The devastation on Batasan Island after Super Typhoon Odette. Photo by Trixy Elle.

It was getting dark when Trixy Elle and her family realized something was terribly wrong. Her family lived on Batasan Island in Tubignon, Bohol province in the Philippines, and there had been warnings that a storm was coming—but not like this. The fishing community had lived through typhoons before. Bad weather on the low-lying island usually meant no fishing for days, so in the hours before the community had stocked up on food in preparation to hunker down and wait out the worst.

What they did not know was that Super Typhoon Odette, officially known as Typhoon Rai, was no ordinary storm. By the time it was over, it would be the second strongest storm to ever hit the Philippines at that time, killing 400 people, injuring 1,100, displacing 1.4 million people from their homes and causing USD $915m in damage. Even the weather forecasters, Elle said, had not recognized the threat until it was too late, and by then there was nothing those on her island could do.

It was around 6pm, a week before Christmas, December 2021 when the water began to rise, Elle remembers. It came from everywhere: through the roof, through the window, through the door. Fearing that they would become trapped, her family decided to evacuate, and she volunteered to go first. Forming a human chain, Elle held the hand of her youngest son. Her youngest held the hand of their eldest son, who in turn held the hand of her husband. He held her mothers hand, who held onto her brother. At the end was her father.

“When I opened the door, the water comes very quickly,” Elle says. “So it was knee high. In just a few, really, really quick steps, the water goes up to the waistline. And then my father shouts that we will hold hands tightly.”

“No matter what happens. We will hold our hands. If we survive, we survive. If we die, we die together. I wouldn’t want to survive and all my kids will die. That life is useless to me.”

Once outside, strong winds, heavy rain and huge waves pounded the small island Elle describes as “literally paradise”. On a normal day the water looks like glass. On that evening, it was as if the ocean swallowed Batasan Island, forcing the family to swim in an effort to reach a nearby two-story building. The day after, she says, when she looked around to survey the damage, everything was underwater. In five hours her home had been swept into the sea.

“You can maybe say that it’s only a picture now,” she says. “I felt so… hopeless. Yeah. You know, I don't know what to do. I'm just sitting there and you know the feeling that you have – you are so down, you are so heartbroken because of what happens. Your things that are gone.  There's no help. You are hopeless. You're devastated.”

Aerial view of Batasan Island.

Now Trixy is one of more than 100 survivors of Super Typhon Odette to sue multinational oil giant Shell to seek damages for personal injury and property damage. The claim, filed in the United Kingdom courts on Thursday, relies on Philippine law and was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the disaster. It attempts to directly link Shell’s activity to the climate harms experienced by Elle and others.

The filing of the papers was marked by a press conference organized by Greenpeace in Manila to allow survivors of the disaster to share their stories, as they could not obtain visas to travel to the UK and follow the process on the ground. Among those to speak was Trixy Elle and Regena Torrejas. In the weeks leading up to the anniversary and the formal filing of the lawsuit, Elle had left her family in an evacuation centre after their island was threatened by yet another typhoon to fly half way around the world to Brazil where she spoke to world leaders about what had happened to her.

Speaking in Filipino and English, Elle grew tearful as she told the story of what happened the day of the disaster once again, the deaths, the lack of help, and how life had to go on amidst the devastation.

“We are just ordinary people, we can do something,” Elle said. “If we come together in what we do, let's give our community a voice, I know we can do something. I know that this will be a long journey for us. This will be a tough journey but we are not ready to wait, we are ready to fight.”

Torrejas described how Super Typhoon Odette had destroyed the livelihood of people on her island, and how they had yet to recover.

“My only call to every Filipino is to unite in this fight. Because it's not for us now but for the next generation,” Torrejas said.

The case follows major developments in climate litigation, including a recent decision in German courts that would have allowed a Peruvian farmer to sue coal-fired power producer RWE for the harms caused by their historical commissions, and another recent case filed by four Indonesians against Swiss concrete giant Holcim. It also marks the first lawsuit filed following the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion outlining what obligations countries have to address climate change. It will also rely on the latest developments in attribution science, which seeks to link emitters with rises in emissions and their contribution to climate harms—even to the extent of being able to put a dollar figure to climate impacts.

