5 September 2017, Reuters, ANALYSIS-Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath could see pioneering climate lawsuits. After disasters in the United States like Hurricane Harvey, lawyers get busy with lawsuits seeking to apportion blame and claim damages. This time, a new kind of litigation is likely to appear, they say – relating to climate change. That’s because rapid scientific advances are making it possible to precisely measure what portion of a disaster such as Harvey can be attributed to the planet’s changing climate. Such evidence could well feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “As extreme weather events and related damages and other impacts increase in severity … courts will increasingly be called upon to seek redress for damages suffered,” said Lindene Patton, a risk-management lawyer with the Earth & Water Group, a Washington-based specialty law firm.Hurricane Harvey last week brought unprecedented destruction as incessant rain and winds of up to 130 miles per hour caused catastrophic damage, making large swathes of Texas and Louisiana uninhabitable for weeks or months. Images of soldiers and police in helicopters and special high-water trucks rescuing Texans stranded by floodwater brought back painful memories of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana a decade ago. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a contention by scientists and the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization that the historic rainfall from Harvey was linked to climate change. Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events. This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change. Read More here
Tag Archives: Extreme Events
31 August 2017, The Guardian, South Asia floods kill 1,200 and shut 1.8 million children out of school. Heavy monsoon rains have brought Mumbai to a halt for a second day as the worst floods to strike south Asia in years continued to exact a deadly toll. More than 1,200 people have died across India, Bangladesh and Nepal as a result of flooding, with 40 million affected by the devastation. At least six people, including two toddlers, were among the victims in and around India’s financial capital. The devastating floods have also destroyed or damaged 18,000 schools, meaning that about 1.8 million children cannot go to classes, Save the Children warned on Thursday. The charity said that hundreds of thousands of children could fall permanently out of the school system if education was not prioritised in relief efforts. “We haven’t seen flooding on this scale in years and it’s putting the long-term education of an enormous number of children at great risk. From our experience, the importance of education is often under-valued in humanitarian crises and we simply cannot let this happen again. We cannot go backwards,” said Rafay Hussain, Save the Children’s general manager in Bihar state….The rains have led to flooding in a broad arc stretching across the Himalayan foothills in Bangladesh, Nepal and India, causing landslides, damaging roads and electric towers and washing away tens of thousands of homes and vast swaths of farmland. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the fourth significant floods this year have affected more than 7.4 million people in Bangladesh, damaging or destroying more than 697,000 houses. They have killed 514 in India’s eastern state of Bihar, where 17.1 million have been affected, disaster management officials have been quoted as saying. In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, about 2.5 million have been affected and the death toll stood at 109 on Tuesday, according to the Straits Times. The IFRC said landslides in Nepal had killed more than 100 people. Read More here
29 August 2017, The Independent, A “wave of legal action” over climate change has already begun and cases will become more likely to succeed as the scientists get better at attributing extreme weather events to global warming, activists have warned. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, lawyers from ClientEarth in London and Earth & Water Law in Washington DC said events previously regarded as “acts of God” could increasingly land humans with a bill for damages. Companies and their directors, government agencies and others with a duty of care, who fail to disclose relevant information or to plan ahead, could all potentially be in legal trouble. Several legal cases are already underway in the US with a group of young people suing the US federal government for allegedly creating and enhancing the dangers of climate change; coastal communities in California suing fossil fuel companiesover sea-level rise; and the New York attorney general’s office investigating ExxonMobil amid claims the company may have misled shareholders about the financial risk posed by climate change. The Nature Geoscience article said: “The question is not whether there will be another wave of climate-related litigation — the wave is already in motion. “The question instead is whether it will be more successful than previous efforts. Read More here
29 August 2017, VOX, Climate change did not “cause” Havey, butit’s a huge part of the story, Climate change did not “cause” Harvey, but it’s a huge part of the story. Nine things we can say about Harvey and climate. The recent Category 4 hurricanes making landfall in the US have revived the perennial discussion about the relationship between extreme storms and climate change. Despite what you might think from the dueling headlines, it’s actually a fairly complicated issue — complicated not just because of the physics, but because of the politics. Here are nine things you can say about Harvey, Irma, and climate change. 1) These hurricanes are not centrally about climate change Talking about climate change during a disaster always runs the risk of insensitivity. The story that most matters about Harvey and Irma right now are the effects they are having on lives and land in Texas and Florida, and the efforts underway to prevent more suffering. More broadly, climate is never going to be central to stories like these. There have always been hurricanes and floods in Texas and Floriday. The things making those states’ coastal developments vulnerable to severe weather — heedless development, sandy subsoil, insufficient drainage — would be problems even in the absence of climate change. Climate is not central, but by the same token it is grossly irresponsible to leave climate out of the story, for the simple reason that climate change is, as the US military puts it, a threat multiplier. The storms, the challenges of emergency response, the consequences of poor adaptation — they all predate climate change. But climate change will steadily make them worse. Read More here