The evolving field of climate science has deepened our understanding of the changes in climate systems while shaping discussions on responsibility and accountability for climate-related harm. By establishing causal links between greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related impacts such as extreme weather events, scientific findings have become an important tool for advancing climate justice in courtrooms.

However, challenges remain to make scientific knowledge, as well as the technology needed to produce it, accessible to law practitioners. This issue particularly affects lower-income countries, where communities often face disproportionate effects of climate change. 

Climate litigation has emerged as a powerful way to challenge the ambition of climate policies, holding governments and corporations accountable for their part in fuelling climate change. As of January 2025, more than 1000 climate-related cases have been filed worldwide. Many of them aim to prevent fossil fuel extraction and hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate-related harm.

Drawing on a recent report by SEI experts, we explore the role of science in climate litigation, including the unique challenges Latin America and other lower-income areas face and the ways science can shape the future of climate litigation.

How does science contribute to climate litigation?

Science plays a crucial role in litigation, establishing state responsibility for climate damage by assessing their direct or indirect contributions to climate harm, the adequacy of national emissions targets, and the ambition of their policies. When it comes to climate adaptation measures that protect human rights, scientific evidence provides critical insights into regional climate impacts and the adequacy of state responses.

One of the most influential sources of scientific evidence in climate litigation is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has provided a strong foundation for landmark cases demanding more ambitious climate policies such as Urgenda Foundation v. The State of the Netherlands and Neubauer et al. v. Germany. The IPCC’s assessments of remaining carbon budgets to meet the Paris Agreement goals have also enriched legal discussions around the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, in other words, all countries have responsibility for taking climate action, but the types and levels of action will vary according to their different conditions and capabilities.

However, while IPCC reports offer authoritative scientific consensus, they often lack the specificity needed to meet evidentiary standards in court for guiding concrete climate action. These issues warrant more tailored scientific knowledge for litigation.

Historically, most climate lawsuits have been filed against governments, but there is a growing trend of cases against corporations for their role in climate change, particularly in the oil and gas sector. A key turning point was the 2014 Carbon Majors study that provided a strong scientific basis for attributing emissions to specific companies. By tracing the historical emissions of major oil, gas, coal and cement producers, the study demonstrated corporations’ substantial role in driving global greenhouse gas emissions. An updated analysis found that 78 private and state-owned fossil fuel and cement companies are responsible for 70% of accumulated carbon dioxide emissions, from 1854 to 2022.

How does science shape climate litigation in the oil and gas industry in Latin America?

In Latin America, climate litigation cases have primarily focused on constitutional rights violations, particularly the right to a healthy environment. Many cases challenge the inconsistencies between national policy and international climate commitments, often relying on legal and human rights arguments rather than technical or scientific evidence. However, scientific data is increasingly used to support claims on oil and gas projects’ environmental impacts.

Scientific evidence is especially crucial when assessing environmental damage and socio-economic impacts in sensitive ecosystems and Indigenous territories. Threats to biodiversity profoundly affect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, whose livelihoods, traditions, and spiritual connections to the land are deeply intertwined with these ecosystems.  This highlights the need to integrate both climate science and biodiversity data into legal cases, strengthening arguments for environmental and human rights protections.

While lawsuits against oil and gas companies over climate-related damage remain rare in Latin America, global trends suggest they may grow. Several major lawsuits against fossil fuel companies in higher-income countries have been filed. In the US, local governments have filed over 26 lawsuits against fossil fuel companies on various grounds, including consumer fraud and cost recovery for climate change-inflicted damages. In 2023, the Hawaii Supreme Court allowed Honolulu’s lawsuit against major oil and gas companies, accusing them of deceptive marketing and failing to warn about the climate impacts of their products. Despite attempts by the companies to dismiss the case, the US Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal in January 2025, allowing the lawsuit to proceed. If successful, these cases could set influential precedents and encourage transnational litigation to hold corporations accountable for damage caused in lower-income regions. Robust scientific evidence is crucial to support such cases.