Emmett Connaire, a Senior Analyst at UK-based climate group Influence Map, which manages a database in collaboration with the Climate Accountability Institute tracking the historical CO2 emissions of global fossil fuel producers, said that based on this work Shell is responsible for over 2% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This, he said, makes it the fourth-largest investor-owned emitter in history. A recent extreme event attribution study described Odette as a “compound event” where the impacts “often result from a combination of several meteorological extremes”. It concluded that anthropogenic climate change “has likely more than doubled the risk of combined high winds and heavy rainfall like those due to Typhoon Odette” and estimated economic damages due to climate change from Odette as over USD$450m in 2021.

“While the impacts were caused by a range of factors including exposure and vulnerability, [anthropogenic climate change] played a significant role in amplifying the damage, and this risk will very likely continue to grow with increasing levels of warming,” the study said.

Unlike the recent decision by German courts in RWE, however, the case brought by survivors of Super Typhoon Odette takes aim at Shell not over damage that may be caused in the future but over events that have already transpired. In a letter before action sent by lawyers representing the survivors that outlined the claim against the company, it alleged that Shell was “aware for decades that the burning of fossil fuels is a primary driver of anthropogenic climate change and that despite this knowledge, it expanded its production and sale of fossil fuels, tripling its greenhouse gas emissions between 1965 and 2021.”

“Our clients allege that in prioritizing financial gain over environmental responsibility, Shell also engaged in public relations campaigns and political lobbying designed to undermine scientific consensus on climate change,” it said. “More specifically, the LBA argues that through its contribution of more than 2.5% of historical global industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Shell has materially contributed to ACC [anthropogenic climate change] and, in turn, made Typhoon Odette more likely and more severe.”

The aftermath of Odette. Photo by Trixy Elle.

With Shell headquartered in the UK, the case will ask British courts to apply Philippine law, as the law of the land where the harm arose and where the right to a balanced and healthy ecology is recognized by the Philippine Constitution. UK courts have already allowed multiple cases with complicated jurisdictions like this to move forward, including other cases against Shell filed by Nigerian plaintiffs for the company’s impact on ecosystems in that country. The Odette case will rely on four causes of action under Philippine law: that Shell caused damage to the claimants in a manner contrary to morals, good customs or public policy; that Shell violated the claimants’ constitutional right to a balanced and healthy environment; that Shell acted with negligence as it had the opportunity to mitigate harm and an obligation to refrain from obfuscating climate change; and that Shell has been unjustly enriched by profiting from oil and gas extraction at the expense of the claimants. This case relies on a 2022 report by the Philippines Commission on Human Rights which examined the impacts of climate change on the human rights of Filipinos and which provided a framework for holding oil, gas and coal producers to account for both climate harms and for obfuscation.

Greg Lascelles, a member of the legal team representing the 103 survivors, said the case will take direct aim at Shell over its early awareness about the effect its activities would have on the atmosphere.

“We say that [Shell] knew from at least the 1960s that fossil fuels were the primary cause of climate change, yet it chose not to reduce its activities or change course, and it tried to undermine the emerging scientific consensus on the causes and likely effects of climate change,” Lascelles said.

Shell has repeatedly and consistently denied it had any special knowledge about climate change. It did not respond to Drilled’s request for comment by publication.

Combined, these factors make the case brought by survivors of Typhoon Odette one of the most significant recent climate cases filed by people living in the Global South against a major oil and gas producer in the Global North. Should they win, it may set a new precedent for plaintiffs from developing countries to hold industrial giants to account. With courts moving slowly and a decision unclear, the stakes couldn’t be higher, especially for the survivors. Already the 2025 typhoon season in the region around the Philippines has seen 40 tropical cyclones form, with 14 intensifying into named storms and one becoming a super typhoon. In November, Typhoon Fung-wong killed eight people and displaced 1.4m people across the Philippines, weeks after the country was dealing with Typhoon Kalmaegi which killed 224 people as it blew through to lash Vietnam.

Elle says she sees the beginning of a vicious cyclone of rolling catastrophes, with the increased frequency of storms giving no opportunity to recover and rebuild.

“The poor are getting even more poor because we are recovering from the typhoon and then there is another typhoon all over again, and then recovering again,” she says.

“ We don't deserve this. We contribute very little emission, yet we pay the highest price.”