hold companies and governments to account, showing whether they are contributing to a wold of 1.5˚C and in line with the Paris Agreement or a much hotter world where climate damages will be significantly higher.

“For corporates [climate change] is going to be big,” Marcella said, “as climate change increases the search for culprits is also going to increase… we know that there is causality between emissions and climate change, so people are going to start pointing fingers. I think for companies it will be in the forms of fines and penalties, of course, litigation, and even class action damages are expected.”

Climate and law: Marcela Scarpellini: right. based on science

Climate change is increasingly being understood as an issue of financial risk to corporates. This has brought the issue to the attention of corporate lawyers like Sarah Barker, Special Counsel and Head of Climate Risk Governance at MinterEllison, the largest commercial law firm in the Asia Pacific. For over six years, Sarah has been a leading voice in the field of climate risk governance for business. 

As climate change is now widely accepted as a financial risk issue, it necessarily enlivens established legal frameworks around corporate management and disclosure of climate risk. In this Acclimatise Conversation on Climate Change Adaptation, Sarah Barker talks us through why it is so important, from a legal perspective, for businesses to govern for the financial risks associated with climate change.

Climate and law: Sarah Barker, Special Counsel and Head of Climate Risk Governance at MinterEllison

In this Acclimatise Conversation on Climate Change Adaptation, we speak with Clyde & Co lawyers Wynne Lawrence and Nigel Brook, about the emerging field of climate liability risk and the pioneering work that the firm is doing to advise its clients about how to respond.

In September 2015 the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, gave his seminal 'Tragedy of the Horizon's' speech, to the insurance market at Lloyd's of London. In it, he highlighted the severe threats posed by climate change to the financial system and warned the problem risked being ignored because of institutional near-sightedness.

"The classic problem in environmental economics is the 'tragedy of the commons'... but climate change is a tragedy of the horizon," Carney said, "We don't need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors. It will impose costs on future generations that the current one has little direct incentive to fix."

The horizon for monetary policy goes out just a couple of years, and financial stability only about a decade. Carney went on to outline the three main ways in which climate change can affect financial stability: 1 -Physical risks like storms and floods, 2 - transition risks associated with the transition to a low carbon economy and finally, 3 - liability risks, legal claims by those suffering losses due to climate change. 

Much of the attention since then has been on the first two categories, the physical and transition risks, but a growing number of lawyers and pioneering legal firms are drawing attention to the third category, the liability risks. 

Their work has been reinforced by a growing number of international regulations and national laws and a growing body of case law. One such firm is Clyde & Co, a global firm that focusses on five key sectors: insurance, energy, trade and commodities, infrastructure and transport. The firm soon realised that climate change posed risks to all of these sectors, and so they set up a cross-disciplinary team on climate resilience. Listen to the full podcast to learn more.

Climate & Law: Wynne Lawrence and Nigel Brook: Clyde & Co

Financial institutions around the world are beginning to wake up to the reality that climate change will have material impacts on their loan and investment portfolios. Since the Financial Stability Board's Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) released its recommendations in 2017, banks and other financial institutions have been working to understand how climate risks impact their businesses. Mich of the focus of these efforts has been in the EU and North America, however trail-blazing banks in other parts of the world are also taking action. 

In this conversation on climate change adaptation, we speak with Chaitanya Kommukuri, Yes Bank's Vice President of Climate Strategy and Responsible Banking, to learn about the steps it is taking to understand, manage and respond to climate risk.

Climate & banking: Chaitanya Kommukuri, Yes Bank.

In this podcast, we hear from Dr Louise Arnal, a Flood Forecast Product Designer at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on the advancements that have been made in flood prediction and how it can help policy makers when making decisions about adaptation and resilience measures.

@ArnalLouise
@ECMWF

Flood Prediction with Dr Louise Arnal

Adaptation and Water Security with Dr Catherine Grasham & Dr Ellen Dyer

Making research work for others with Dr Catherine Grasham and Alice Chautard

Knowing how to talk about climate change impacts and the actions taken to curb it isn’t always easy. One of the first things communications specialists will say is that you need to know your audience. Recent research conducted in the UK in November 2019 show that there has been a massive shift in the public’s perceptions about climate change. Climate change came second only to Brexit when respondents were asked which were the main issues that the country would face in the next 20 years. Whilst this research was conducted before COVID-19 outbreaks were reported (and this podcast was recorded just before the UK had heightened restrictions) the learnings are still valuable for thinking about how we now talk about climate change.  With heightened public awareness and concern about action on climate change, narratives about adaptation and resilience need to be carefully formed to ensure that engagement remains high, and that action is taken and sustained.

In this podcast episode, we speak to Dr Adam Corner from Climate Outreach to find out more about this recent research project and the principles for engagement that they have derived from it. Climate Outreach are a team of social scientists and communication specialists working to increase public engagement with climate change. They work at the interface of research and practice and help organisations to communicate climate change in ways that resonate with the values of their audiences

Communicating Climate Risk and Adaptation With Dr Adam Corner

The cumulative costs of achieving the 1.5˚C temperature target outlined in the Paris agreement could be as high as 100 trillion US dollars, a new study has found. However, researchers found that there was a wide range of uncertainty in the forecasts with the low-end estimate being 10 trillion US dollars.

In this Conversation on Climate Change Adaptation, we speak to the study's lead author, Professor Detlef Van Vuuren, who works at PPL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, and lectures at Utrecht University.

Since the world's governments committed to reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs) sufficiently to limit global warming to 1.5˚C or at least "well below" 2˚C by the end of the century in the Paris Agreement, attention has increasingly turned to how to achieve such a mammoth task.

As with COVID-19, the costs of inaction are unimaginable, but the dramatic cuts in GHG emissions necessary to hit the targets will require an unprecedented transformation of the global economy. Such changes will inevitably come with a hefty price tag. Calculating what this is is no easy task, the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, set out to do just that. It provides discounted cumulative cost estimates for hitting the 2˚C and 1.5˚C temperature targets.

The researchers found that these costs had a wide range of uncertainty stemming from both the physical climate system and also the socio-economic pathways to action.

Read the research here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0732-1

How much will it cost to meet the Paris temperature goals? With Professor Detlef Van Vuuren

One-on-one conversations with the leading thinkers and doers in climate change adaptation and resilience.

A podcast by climate change practitioners for climate change practitioners, we speak to world-experts to understand the latest best practices and explore the risks and opportunities that climate change brings. 

These podcasts are brought to you by the Acclimatise: www.acclimatise.uk.com. Acclimatise is a leading consulting firm providing expertise in climate change adaptation and risk management.

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