PICO
PICO: Thu, 7 May, 10:45–12:30 | PICO spot 5
The Climate Litigation Network supports national organisations that are taking legal cases against their governments in respect of the adequacy and implementation of national climate policies and targets ('framework’ cases). Over the last 10 years, there have been a number of groundbreaking decisions in government framework cases, including in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, South Korea and at the European Court of Human Rights. In these cases, national and regional courts have found governments’ insufficient climate policies in breach of their legal obligations.
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released its advisory opinion (AO) on the ‘Obligations of States in respect of climate change’. It provides a clear interpretation of key international law instruments, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, as well as human rights conventions and international customary law. The ICJ AO builds on precedents set in national cases, and provides greater clarity on some of the most contentious aspects of framework cases, in particular the standards against which a State’s compliance with its climate obligations must be assessed. This opinion will be highly influential for framework cases around the world.
Specifically, the ICJ found that States must ensure that their Nationally Determined Contributions (1) represent an adequate contribution to the global effort for 1.5°C, (2) collectively add up with other NDCs to achieve that aim, and (3) are fair and ambitious, in line with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. This presentation will examine how the ICJ AO findings are relevant to scientific studies and evidence being submitted in framework cases.
How to cite: Williamson, A.: Developments in international law: implications for science and evidence in climate litigation, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-3558, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-3558, 2026.
Climate litigation is a tool used to challenge the ambition, implementation and integrity of climate action by states and corporations in regional and national courts. Since 1986, almost 3000 climate litigation cases have been recorded across 60 countries (Setzer and Higham, 2025).
Climate science – and climate scientists – can provide crucial evidentiary support in litigation. Courts rely on scientific evidence to provide a clear explanation of how emissions translate to global warming, the compatibility of individual actions with global goals, and assessments of consensus, confidence, likelihood and risk.
2025 was a milestone year for the alignment of climate science and international law, with the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion affirming 1.5oC as the relevant legal threshold. Given that the remaining global carbon budget for 1.5oC is almost exhausted, there will be a pressing need for scientific research to explore how government action can be tracked and verified to be compatible with the Paris Agreement and human rights obligations.
This presentation will highlight the current deployment of science in climate cases against governments and explore new frontiers and research gaps in ongoing cases.
References
Setzer, J. and Higham, C., 2025, Global trends in climate change litigation: 2025 snapshot, Grantham Research Institute, LSE, doi:10.21953/LSE.LH46LE9Y8SGI.
How to cite: Palazzo Corner, S.: Climate science in the courts: trends and new frontiers, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-3868, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-3868, 2026.
Climate litigation continues to grow and evolve as climate action lags and impacts grow increasingly severe. Although climate-focused cases employ a variety of legal strategies, they all require rigorous research to support their arguments, requiring the engagement of scientists capable of conducting and interpreting litigation-relevant research. To advance that work, we interviewed legal practitioners and scholars to identify research needs for climate litigation. This paper presents the third installment in a longitudinal research series designed to track how scientific research needs in climate litigation are changing over time and to translate evolving legal theories into empirically tractable scientific questions. Building on prior phases of this research, the study examines how new case types, evidentiary strategies, and theories of liability are shaping demand for specific kinds of scientific evidence. Earlier phases of this work highlighted three research priorities: attribution science, climate change and health, and economic modeling, which reflect the evolution and advancement of the field. Additionally, we identified strategic research areas including legal and financial accountability, disinformation and greenwashing, policy and governance, environmental and social impacts, and emissions accounting and reductions. Research to inform losses and damages emerged as a cross-cutting theme, integrating these priorities and strategic areas to address comprehensive litigation needs. This third wave updates and extends that framework by providing new empirical insights into how litigation strategies are evolving and what this means for the scientific research agenda. This work underscores the important role that scientists play in climate litigation and provides an updated research agenda for those looking to engage.
How to cite: Phillips, C., Merner, D., and Walker-Crawford, N.: Research Priorities to Inform Climate Litigation, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-11750, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-11750, 2026.
Strategic climate-aligned litigation refers to a diverse set of legal strategies that seek judicial relief consistent with climate action objectives, while also shaping the broader public debate on climate change. This diversity is particularly relevant when considering the role of scientific evidence in these cases. While significant work is underway to examine and expand the role of scientific evidence in climate litigation, existing discussions have tended to either treat climate litigation as a single, homogenous category or focus narrowly on one specific type of case.
