The UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment and the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme are set to launch a new workstream pinpointing what climate-related legal risk means in financial terms for companies. Dr Thom Wetzer told RI, 'It's clear that litigation risk is real - it's not some figment of an activist's imagination.'

Dr Thom Wetzer comments on a lawsuit brought by a Peruvian farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, against RWE, Germany’s largest utility company. He said part of the reason for the uptick in climate litigation is the climate “governance gap The Paris Agreement lacks an enforcement mechanism to ensure that countries do what they’ve signed up for . . . As long as these governance gaps persist, we will see more and more litigation to try and plug those gaps.” There is also no net zero legislation governing what companies can or must do in most parts of the world, he adds.

Newly-available scientific evidence, which could prove critical to the success of climate-related lawsuits, is often not produced in court, according to a new study published by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme and Environmental Change Institute.