Why is Shell facing lawsuits over climate disasters in Brazil and the Philippines? / Photo: © AFP
Why is Shell facing lawsuits over climate disasters in Brazil and the Philippines?
A typhoon in the Philippines and flooding in Brazil. Twice in less than a year, British energy giant Shell has been the target of a new type of lawsuit seeking to make polluters pay part of the cost of specific extreme weather events.
"We chose Shell because it's an emblematic company. It meets all the criteria," Thales Miola, a lawyer for the Brazilian NGO Instituto Preservar, told AFP.
On Friday, the organization and federal prosecutors jointly filed a lawsuit against Shell's subsidiary in South America's largest country.
They are seeking the equivalent of $108 million in compensation for catastrophic flooding in southern Brazil in 2024. The disaster killed nearly 200 people, displaced half a million and caused widespread destruction.
Until now, the only lawsuits filed over the disaster had targeted public authorities.
Shell is not Brazil's biggest oil company -- that distinction belongs to state-owned Petrobras -- but it has operated there for decades, and its contribution to global warming is well-documented and "a huge amount for a single company," Miola said.
According to estimates by the think tank Carbon Majors cited in the lawsuit, Shell holds responsibility for 2.02 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel and cement-making.
Much of those emissions come from burning the hydrocarbons the company produces and sells. Shell's share is more than three times that of Petrobras.
At the heart of the legal argument is an attribution study published in a journal belonging to the Nature group, which estimates that climate change intensified the extreme rainfall in 2024 by 12 percent.
The plaintiffs want Shell to pay for that additional intensity in proportion to its contribution to global emissions: two percent of the 12 percent increase.
"In Brazil, it is the first time that we use attribution science against a carbon major company," Miola said. "Choosing Shell does not exempt the other companies from being prosecuted in the near future."
- Super typhoon -
In the Philippines, too, the plaintiffs want Shell to pay for its history and its size.
In December 2021, Typhoon Rai, known locally as Odette, devastated several islands. More than 400 people died and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. It was one of the worst disasters in the country's history.
Four years later, in 2025, around 100 survivors, supported by NGOs, filed a lawsuit against Shell in the United Kingdom, where the company is based.
The lawyers base their case on the company's "historic carbon emissions" and the link between those emissions and global warming, which climate scientists have shown intensifies cyclones.
- Aggravating factor -
The plaintiffs cite an additional aggravating factor: Shell's "history of misinformation regarding the causes and impacts of climate change," said Greg Lascelles, a lawyer at Hausfeld, the firm handling the lawsuit in London.
"There's a lot of evidence about Shell knowing as early as in the 1960s" that fossil fuels contributed to global warming, said Madeleine Lynch, a campaigner on the "Odette case."
The lawsuit argues that this establishes negligence under Philippine law.
The Brazilian lawsuit also cites Shell's past record, including an internal company report from 1986 that acknowledged fossil fuels' role in increasing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.
Shell has not responded to the Brazilian lawsuit. However, in December, following the Philippine lawsuit, the company said "the suggestion that Shell had unique knowledge about climate change is simply not true."
- 'Test cases' -
Claims seeking compensation from major companies for specific climate-related damage -- sometimes in countries where those companies are not even based -- are only just beginning to emerge.
Swiss cement maker Holcim is being sued by residents of an Indonesian island being eroded by rising sea levels. Pakistani farmers are suing two companies in Germany, including a cement manufacturer.
"The cases we're seeing in the world are test cases, to see whether it is a viable legal strategy," said Noah Walker-Crawford, a researcher at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
"If these cases are successful," he said, "We could expect to see a lot more of these cases against more companies as well."
(V.Varonivska--DTZ)
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