This presentation will first outline existing climate litigation typologies, focusing on government framework cases, corporate framework cases, and corporate damages cases. Drawing on an extensive case study database of over 25 climate litigation cases, it will then analyse the evidentiary demands of each case type, the relevant expertise required, and the unique challenges faced across type and jurisdiction. The presentation will conclude by identifying overarching issues and themes, including common challenges such as narrative presentation and communicating uncertainty.
How to cite: Reyes, J. J., Petkov, N., and Walker-Crawford, N.: Beyond the Big Picture: A Typology-Based Approach to Evidence in Climate Litigation , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-5556, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-5556, 2026.
Scientific advances in extreme event and impact attribution have significantly improved our ability to assess how anthropogenic climate change influences specific harms. These probabilistic, counterfactual, and multifactorial approaches are now well established within the geosciences. At the same time, courts, regulators, and international institutions are increasingly engaging with scientific evidence when addressing questions of climate responsibility, damage, and obligations. Despite growing interest, attribution science and its relevance are still not well understood within legal scholarship or legal practice, which limits its effective use in legal and policy contexts.
This presentation examines how attribution science is currently recognised within the legal landscape. Rather than treating attribution as a future aspiration, it focuses on where and how attribution-related evidence appears in legal and governance contexts. The analysis adopts a multilevel perspective, considering international, EU, and national settings, and includes both judicial and non-judicial processes.
The presentation highlights selected illustrative cases showing how attribution findings are beginning to appear in legal and governance contexts across different levels of climate governance, with a focus on institutional practices rather than detailed doctrinal analysis. While legal concepts such as causation and responsibility provide important background context, the emphasis is on identifying practical entry points through which attribution evidence may inform legal and policy processes.
Building on this mapping exercise, the presentation reflects on key factors that currently shape the use of attribution science in legal contexts, including procedural considerations, evidentiary expectations, and institutional capacities. It also points to practical opportunities for more effective engagement, such as clearer presentation formats, greater alignment with legal procedures, and closer interaction between scientists, legal scholars, and practitioners.
The central argument is that attribution science already plays a growing, though uneven, role in climate-related legal and governance processes. Better understanding where and how this engagement is taking place is a necessary step toward using attribution evidence more effectively in the future. By clarifying existing points of connection and emerging trajectories, the presentation contributes to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions on how attribution science can support more informed, accountable, and just responses to climate-related harm.
How to cite: Vesa, S.: How attribution science meets law: emerging connections in climate governance, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-2753, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-2753, 2026.
As governments’ and corporations’ climate pledges continue to inadequately contribute to globally agreed objectives of limiting global warming, litigants have begun using ‘polluter pays’ actions to seek compensation for climate related losses and damages, and to incentivise mitigation. While attribution science can now robustly quantify how anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions alter the frequency, magnitude and impacts of climate extremes, courts have found current submissions insufficient to establish legal causation for losses and damages. The gap is not purely scientific or purely legal: for example, scientific inference is probabilistic and context dependent, whereas legal causation is jurisdiction specific and defined by evidentiary standards.
We recently launched a transdisciplinary project, EXACT (Extreme event impact attribution for climate litigation), to translate advances in climate impact attribution into evidence that is both scientifically rigorous and legally compelling. We aim to build an international network of attribution scientists, climate impact researchers, legal scholars, and litigators working in this area, with open dialogue about challenges in impact attribution. The ultimate aim is to codevelop and validate a case-based method that links emissions to hazards, to exposure and vulnerability pathways, and finally to quantified losses and damages using procedures compatible with legal standards of proof.
We will present preliminary outcomes from our first transdisciplinary workshop, including progress on a coproduction framework that aligns attribution metrics (e.g., risk ratios, counterfactual estimates) with legal thresholds as well as suggested criteria for selecting test cases and harmonising data across jurisdictions.
Our contribution aims to integrate geoscience into legal practice by providing a practical framework, shared language, and tools for co-producing compelling climate impact evidence. We invite participants to discuss and comment on these preliminary outcomes, especially impact attribution evidence from scientists and priority case applications, to refine the framework and ensure usability for courts, policymakers, and vulnerable communities.
How to cite: Bradley, A., Rözer, V., Schönfeld, J., and Petkov, N.: Co-producing legally compelling climate impact attribution for climate damages cases, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-1829, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-1829, 2026.
