Victims of Typhoon Rai, which caused widespread devastation in the Philippines, have initiated legal proceedings against Shell in UK courts. The claim seeks compensation for the oil and gas company’s alleged contribution to the typhoon’s severity.
Typhoon Rai, which struck the Philippines shortly before Christmas 2021, resulted in approximately 400 fatalities and impacted millions of homes.
Now, a group of survivors is pursuing legal action against Shell, asserting that the company’s operations played a role in increasing the likelihood and intensity of the typhoon.
Shell has dismissed the claim as “baseless,” refuting any assertion that it possessed unique knowledge regarding the impact of carbon emissions on climate change.
Typhoon Rai, locally known as Odette, was the most powerful storm to strike the Philippines in 2021.
With wind gusts reaching up to 170mph (270km/h), it destroyed approximately 2,000 buildings and displaced hundreds of thousands of individuals, including Trixy Elle and her family.
Trixy was a fish vendor on Batasan Island when the storm hit, forcing her to flee her home and narrowly escape with her life.
“We had to swim amidst large waves, heavy rainfall, and strong winds,” she recounted to BBC News from the Philippines.
“My father said that we would hold our hands together, and if we survive, we survive, but if we die, we will die together.”
Trixy is now among the 103 individuals who have filed a claim that is believed to be the first of its kind against a major UK oil and gas producer.
According to a letter sent to Shell prior to the claim being filed, the legal team for the survivors chose to bring the case before UK courts because Shell is domiciled there. However, Philippine law will be applied, as that is where the damage occurred.
The letter contends that Shell is responsible for 2% of historical global greenhouse gases, based on calculations from the Carbon Majors database of oil and gas production.
The letter states that the company has “materially contributed” to human-driven climate change, which made the Typhoon more likely and more severe.
The survivors’ group further claims that Shell has a “history of climate misinformation” and has been aware since 1965 that fossil fuels were the primary cause of climate change.
“Instead of changing their industry, they still do their business,” Trixy Elle stated.
“It’s very clear that they choose profit over the people. They choose money over the planet.”
Shell denies that its production of oil and gas contributed to this individual typhoon, and it also denies any unique knowledge of climate change that it kept to itself.
“This is a baseless claim, and it will not help tackle climate change or reduce emissions,” a Shell spokesperson said in a statement to BBC News.
“The suggestion that Shell had unique knowledge about climate change is simply not true. The issue and how to tackle it has been part of public discussion and scientific research for many decades.”
The case is being supported by several environmental campaign groups who argue that developments in science make it now far easier to attribute individual extreme weather events to climate change and allows researchers to say how much of an influence emissions of warming gases had on a heatwave or storm.
However, proving to the satisfaction of a court that damages done to individuals by extreme weather events are due to the actions of specific fossil fuel producers may be a challenge.
“It’s traditionally a high bar, but both the science and the law have lowered that bar significantly in recent years,” says Harj Narulla, a barrister specialising in climate law and litigation who is not connected with the case.
“This is certainly a test case, but it’s not the first case of its kind. So this will be the first time that UK courts will be satisfying themselves about the nature of all of that attribution science from a factual perspective.”
The experience in other jurisdictions is mixed.
In recent years efforts to bring cases against major oil and gas producers in the United States have often failed.
In Europe campaigners in the Netherlands won a major case against Shell in 2021 with the courts ordering Shell to cut its absolute carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, including those emissions that come from the use of its products.
But that ruling was overturned on appeal last year.
There was no legal basis for a specific cuts target, the court ruled, but it also reaffirmed Shell’s duty to mitigate dangerous climate change through its policies.
The UK claim has now been filed at the Royal Courts of Justice, but this is just the first step in the case brought by the Filippino survivors with more detailed particulars expected by the middle of next year.
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