Climate change | National News

Climate change is one of the most universal and viscerally debated threats to global life today. The degradation of the environment and atmosphere is distinctly human-made, yet the vast scale of that degradation, as well as the continued reliance on fossil fuels and other pollutants, makes it difficult to hold root perpetrators accountable.

Lawsuits filed by individuals against corporations and government entities in the U.S. for negligence or environmentally harmful behaviors have historically failed. However, questions of liability have become more present in policy discussions during the past decade, as the international community has started setting long-term climate change goals, and the impacts of climate change become increasingly devastating—and expensive. But creating environmental policy around liability is far from straightforward.

Much of the challenge of defining liability for climate change is that it is almost scientifically impossible to prove that one party’s actions or negligence resulted in the specific effects felt by another party. Furthermore, many high-emissions corporations use their enormous lobbying power to influence policymaking in ways that protect their financial interests by avoiding liability.

The 2015 Paris Agreement was one of the first major climate change treaties to integrate the idea of loss and damage, or the destruction resulting from climate change and the policies meant to address this damage. Climate-vulnerable nations in particular have sought more concrete loss-and-damage policies in order to hold major polluters accountable and to seek financial redress for anything from damaged infrastructure to deaths from extreme weather.

At the 2022 COP27 global conference, a decision was made to create an operational loss and damage fund, which would assist more vulnerable nations with covering the damages induced by climate change. However, decisions about which countries will pay into the fund, as well as more specific policies about liability, have not yet been made.