Climate change is increasing and extreme weather events around the world are becoming more frequent and intense. Yet, tracking and attributing their complex impacts, namely losses and damages affecting human societies, remains far from trivial. The Climate Damage Tracker develops simple methods that can be deployed rapidly and globally to estimate attributable impacts in the aftermath of extreme weather events. It produces near-real-time results that can be communicated in a timely manner to a broad audience, raising awareness about the impacts of extreme weather and the role of climate change. To date, methodologies attributing direct economic impacts from tropical cyclones and heat-related mortality have been operationalised and applied in diverse geographic and socioeconomic contexts. Here, we will present a synthesis of the rapid studies conducted over the past two years. We will further reflect on the uptake of Climate Damage Tracker outputs in the media and discuss how these findings can inform litigation and policy-relevant discussions around disaster preparedness, measuring adaptation progress and funding Loss and Damage. Finally, we will outline future directions for consolidating existing methodologies and expanding the scope of the Climate Damage Tracker to additional impact and hazard types.
How to cite: Theokritoff, E., Sparks, N., Konstantinoudis, G., Barnes, C., Otto, F., Rogelj, J., and Toumi, R.: Tracking and attributing losses and damages from extreme weather events globally, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-12163, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-12163, 2026.
Attribution science is increasingly extending beyond establishing the role of aggregate anthropogenic forcing in climate change to quantifying contributions from individual sources, such as sectors, nations, income groups, or corporations. This extension of attribution to sources raises fundamental scientific questions about how specific emissions contribute to changes in the global climate system, extreme events, and their impacts. A growing scientific literature now applies multiple, partially overlapping methodological frameworks, yet their assumptions, capabilities, and domains of applicability are not always articulated in a unified manner, potentially confusing the community on these different approaches.
Here, we synthesize and compare source attribution methods across the four connected stages of the climate system: emissions, global climate, local climate, and impacts. Because of the large number of actors, many counterfactual runs have to be computed in source attribution, hindering the direct use of climate models due to their high computational cost. To translate actor-attributed emissions into changes in global climate indicators, reduced-complexity climate emulators are therefore commonly employed. We show that while the choice of emulator itself matters primarily in specific settings, the broader methodological approach has stronger implications, especially for uncertainty treatment and the incorporation of observational constraints. We contrast emulator-based approaches with proportional methods based on fractions of cumulative emissions, highlighting their conceptual simplicity but also their limitations in representing Earth system inertia, non-CO₂ emissions, and non-linear climate responses.
From global climate indicators to local climate, we compare three existing approaches: pattern scaling, spatial climate emulators, and extreme event attribution frameworks. We demonstrate that pattern scaling offers a computationally efficient pathway and facilitates rapid downstream extensions to impact attribution, but is limited to representing central estimates of the local climate. Spatial climate emulators are more sophisticated in this regard, allowing the representation of local climate variability, but this framework still does not represent precisely observed extreme weather events. Extreme event attribution frameworks are capable of representing observed events, but are limited in their ability to inform about future events. We discuss the capabilities of these frameworks to investigate not only the source-attributed changes in intensities, but also in probabilities to inform about causality.
We then illustrate how these methodological differences propagate into impact attribution using heat-related mortality as an example. Linking source-attributed climate changes to epidemiological models reveals that choices made upstream can substantially affect quantitative estimates of attributable impacts. In particular, strong non-linearities in temperature-mortality relationships challenge standard “but-for” counterfactual approaches and require careful methodological adaptations.
The presentation concludes by reflecting on the broader societal relevance of source attribution science. As source attribution is increasingly used to inform assessments of responsibility, including in health impact studies, clarity about methodological foundations, uncertainties, and appropriate interpretation becomes essential. By quantitatively comparing methods across the full attribution chain and illustrating their implications for heat-related mortality, this work aims to strengthen the coherence, transparency, and robustness of source attribution science, and to support its careful and context-appropriate application in policy and legal contexts.
How to cite: Quilcaille, Y., Callahan, C. W., Hohmuth, N., Lüthi, S., Merner, L. D., Otto, F. E. L., Phillips, C. A., Rogelj, J., Schleussner, C.-F., Schöngart, S., Seneviratne, S. I., Stott, P., Stuart-Smith, R. F., Theokritoff, E., Thiery, W., and Vicedo-Cabrera, A. M.: Navigating Source Attribution Methods for Linking Individual Actors to Climate Change, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-14038, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-14038, 2026.
