It is not clear what is happening at first. In one video, a CCTV camera looks out over a port facility; in another it is a grand building that marks the Nepal-China border crossing. There are people in these images but from this distance, they look like specks. But the specks on the screen are moving quickly. Seconds later, the nature of the unfolding horror becomes clear. The camera begins to shake, people run. They are fast, but not fast enough. A sequence of events from which there is no escape has already been set in motion. A wall of mud and water moves faster, exploding into every structure.
These distressing images, shared to the internet and viewed millions of times, captured a moment where a breakdown in complex climate and environmental systems punched through into human affairs. Within days, fierce arguments erupted over what caused the glacial mountain collapse that smashed through Himalayan valleys, killing at least 1,400 people and leaving over 5000 others missing, and what the precise role of climate change may have been.
Weeks later, researchers from World Weather Attribution attempted an answer. The organization produces rapid attribution studies after extreme weather events to determine the role climate change played. It recently looked at the role of climate change in the fires that forced evacuations in Spain and France, the role of climate change in generating the heat dome that developed on 4 July 2026 when Donald Trump pledged to speak at a rally despite the risk, and how climate change was making the Hajj pilgrimage worse for millions. In the case of Nepal, its report found the devastating events were the product of a “compound event” in which climate change played a role, even if the magnitude of that role could not be determined.
“While the underlying geological structure controlled where and how the slope failed, longer-term warming and changing precipitation phase from snow to rain may have reduced its stability by weakening ice-filled fractures and rock–ice contacts and increasing water pressure,” it found. “Climate change is thus best understood as a destabilizing factor acting on a preexisting geological predisposition, rather than the fundamental cause of the failure.”
It may not have been a smoking gun, but the speed with which the team of scientists from several countries were able to coordinate to produce the report was remarkable. Historically, it has taken months, and in some cases years, for attribution studies to determine the contribution of climate change to a specific event and by that time the event has long passed into ancient history. What this speaks to is the rapid development of attribution science as a field in recent years, and the growing number of applications in which it is finding a use. In 2019, for instance, these sorts of methods were used to highlight how 20 companies have been responsible for nearly a third of humanity’s carbon emissions since 1965. Others have sought to find ways that could identify a company’s contribution to climate change and put a dollar figure to the harms it caused. In another October 2025, a study led by former Australia National University scientist Nerilie Abram used attribution science to examine the climate impacts generated by petroleum giant Woodside’s AUD$16.5bn (USD$11.51bn) Scarborough gas project and found it could lead to the death of 480 people.
At the time, a spokesperson for Woodside insisted that: “climate change is caused by the net global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It cannot be attributed to any one event, country, industry or activity.”
It is a line that has similarly been adopted within arms of government. When the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved an extension to the operating life of the Hunter Valley Operation coal mine in October 2026, for example. Though the Commission accepted the project would produce 809 megatonnes of emissions that would worsen climate change, it concluded that there was no way to know how much it would cost in dollars.
“The Commission accepts that GHG emissions give rise to climate-related costs and that those costs are relevant in the assessment of the Project,” it said. “However, the Commission is not satisfied that the applicable assessment methodology, or the evidence before it, provides a reliable basis for quantifying the proportion of Scope 3 climate costs attributable to NSW.”
For industry, and to some extent government, to do otherwise may invite disaster. The use of attribution science in future litigation represents the nightmare scenario for fossil fuel producers in particular, one that is growing worse as courts internationally increasingly signal their willingness to accept this work as scientific evidence. German courts recently accepted that these studies can link companies to specific climate harms, and the pending lawsuit in British courts against Shell brought by Filipino survivors of Typhon Odette is expected to rely on attribution science in evidence. Not only does this offer a way to outline a method to establish a causal link between a particular company’s emissions and a specific harm, but it offers the ability to assign a dollar figure to the consequences that enables a court to impose a remedy. These sorts of lawsuits brought against companies and governments, particularly in the wake of the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, are only expected to grow.
Already industry and its supporters in government have been working to attack the growing field and discredit the scientists involved. For years oil, gas and coal executives have insisted it was impossible to link specific climate harms to the actions of a specific company or project. As attribution science has developed, however this position has been harder to sustain and efforts have been made to shield producers from liability. In August, New Zealand passed a law that will make it the first country in the world to introduce a liability shield for heavy polluters, a bill introduced specifically to snuff out a legal challenge by Maori man Mike Smith. In September, U.S. Republicans continued their efforts to advance a bill that would “prohibit liability against those engaged in the mining, extraction, production, refinement, transportation,distribution, marketing, manufacture, or sale of energy for damages or injunctive or other relief.” That bill specifically attacked attribution science, claiming it lacked “scientific credibility.”
