A groundbreaking approach now makes it possible to estimate, with formal rigor, the economic damages tied to emissions from individual fossil fuel companies. In a detailed study, researchers argue that attribution science, which historically linked weather events to climate change, can be extended to quantify the monetary toll of emissions by specific firms. The central claim is stark: if the emissions traced to the 111 largest carbon-intensive companies were removed, the global economy would be significantly richer—potentially by trillions of dollars. The authors suggest that this method could furnish a new form of legal argument in climate litigation, reframing climate disasters as events with identifiable human fingerprints rather than “acts of God.” The study presents a scalable framework, capable of isolating the contribution of particular emitters to both long-term climate trends and to specific extreme weather incidents, and it places concrete dollar estimates on those contributions across time. This rewrite examines the method, its implications for policy and law, and the challenges ahead in applying such analysis at scale.
How attribution science works and its evolution
Attribution science has evolved from a relatively narrow focus on whether climate change influenced the probability or intensity of specific events to a broader framework for quantifying the economic consequences of emissions linked to particular actors. Traditionally, scientists ran climate models with and without the additional carbon dioxide released by human activities to assess changes in the frequency or severity of weather events. By comparing results from these two model runs, researchers could infer how much climate change altered the likelihood or severity of phenomena such as rainfall, heat, or storm intensity. This comparative approach creates a causal link between anthropogenic emissions and observed weather patterns, providing a scientific basis for assigning responsibility in a broad sense.
The authors of the Nature study extend this logic to the corporate level. Rather than focusing on a global aggregate, they propose calculating the estimated emissions attributable to individual corporations, and then assessing how those emissions shift the probabilities of climate-related impacts. The analysis allows for various timescales, including the impact of emissions over a specific window—such as a few decades—and the cumulative effect on long-run temperatures and extreme temperature events. The methodology emphasizes flexibility: researchers can model different levels of emitted CO2, including the amount associated with particular companies, to generate a probabilistic forecast of weather outcomes with and without those emissions. This flexibility is crucial because it enables the analysis to be adapted to diverse legal, economic, and historical contexts.
Key to the approach is translating emissions into changes in global mean surface temperature, which then cascade into alterations in the distribution of extreme temperatures, rainfall intensity, and other climate hazards. The researchers also connect those physical changes to observable economic damages, using econometric evidence that links climate hazards with outcomes such as income loss, reduced agricultural yields, increased mortality, and slowed growth. This step—linking climatic shifts to economic costs—provides the bridge between physical science and financial accounting. The framework can be applied to broad, population-wide impacts or to the financial costs associated with specific events, depending on the data available and the scale of interest. In short, attribution science now offers a pathway from emissions by a company to tangible costs borne by societies, communities, and markets.
This body of work underscores a crucial methodological point: attribution studies can incorporate a range of scenarios. Analysts can compute the “but-for” scenario, asking what would have happened if a company had not emitted the amount under study. They can then compare the present climate with a hypothetical climate that excludes those emissions. By doing so, the analysis yields a probabilistic estimate of the degree to which a company’s emissions contributed to changes in temperature or the intensity of hazards and, by extension, the damages those hazards caused. The study demonstrates how this framework can be scaled from a single event to a full historical period, producing a spectrum of costs that reflect different assumptions and data inputs. In this way, attribution science becomes a versatile tool for quantifying corporate responsibility in the context of climate risk.
From emissions to temperatures, and then to economic damages
The authors outline a multi-step process that begins with converting corporate emissions into a measure that can be tied to climate outcomes. First, emissions attributed to a company are translated into their contribution to changes in the global mean surface temperature. This step requires empirical models that capture how added CO2 alters the planet’s heat balance and, importantly, how those changes manifest across time. The temperature impact then informs projections of more extreme temperatures, including the expected number of days and the magnitude of heat extremes. The second step is translating those shifts in extreme temperatures into economic damages. Researchers rely on econometric studies that quantify relationships between climate hazards and economic outcomes, such as crop losses, reductions in yields, income disruption, and health-related costs.