Establishing causation from conduct to environmental harm is crucial for successful climate litigation. End-to-end attribution of climate impacts to a certain entity’s greenhouse gas emissions can serve this purpose and requires counterfactual emissions scenarios appropriate to the respective attribution question.
We here present a comprehensive database of historical counterfactual emissions scenarios and showcase global mean temperature (GMT) change trajectories attributable to large emitters based on a selection of these scenarios using the simple climate model (SCM) MAGICC. Counterfactual design covers systematic choices of (i) the accounting basis, (ii) the starting years from which the scenarios deviate from historical emissions, and (iii) the evaluation time frame for various types of emitters (countries, country groups, carbon majors, income groups, sectors).
The database provides complete global emissions scenarios following the OpenSCM standard for use with SCMs. It will be available as a public repository, allowing for users to generate additional counterfactual emissions scenarios of their own design, laying the groundwork for the attribution of GMT changes using SCMs, and of regional impacts using regional climate emulators. This will enable the accessible and systematic exploration of end-to-end attribution at scale, helping to inform discussions of accountability and to facilitate counterfactual climate impact assessments on-demand for a wide range of combinations of different emitters.
How to cite: Högner, A., Nicholls, Z., Kikstra, J., Nauels, A., Schöngart, S., Zecchetto, M., and Schleussner, C.-F.: A counterfactual emissions scenarios database for end-to-end climate impact attribution, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-10007, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-10007, 2026.
The Permian Delaware Tight, located in Texas (USA), is the largest identified carbon bomb worldwide. Carbon bombs are defined as 425 fossil fuel megaprojects, of which nearly 60% are already in operation. With potential emissions of 27.8 GtCO₂, the Permian Delaware Tight alone would release three-quarters of current annual global CO₂ emissions and consume over ten percent of the remaining global carbon budget compatible with limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Overall, the cumulative potential emissions from all identified carbon bombs exceed at least twice the remaining carbon budget consistent with the Paris Agreement.
However, quantifying the specific climate impacts attributable to individual fossil fuel projects remains a major scientific and legal challenge. Such attribution is central not only for understanding the long-term consequences of continued fossil fuel expansion, but also for informing emerging forms of climate litigation in which plaintiffs seek to establish causal links between emissions, harms, and responsibility.
Within the Source2Suffering project, we develop a modelling framework that converts CO₂ and CH₄ emissions from any fossil fuel project into lifetime exposure to six categories of high-impact climate extremes, including heatwaves, droughts, and floods. In addition, the framework quantifies each project's contribution to committed glacier mass loss and multi-century sea-level rise. By explicitly incorporating uncertainty, the model provides probabilistic impact estimates that can support evidence-based arguments in legal contexts where causal strength, foreseeability, and proportionality are scrutinised.
Crucially, the framework reveals how the impacts of individual projects propagate unequally across generations and countries. This integrated approach provides new quantitative tools for bridging geosciences and legal practice by making project-level climate responsibility scientifically traceable, comparable, and communicable within litigation and regulatory processes.
How to cite: Laridon, A., Thiery, W., Pietroiusti, R., Smith, C., Rogelj, J., Zhang, J., Schleussner, C.-F., Menke, I., Zekollari, H., Schuster, L., Nauels, A., Palmer, M., and Schewe, J.: Linking Emissions from Fossil Fuel Megaprojects to Lifetime Climate Impacts Across Generations: a Framework for Climate Litigation , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-539, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-539, 2026.
Across the globe, today’s young generations will be more frequently exposed to climate extremes over their lifetime than older generations. Previous work has established this finding by combining simulations of historical and projected trends in climate extremes together with data on past and future demographic changes (Thiery et al. 2021, Grant et al. 2025). This kind of research can be relevant for child and youth-focused climate litigation, helping assess to what extent different global warming or emission scenarios imply intergenerational inequity in exposure to local climate hazards. However, research has so far focused on a limited set of climate extreme indicators, and did not fully assess uncertainty across the climate impact modelling chain from emissions to impacts.