“The efforts to attribute local weather patterns and the local harms that result from meteorological events, such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, or heat waves, to persons engaged in the energy business lack scientific credibility and are, therefore, arbitrary,” the text of the bill read.
This would be news to the scientists working in the field.
As the tobacco industry learned, these efforts may prove akin to trying to hold back the tide, especially as public awareness of the field grows and access widens—as one Australian research team is attempting to do with the Carbon Impacts Tracer. Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist with Australian National University and a coordinating lead author for the next IPCC report, leads the team that sought to expand on the work in the October 2025 study published in the journal Climate Action that looked at Australian petroleum giant Woodside’s contribution to climate change. She says the goal was to make the latest attribution science free and easy to access.
“The field of attribution has grown rapidly in the last 20 years,” Perkins-Kirkpatrick says. “It’s had an evolution and this is the next phase of the evolution. Finally, we can show with a reasonable degree of certainty how every tonne of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does really matter.”
The tool, funded by the Australian National University, the Lethal Humidity Global Council and 21st Century Weather, is intended for use by anyone—journalists, campaigners, planners, government assessors, litigators, activists, and even fossil fuel companies. The Lethal Humidity Global Council is financially supported by the Minderoo Foundation, the personal charity of Australian iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest.
Demonstrating how it works, Dr. Wesley Morgan, Research Associate at the Australian Climate Accountability Project of the UNSW Australian Human Rights Institute said the approach relies on a rule of thumb calculation using what is known as the Transient Climate Response to Emissions (TCRE) measure. The TCRE measure originates in previous IPCC reports that have been adopted by 195 governments and represents the best understanding of the relationship between CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere and its effect on global warming. As a rule of thumb, this holds that a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide will result in about 0.45 degrees Celsius of warming. Using this basic relationship, a calculation is then performed which takes the emissions a company reports from a particular project and works out the amount of warming it may cause. Then, additional calculations project harms that may be expected from that warming. The calculations for specific harms are based on methods developed in existing studies in the scientific literature.
“The point is you can use that to calculate the contribution to global temperature rise based on the emissions of individual projects,” Morgan says.
For example, Morgan points to Australian petroleum giant Woodside’s Scarborough project. The heavily contested operation extracted first gas in July 2026 with plans to send its first cargo by the end of the year.
“So for 876mT of CO2, that equals 0.00039C of warming,” Morgan says. “It looks like a tiny number, right? But that is the best estimate based on the best available science, of the contribution to global temperature rise of the Scarborough project.”
“Where it gets interesting is where there are a whole bunch of climate change impacts that can be illustrated in an instant. It tells you that Scarborough will cause 484 deaths in Europe. How do we know that? Not because we did any particular study on deaths in Europe, but because it relies on a peer reviewed study based on, I believe, 300 cities in Europe.”
“So you start with these small numbers that sound really tiny, but when you look at the impacts, they translate into 484 additional deaths and some 16.1 million additional coral colonies lost during each bleaching event.”
Searching for the total emissions reported by specific companies is similarly chilling. Plugging in BP, for example, returns results that suggest the 3321mtCO2 emissions generated by the company will result in a 0.00150C increase in temperature. Clicking through the menu causes the devastating effects to spill out in numbers—on a planet home to 6.9 billion people, some 1.2 million will be exposed to unprecedented heat, with 1.1 million people forced to live outside the human climate change in which humanity has developed; a loss of 827 billion kcal in loss food production can be anticipated; some 16.77Gt of additional glacier mass is expected to be lost, along with 80.5km2 of additional glacier area lost and 0.0439mm of sea level rise; an extra 173,000 people plunged into extreme poverty that are forced to live on $2.15 a day.
The project, however, is not complete. It currently only includes information for five Australian fossil fuel projects, and one development in the United Kingdom, along with emissions figures for specific companies. Though the researchers have had requests to include other projects from around the world, Perkins-Kirkpatrick says they will only include those projects with publicly available and independently verifiable emissions data.
“It all has to be verified emissions numbers,” says Perkins-Kirkpatrick.
Similarly, there are currently only eight measurements of potential climate harms based on studies the team have relied upon after “scouring the literature”. Perkins-Kirkpatrick says the hope is to add new projects and new climate harms over time, especially as more regionally focused studies on specific impacts are carried out and published over time. Asked about what the fossil fuel industry might think, Perkins-Kirkpatrick says attribution science has a momentum that antagonistic companies may find difficult to outrun.
“It’s really starting the conversation and making people say [companies] can no longer get away with this,” Perkins-Kirkpatrick says. “It doesn’t matter where that carbon dioxide is emitted, it has a global effect. The reality is, we will have no hope of meeting net zero, whether here in Australia or globally if we continue to approve new fossil fuel projects. The more carbon we put in the atmosphere, the further away it is.”
