A German court has thrown out a Peruvian farmer’s landmark climate lawsuit, which sought damages from energy company RWE, claiming its historical greenhouse gas emissions put his home at risk.
Farmer and mountain guide Saúl Luciano Lliuya claimed that Andean glaciers above his hometown of Huaraz, Peru, are melting, increasing the risk of catastrophic flooding to his home.
The 44-year-old farmer, whose family grows corn, wheat, barley and potatoes, said he chose to sue RWE because it is one of the biggest polluters in Europe, rather than any particular company projects near his home.
Using data from the Carbon Majors database, which tracks historic emissions from major fossil fuel producers, Lliuya has said that RWE is responsible for nearly 0.5 per cent of global man-made emissions since the industrial revolution and must pay a proportional share of the costs needed to adapt to climate change.
For a $3.5 million flood defence project needed in his region, RWE's share would be around $17,500, according to Lliuya's calculations.
RWE, which has never operated in Peru and is phasing out its coal-fired power plants, denies legal responsibility and argues that climate change is a global issue caused by many contributors.
The state court in Hamm, in western Germany, dismissed the lawsuit on Wednesday and said no appeal was possible in the decade-old case.
Presiding judge Rolf Meyer said the experts' estimate of the 30-year damage risk to the plaintiff's house of 1 per cent was not enough to take the case further. Had there been a larger adverse effect, a polluter could have been made to slash emissions or pay damages, Meyer said.
Meyer said the plaintiff's case was argued coherently and that it was "like a microcosm of the world's problems between people of the southern and the northern hemisphere, between the poor and the rich."
Experts said that the case had the potential to set a significant precedent in the fight to hold major polluters accountable for climate change.
RWE argued that the lawsuit is legally inadmissible and that it sets a dangerous precedent by holding individual emitters accountable for global climate change. It insists climate solutions should be addressed through state and international policies, not the courts.
Judges and experts from Germany visited Peru in 2022 as part of the case.