We now build on this existing lifetime exposure framework and combine it with a chain of climate model emulators constituted of a Simple Climate Model (SCM) and the Rapid Impact Model Emulator Extended (RIME-X, Schwind et al., submitted). A Simple Climate Model can quickly reproduce the evolution of Global Mean Temperature (GMT) in response to emissions from more complex climate models. RIME-X can then translate those into resulting local changes in climate or climate impact indicators, and produce a full assessment of associated uncertainty encompassing the GMT response to emissions, the local climate response to global warming, and interannual variability. It has already been used to produce projections for 40+ indicators, and this list can be extended to further indicators whose evolution predominantly depends on the level of global warming and for which historical and future simulations are available.
We also update the lifetime exposure framework to consider more recent demographic data, and package it into a GitHub repository called dem4cli (short for ‘demographics for climate’) that will be made publicly available. We use spatially explicit population reconstructions and projections from the COMPASS project, and national-level life expectancy and cohort size estimates and projections from UNWPP2024.
This work delivers more robust calculations of lifetime exposure to changes in extremes or climate impacts, by leveraging the ability of the SCM-RIME-X emulator chain to represent both their forced response to emissions as well as the combined uncertainty arising from the GMT response to emissions, the local climate response to global warming, and interannual variability, in combination with updated demographic data. This new framework is designed to generate such policy-relevant information in a more flexible and systematic manner, as it can in theory be applied to any available emission or GMT trajectories, and extended to a broad range of climate hazards. We argue that this framework can provide meaningful science-based contributions to the evidentiary base of child and youth-focused climate lawsuits.
Thiery, W. et al. Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes. Science 374, 158–160 (2021)
Grant, L. et al. Global emergence of unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes. Nature 641, 374–379 (2025)
Schwind et al. RIME-X v1.0: Combining Simple Climate Models, Earth System Models, and Climate Impact Models into a Unified Statistical Emulator for Regional Climate Indicators. Geoscientific Model Development (submitted)
How to cite: Lejeune, Q., Pietroiusti, R., Laridon, A., Schwind, N., Schleussner, C.-F., and Thiery, W.: Towards a more robust and flexible approach to assess intergenerational inequity in exposure to climate extremes and impacts, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-16766, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-16766, 2026.
Climate-related losses to insured assets are rising rapidly, intensifying pressure on insurers to reconsider traditional approaches to risk management and recovery. One possible approach is subrogation, whereby insurers seek to recover losses from third parties alleged to have contributed to the loss, raising the possibility of claims by insurance companies against major greenhouse gas emitters. At the same time, attribution science is playing an increasingly visible role in both climate litigation and insurance practice, yet its relevance for subrogation remains largely unexplored.
This paper examines insurance subrogation as a potential, though structurally complex, pathway for climate accountability. Drawing from research on the use of attribution science in climate litigation, we examine how attribution could be used in subrogation actions, and what a subrogation claim may look like in practice. We also consider the legal, evidentiary, institutional and systemic constraints that may limit these claims. This paper invites consideration of how attribution science may shape claims and open new pathways for accountability.
How to cite: Petkov, N., Reyes, J. J., Walker-Crawford, N., and Sedilekova, Z.: Insurance Subrogation and Climate Accountability: New Opportunities for Attribution Science? , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-22974, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-22974, 2026.
Recent developments in climate science, law, and policy are reshaping debates over corporate responsibility for climate change. International advisory opinions, landmark domestic court decisions, and emerging regulatory frameworks (binding and non-binding) increasingly recognize that corporate actors may bear backward-looking responsibility for climate harms linked to historical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, forward-looking duties to reduce emissions, and obligations to disclose accurate and substantiated climate-related information. At the same time, scientific research has made considerable progress in attributing climate impacts to individual emitters, developing firm-level transition pathways, and evaluating corporate climate claims, prompting claims that the scientific basis for corporate climate accountability is now largely settled.
Here, we argue that while existing scientific evidence has proven sufficient in some legal settings, further developments could more precisely articulate causal relationships and legal duties (for example with respect to corporate emission-reduction targets) and provide additional technical clarity for judicial adjudication. We examine backward-looking “polluter pays” claims, highlighting unresolved challenges related to emissions accounting choices. We also assess the need for individualized and legally cognizable impact data, as well as the alignment of climate attribution methods. We then analyse forward-looking corporate responsibility, focusing on the challenges related to the translation of global climate targets into firm-level emissions-reduction pathways and corporate responsibility in climate communications. We conclude by outlining a research agenda to support well-informed adjudication in the context of corporate climate accountability.
