The People Who Caused the Least Climate Change Paid the Highest Price
Written by Lea Nierlich and Tatum Kennedy
And the legal fight to make polluters answer for it
Between 2021 and 2023, East Africa endured its worst drought in 40 years. In Kenya alone, 4.4 million people needed emergency support to survive it, and 2.1 million livestock, the backbone of pastoralist life across the region, died of thirst and starvation. East Africa, as a region, is responsible for roughly 1.4 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that made a drought like this more likely in the first place.
It is one story among many with the same shape. Around the same time, in southern Madagascar, four consecutive years without proper rain pushed the country into what the UN's World Food Programme called the world's first famine caused by climate change alone, leaving over a million people food insecure. In Pakistan, the 2022 floods submerged a third of the country, a nation responsible for roughly 1 percent of global emissions. On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, a nickel mine's collapsed waste facility poured toxic heavy metals into a river a nearby village depended on, part of the same global supply chain now extracting the metals that power electric cars and renewable energy elsewhere. These are simply four documented cases among a far longer list. The places least responsible for causing climate and environmental harm are, disaster after disaster, the ones absorbing it.
An unequal planet, measured
The numbers make the imbalance hard to argue with. The richest 1 percent of the world's population produced 16 percent of global carbon emissions in 2019, roughly the same share as the poorest two-thirds of humanity, some 5 billion people, combined. Oxfam has calculated that the emissions of that same richest 1 percent are on track to cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths this decade. Since the Industrial Revolution, the United States alone has produced around a quarter of the world's cumulative CO2 emissions, and the EU close to another quarter. Madagascar's total contribution barely registers by comparison.
Even those figures understate the gap, because they are largely measured at the point of production, not consumption. Much of the manufacturing and heavy industry that wealthier countries have shifted overseas over recent decades still makes the goods those countries consume, just with the emissions, and the toxic waste, now counted on someone else's ledger. The nickel mine in Sulawesi is one small piece of that arrangement: workers and villagers near the plant absorb the pollution risk of an industry supplying electric vehicles that will mostly be driven somewhere else.
Why this keeps landing in politics, not courts
For decades, the answer to this imbalance was supposed to come through diplomacy. Wealthy countries first promised, at the COP15 summit in Copenhagen in 2009, to mobilize 100 billion dollars a year in climate finance by 2020. That target was not actually met until 2022, two years late. After years of separate pressure from Pacific Island nations and other vulnerable countries, the UN then agreed at COP27 in 2022 to establish a dedicated loss and damage fund, to help pay for disasters like these specifically. Developing countries on that fund's board say at least 100 billion dollars a year is needed by 2030. Pledges toward it so far add up to around 700 million dollars, roughly a tenth of one percent of what is actually required.
Part of the reason progress is this slow is written into the agreement that created the whole framework. The Paris Agreement explicitly states that it "does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation," language inserted at the insistence of the United States specifically to prevent climate-vulnerable countries from using the agreement to sue wealthy, high-emitting countries. The political process that was supposed to deliver justice was built, deliberately, with a legal dead end inside it.
A different route, through civil courts
If states cannot easily be sued over their historical emissions, a newer wave of litigation has started asking a different question: can the companies that extracted, sold, and profited from those emissions be sued instead, not as governments, but as ordinary corporate defendants under civil law.
The clearest test of that idea so far is Lliuya v. RWE, brought by Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a farmer from Huaraz, Peru, against the German energy company RWE, over the cost of protecting his hometown from a glacial flood risk linked to climate change. In May 2025, Germany's Higher Regional Court of Hamm dismissed the specific claim, finding no sufficiently concrete danger to Lliuya's own property. But in the process, it established something courts had never confirmed before: that a large emitter can be held civilly liable, under ordinary nuisance law, for its proportional contribution to climate harm, even across borders, even through an indirect chain of causation, as long as that contribution measurably increased the risk. The court also accepted attribution science, the field that calculates how much more likely and severe a specific disaster was made by climate change, as valid evidence in a courtroom. Lliuya lost his case. The legal principle behind it won.
That principle is now the foundation other cases are starting to build on. In July 2025, Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation ruled that climate damages lawsuits against companies are admissible in Italian civil courts. In December 2025, a Swiss court agreed for the first time to hear a similar claim against the cement company Holcim on its merits. Researchers tracking climate litigation counted more than 50 new strategic cases filed against companies in a single year. None has yet resulted in a company actually being ordered to pay climate damages. Each one that survives a motion to dismiss, the way Lliuya's legal reasoning did, makes the next one a little less novel, and a little harder to wave away.
Why this matters beyond one courtroom
This is the same imbalance AllRise works on across very different cases: harm concentrated among people with the least power to prevent it or recover from it, caused by decisions made, and profited from, thousands of kilometers away, by actors the ordinary channels of accountability were never quite built to reach. A drought in Kenya, a famine in Madagascar, a poisoned river in Sulawesi, a flooded third of Pakistan, none of it checks whose emissions caused it first. The law that is supposed to answer for that has to be built the same way each disaster's cause was proven: case by case, court by court, until responsibility reaches as far as the harm already has.
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Disclaimer: This article was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which were used to support research, fact-checking, and editorial review. All content has been reviewed and approved by the author(s), who remain responsible for the accuracy, interpretation, and conclusions presented.