Changed topic:
The goal of the poster is to provide climate scientists with an overview of how they and lawyers can work together successfully in climate litigation to help hold governments and companies accountable for their GHG emissions to move towards deep decarbonization.
Guiding questions:
How can climate scientists provide evidence to support climate litigation cases?
How can lawyers use this scientific evidence in a climate litigation cases?
Drawing on literature:
The Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook acknowledges the potential of climate litigation to support social dynamics toward deep decarbonization. It can be used to establish responsibilities for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or compensation of global warming impacts (Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2024).
Attribution science enables a causal relationship to be established between GHG emissions and specific climate-related events. This is a key source of evidence for making causal claims in court (Stuart-Smith et al.).
However, courts struggle to translate this evidence into legal responsibility. The key challenge lies in establishing legal causation. The existing legal framework demands causation that relies on necessity and sufficiency, but this is not applicable in the context of climate change. An emitter is considered a ‘concurrent cause’: while courts acknowledge that it is a major emitter, its contributions are not significant enough among other emitters to be a sufficient or necessary cause (Minnerop & Otto).
Minnerop and Otto therefore suggest broadening this logical causation framework and introduce the concept of sustenance: ‘E is a cause if it will sustain I_S even if w changes.’
In other words: A specific emission (E) is a cause of a specific climate change impact (I_S) if the fraction of climate-related risk attributed to GHG emissions remains the same even when other factors in the climate model (w) are altered (e.g. natural variability or adaptation measures).
Attribution studies can provide fractional risk assignments to specific emitters. The strength of the legal argument then depends on the availability of scientific evidence (which varies for different climate-related events and regions), the fraction of attributable risk for the specific extreme event, and the confidence level attached to it (Minnerop & Otto).
For attribution studies to provide effective evidence in climate litigation cases, there needs to be improved dialogue between the legal and scientific communities. This includes:
Lawyers should be able to request and access attribution evidence that effectively strengthens their legal argument. They must also make the scientific community aware of the types of evidence that are most effective in establishing causation in court.
Scientists should produce authoritative, peer-reviewed evidence and make this knowledge accesible. Further advances in attribution science could strengthen legal arguments (Stuart-Smith et al.).
Sources:
Engels, Anita; Jochem Marotzke; Beate Ratter; Eduardo Gonçalves Gresse; Andrés López-Rivera; Anna Pagnone; Jan Wilkens (eds.); 2024. Hamburg Climate Futures
Outlook 2024. Conditions for Sustainable Climate Change Adaptation. Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). transcript Verlag, Bielefeld.
Minnerop, P., & Otto, F. (2020, January 23). Climate change and causation: Joining law and climate science on the basis of formal logic. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3522519
Stuart-Smith, R., Saad, A., Otto, F., Lisil, G., Lauta, K., Minnerop, P., & Wetzer, T. (2021). Attribution science and litigation: Facilitating effective legal arguments and strategies to manage climate change damages. FILE Foundation.
I also find your topic very suitable and interesting. You chose nice literature to back up your ideas and derive your research questions clearly from that. I look forward to the final poster.
I agree with Lars that it is very nice that you found relevant literature, but it would be nice to see if there are also papers arguing to the contrary. Maybe have another look – if you do not find anything, that absence of literature can make your arguments much stronger!
For the last resource you cite I found a peer-reviewed paper that might help distilling a few of your points more strongly and that, to my understanding, the cited report rests upon: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01086-7 Maybe have a look there.
I also share Lars’ view on making your resources more consistent so that every one follows the same structure in the text and in the references section. The latter should absolutely contain info in main author, year, title, journal, and doi. Finally, some of your paragraphs don’t appear to relate to each other, impeding the reading flow a little bit. I suggest you think a bit more on how to connect paragraphs to tell one consistent story.
The goals of the poster are very interesting and suitable for the course’s poster task. Interactions between lawyers and climate scientists to improve climate litigation as driver for decarbonisation are clearly very relevant for climate change mitigation and are an emerging field of climate action and climate research.
Great that you found suitable references that can give background for your reasoning. I would find it interesting if you would also look for articles that present arguments against using climate attribution studies for court cases. From such conflicting arguments, you could develop research questions that the climate science community could tackle.
Would you have ideas for specific strategies of improving communication between lawyers and climate scientists?
Please improve your style of references, especially in the text. Consistently, reference the authors and the year of publication. Also, the list of references needs to be consistent in the style/format of information on the references.