Pakistan Climate Cost Case

Building on the legal approach developed in Lliuya v. RWE, this case concerns a claim for partial compensation brought by Pakistani farmers seeking redress for the losses they suffered during the floods that struck Pakistan in 2022. The lawsuit was filed on 22 December 2025. The plaintiffs are 39 farmers from the Pakistani province of Sindh, specifically from the districts of Jacobabad, Larkana, and Dadu. The claim is brought against RWE, one of Europe’s largest electricity producers, and Heidelberg Materials, one of the world’s leading cement manufacturers. The plaintiffs cultivate agricultural land of which they are either the owners or over which they hold ownership-like or other proprietary rights. The claim concerns damage caused by extreme precipitation in their region in late August 2022 and the resulting flash floods. The floods submerged the plaintiffs’ fields for several months, destroying cultivated crops and stored seed and causing lasting damage to soil quality and agricultural infrastructure. The flooding posed a severe threat to the lives and livelihoods of the plaintiffs and the wider village populations. Their families were rendered homeless for months and were forced to live in emergency shelters with limited access to basic necessities. The destruction of homes, crops, livestock, and household property caused both immediate suffering and long-term economic harm. Thousands of people in the region died as a result of the floods, including residents from the plaintiffs’ villages. The plaintiffs’ entire summer 2022 harvest was completely destroyed. Due to persistent standing water and waterlogged soils, most plaintiffs were also unable to cultivate crops during the winter season of 2022/2023. Long-term soil degradation caused by the flooding continues to have adverse effects to this day. The plaintiffs seek partial compensation for lost profits from these two growing seasons, as well as a judicial declaration establishing the defendants’ liability in principle. The plaintiffs argue that the causally relevant conduct consists in the defendants’ group-level management decisions to emit quantities of CO₂ determined by them. They further contend that the risks and dangers of climate change were objectively foreseeable and, at the latest, recognizable to the defendants as early as 1965. The claims are based on German civil law. First, the plaintiffs invoke an entitlement to reasonable compensation by analogy to Section 906(2), sentence 2 of the German Civil Code (BGB), a nuisance-type rule governing the toleration of harmful interferences with property and providing for compensation (so-called faktischer Duldungszwang). Secondly, the plaintiffs rely on Section 823(1) BGB, the core tort provision of German private law, alleging that the defendants breached their duties by making unlawful corporate and business decisions that infringed legally protected interests.