How to cite: Beaulieu, J. O., Theokritoff, E., Quilcaille, Y., Stuart-Smith, R. F., Fuss, S., Lamboll, R. D., Ray, G., Setzer, J., Walker-Crawford, N., Wetzer, T., and Rogelj, J.: Evidence for corporate climate accountability: Integrating science, law, and policy, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-13442, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-13442, 2026.
Climate and forest sciences have robustly documented the role of forests in carbon sequestration, climate regulation, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem resilience. At the same time, energy-intensive digital economies – particularly crypto-asset systems such as Bitcoin – are expanding rapidly, increasing electricity demand and associated greenhouse gas emissions. While the energy use of crypto mining is increasingly transparent, its ecological externalities are not translated into legal responsibility or compensation mechanisms. Existing regulations focus primarily on financial stability, consumer protection, and market integrity, leaving a governance gap regarding environmental responsibility, burden sharing, and ecosystem protection. This disconnect represents a critical blind spot in climate governance, where scientific evidence of ecosystem impacts is not yet reflected in legal and policy frameworks for emerging digital sectors.
This contribution develops a conceptual framework that integrates forest ecosystem service impacts into the governance of crypto-economic activities. Building on forest science and climate impact literature, the study explores how scientific knowledge on carbon storage, biodiversity value, and ecosystem resilience can inform legal and policy approaches applicable to the crypto sector, with the aim of aligning digital innovation with ecosystem protection.
The research adopts a qualitative, review-based approach, combining analysis of EU crypto, energy, and environmental policies with a structured review of forest ecosystem service literature and insights from expert interviews and surveys. This enables identification of where current legal frameworks fail to internalise ecological impacts and where opportunities exist to integrate ecosystem considerations.
Particular attention is given to Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a potential mechanism for translating forest ecosystem values into legal and policy responsibility, supported by complementary incentive-based approaches. The expected outcomes include clarification of a regulatory gap in the ecological governance of digital financial activities, a science-informed framework linking forest ecosystem services to legal responsibility in the crypto sector, and policy-relevant insights for integrating ecosystem protection into digital economy regulation. By addressing questions of responsibility and burden sharing, this work contributes to ongoing debates on climate justice and the role of science in informing environmental law and policy.
How to cite: Nazari, M.: From Climate Science to Legal Responsibility: Integrating Forest Ecosystem Impacts into the Governance of Crypto-Economic Activities, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-21492, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-21492, 2026.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has inflicted immense human suffering, widespread destruction of infrastructure, and severe environmental damage. Beyond the pollution of soil, water, and air, the war has resulted in the release of large quantities of greenhouse gases (GHGs)—emissions that would not have occurred in the absence of this war.
A group of Ukrainian and international scientists has been tracking and estimating the GHG emissions attributable to the war, regularly updating their assessments as the conflict evolves. The Initiative on GHG Accounting of War has developed innovative methodologies for different impact categories, including Landscape Fires, where remote sensing is used to assess damage to carbon sinks such as forests. Recently, the Initiative published Guidance on the Assessment of Conflict-Related GHG Emissions, providing a framework for assessing emissions from other armed conflicts worldwide.
The next critical step is to hold the Russian Federation accountable for the climate damage caused by these emissions. In a resolution adopted on 14 November 2022, the UN General Assembly called for the establishment of an international mechanism for reparation for damage, loss, or injury arising from Russia’s internationally wrongful acts in or against Ukraine. Under the auspices of the Council of Europe, an International Compensation Mechanism is currently being established. One of the damage categories, B3.1 Environmental Damage, covers adverse impacts on fauna, flora, soil, water, air, and ecosystems. Since the climate system is one of the most fundamental ecosystems, compensation for climate damage will be claimed under this category. The scientific assessments mentioned above will provide the necessary evidence and quantification of the harm incurred.
During COP30 in Brazil, Ukraine announced it will submit a climate damage claim to the International Compensation Mechanism in 2026. If such a claim is awarded, it would mark the first time a state has been held accountable for GHG emissions resulting from an unlawful act. This aligns with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which states that all states have a responsibility to protect the climate system.
Compensation awarded to Ukraine could be directed toward a low-carbon reconstruction, prioritising energy efficiency and renewable energy, restoration of destroyed carbon sinks through reforestation. Potentially compensation could be used to support vulnerable countries most affected by extreme weather events linked to climate change.
How to cite: Zibtsev, S., Krakovska, S., and de Klerk, L.: Accountability for climate damage caused by Russia’s war against Ukraine, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-13136, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-13136, 2026.
