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

The Adaptation Conversation

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.”