A landmark example is a 2015 lawsuit, Lliuya v. RWE,  filed by a Peruvian farmer against Germany’s largest energy producer, in a German court. The plaintiff argued that RWE, as one of the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, had significantly contributed to the accelerated retreat of a glacier, increasing the risk of catastrophic flooding in the region. The court dismissed the case in May 2025, on the grounds that the evidence did not demonstrate that glacier melt posed a concrete threat to the claimant’s property. Despite the dismissal, the ruling sets an important precedent, as the court recognized that corporate greenhouse gas emitters can, in principle, be held liable for climate-related risks they create. This opens the door for future transnational litigation seeking to establish corporate liability for climate-related impacts. However, significant challenges remain for plaintiffs in providing sufficient evidence to demonstrate actual or imminent threats.

In addition to proving liability in climate-related loss and damage cases, science can also serve a broader role in climate litigation when tailored to Latin America’s unique context. Strengthening climate research in the region can provide a deeper understanding of how climate change affects Indigenous Peoples’ ways of life, territorial rights, and cultural survival – key aspects that could shape litigation grounded in human rights and environmental justice.

Traditional knowledge in Latin American climate litigation

In Latin America, about 35% of forests are inhabited by Indigenous groups. Their knowledge plays a vital role in understanding and responding to climate change. This knowledge, accumulated over generations, complements scientific data by providing region-specific and chronological accuracy essential for verifying large-scale climate models. While Indigenous knowledge has gained increasing recognition in climate policies, particularly in adaptation strategies, its role in climate litigation remains less explored.  

In Ecuador, a 2020 lawsuit filed by civil society organizations and Indigenous communities challenged PetroOriental S.A. over gas flaring in the Amazon. This lawsuit sought to halt gas flaring and secure recognition of violations against the rights of nature, along with reparations for damages. In the absence of scientific studies, plaintiffs presented the ancestral knowledge of the Waorani people as evidence, to support that gas flaring disrupted carbon cycles and harmed the local environment. While the judge acknowledged the validity of traditional knowledge, the court ultimately ruled that Indigenous testimonies failed to demonstrate measurable changes in biodiversity, species abundance, or ecosystem stability.

This case underscores the need for collaborative methods to collect and present evidence integrating both traditional and scientific knowledge. Many Latin American countries still lack comprehensive information systems to document and integrate Indigenous climate knowledge in a way that is both accessible and applicable, limiting joint production of robust proof for climate litigation. Furthermore, traditional knowledge is gradually being lost as Indigenous communities experience the erosion of their social, economic, and political structures, driven by external economic and development pressures.

What challenges do Latin American courts face in using scientific evidence?

Like many other lower-income regions, limited access to scientific knowledge remains a major hurdle for both lawyers and judges in Latin America, where legal practice is often less integrated with technical expertise. Besides the economic costs incurred, the dominance of English in academic research, databases and analytical tools creates a major obstacle for legal professionals in non-English-speaking countries, making it even harder for them to use scientific evidence in court.

Another big challenge for strengthening climate litigation in Latin America is the shortage of specialized environmental judges. While some countries – like Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica and Peru – have made progress by setting up environmental courts, most countries in the region still lack such specialized judicial bodies. These courts are crucial because they offer a more effective and efficient way to handle environmental disputes.

Beyond legal practice, disparities in the availability of scientific evidence also hinders climate litigation efforts in Latin America. Most climate research and data come from the US and Europe, giving cases in those regions a stronger foundation, while many lower-income countries struggle to build legal arguments due to gaps in research. Data on extreme weather attribution and climate impacts are especially scarce, often due to poor historical records and limited access to high-quality climate models.

Moreover, higher-income countries’ dominance in climate science has led to bias in the research that overlooks the realities of vulnerable regions and excludes them from producing climate knowledge. This not only limits their ability to respond effectively, but also fuels a major underestimation of the climate crisis in low and middle income countries.

Resource limitations of local communities and NGOs that often lead such cases face a disadvantage when taking on powerful interests, which often align with the state. These disparities can increase the pressure on litigators to provide evidence at a depth and rigor that cannot easily compete with the expertise that companies can buy. Local litigators frequently operate with constrained budgets, relying on pro bono legal assistance, philanthropic backing, and crowdfunding to support their cases. Corporations can prolong cases indefinitely, using procedural delays to exhaust their opponents, whereas affected communities often lack the resources to sustain long court battles, increasing the risk of cases being dropped.

Moreover, fossil fuel companies have manipulated knowledge about climate change to influence public perception and policy debates in their favor. The industry has a long history of funding misinformation campaigns, including newspaper advertisements designed to cast doubt on the scientific consensus around climate change. One strategy has been to deliberately promote a narrative of scientific uncertainty, even as overwhelming evidence pointed to the growing climate crisis. Beyond media influence, fossil fuel corporations have also funded trade associations, think tanks, and academic institutions to shape research agendas and bolster industry-friendly messaging.

In Latin America, corporate capture in the oil sector allows economic elites to shape decision-making, prioritizing industry interests over human rights and environmental protection. This influence extends from securing licenses in conflict zones and weakening regulations to limiting oversight and community participation. Oil companies also fund research that legitimizes extraction while downplaying its risks. This control over information deepens asymmetries in litigation and broader policy discussions, reinforcing industry dominance and marginalizing alternative perspectives that challenge the sustainability of fossil fuel expansion.

How can research strengthen climate litigation?

Some of the most pressing research priorities in the field of climate litigation include advances in tracing climate impacts to specific sources, identifying health impacts from climate change, and quantifying the costs of climate impacts, along with mitigation and adaptation strategies. Plaintiffs also need more research that demonstrates specific harm resulting from climate change or the actions of governments and corporations. Integrating expertise from economics, law, social sciences and natural sciences would strengthen the foundations of climate litigation.

Closing the climate data gap between lower-income and higher-income regions is essential to ensure equitable access to scientific evidence. These gaps can be addressed through innovative approaches, including advanced statistical methods or comparative studies of regions with similar climatic conditions. Collective intelligence initiatives – collaborative efforts that harness diverse knowledge, technology, and citizen participation to solve complex problems – are emerging as a valuable tool, mobilizing citizens to generate localized climate data to fill gaps.

There is a valuable opportunity to strengthen traditional knowledge as evidence alongside scientific knowledge, particularly to address local knowledge gaps with region-specific insights. However, this requires ethical research practices that integrate multiple knowledge systems, avoiding the extractive models that still dominate in Latin America; in other words, where local communities receive little or no recognition or benefit from the use of their knowledge. Despite growing recognition of traditional knowledge, much research continues to undervalue local observations and reinforce academic power structures and perpetuating colonial patterns of knowledge production.

In Advisory Opinion OC-32/25, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights affirmed that the “right to science” encompasses access to culture as well as to local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge. The Court called for respectful and equitable dialogue between knowledge systems to co-produce climate knowledge, stressing that the outcomes of such dialogue should inform climate mitigation and adaptation decisions to ensure their sustainability and effectiveness, and to prevent cultural harm. It also highlighted good practices to support this approach, such as establishing and funding intercultural research centers.

Even when new research emerges, using it in courtrooms remains a challenge. The gap between the latest climate science and the evidence used in court shows the urgent need to improve legal practitioners’ access to up-to-date scientific information. A broader dissemination of existing data and tools beyond academia is crucial. Open-source resources, multilingual translations, specialized scientific training for lawyers and judges and clearer, more accessible language would help in bridging this gap. Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 outlines obligations for States to address these challenges, including the duty to produce accurate and relevant climate information, ensure that access to this information is affordable, effective, and timely, and adopt measures to counter disinformation on climate change.

Moving beyond carbon tunnel vision in litigation

Climate litigation in Latin America’s oil and gas sectors highlights the need for integrated approaches that connect climate, biodiversity, and human rights. Beyond climate science, further scientific development and innovative tools are required to attribute responsibility to these industries for biodiversity loss and its impact on human rights, with special attention to Indigenous rights.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, especially its ambitious goal to protect 30% of the planet by 2030, could be a game-changer for environmental litigation. Just as the Paris Agreement became a key legal tool in climate lawsuits, this new framework may pave the way for stronger legal cases connecting biodiversity loss and human rights. Scientists can play a key role in moving beyond carbon tunnel vision, which prioritizes carbon neutrality while neglecting other sustainability and development goals. Latin America, like other lower-income regions, has much to contribute to these discussions, offering important perspectives on how litigation can integrate climate, biodiversity, and human rights frameworks.