In practice, the method allows for a range of potential damage scenarios rather than a single fixed figure. This reflects real-world uncertainty in both climate sensitivity and the socio-economic pathways through which climate impacts translate into costs. The framework can analyze long horizons—spanning decades—where the emissions history of a company is chained to temperature trajectories and hazard distributions. It can also focus on shorter intervals, for example, the period from 1991 to 2020, to estimate the damages associated with that span. The analysis is not limited to a single set of assumptions; researchers can experiment with different starting points, such as when internal corporate awareness of climate risks began to cohere, to examine how the attribution results shift across historical framing. This adaptability enhances the relevance of the findings for historical accountability and for future risk assessments.
The study emphasizes that the approach has significant flexibility. If scientists determine that climate change increased the likelihood of a given event, they can quantify how much of that increased risk can be traced to specific emissions, and, in turn, how those emissions contribute to the event’s financial cost. They also underscore the use of empirical, peer-reviewed econometric estimates to tie temperatures and hazards to economic losses. This helps ensure that the damages attributed to particular emissions are grounded in observed relationships, rather than speculative assumptions. The combination of physical climate attribution with econometric damage estimation provides a coherent narrative linking emissions to concrete financial consequences, moving beyond abstract probabilities to tangible numbers.
The researchers also highlight the practical flexibility of analyzing emissions over restricted periods. They note that internal corporate analyses from decades ago suggested climate risks were a concern long before the public discourse crystallized, and they show how focusing on the emissions that occurred after such risk awareness began can yield meaningful estimates. This ingredient underscores the historical dimension of the analysis and allows for a better understanding of when responsibility became measurable in a legal or economic sense. The result is a framework that can accommodate both historical accountability and forward-looking risk assessment, offering a way to quantify the cost of emissions within specific corporate histories and across longer planetary scales.
Major damages attributed to the leading carbon majors
The study applies its framework to a set of leading carbon-intensive companies, often referred to as the “carbon majors.” By aggregating the emissions from these entities and tracing their climate impacts through to economic damages, the researchers assemble a global picture of how corporate activity translates into financial losses. Using the proposed method, the researchers estimate a broad range of damages for the major emitters, with the results showing striking magnitudes even under conservative assumptions, and far larger totals when extended to the entire cohort of carbon-intensive firms.
In one illustrative example, the analysis attributes a portion of the warming to a specific company’s emissions in a given year and then scales that contribution to an estimated economic toll. For instance, they consider how Chevron’s emissions in a given year contributed to warming, and subsequently to damages associated with extreme heat. The calculations yield a wide range of potential damages for that year, reflecting uncertainty in climate sensitivity, economic impacts, and the precise attribution of effects to a single actor. The study demonstrates that, in certain periods, the damages attributable to a major emitter can reach substantial levels, with the most consequential outcomes concentrated in tropical and less-developed regions that experience a higher burden of climate risks.
When the researchers extend the analysis to the five largest emitters—chevron, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, and BP—they estimate a combined damage figure on the order of trillions of dollars, illustrating how a small group of actors can account for a large share of climate-related economic losses. The figures indicate that the top five emitters each contribute significant sums, with Chevron’s modeled impact cited as a representative example of how emissions translate into measurable damages. Across all 111 carbon majors included in the study, the total reported damages reach an estimated tens of trillions of dollars, underscoring the scale of potential accountability that could emerge under this framework. The analysis emphasizes that these totals are not mere projections but are anchored in the probabilistic outcomes produced by the attribution models.
The study also breaks down regional effects. A substantial portion of the damages concentrates in tropical regions, where climate hazards interact with vulnerability to yield considerable economic losses. This regional pattern highlights how the same climate event can have very different fiscal consequences depending on a country’s exposure, infrastructure, and economic resilience. The results imply that climate damages from emissions are not uniformly distributed but are instead shaped by geography, development level, and adaptation capacity. This nuance is essential for policymakers and litigants who seek to understand where accountability and redress might be most meaningful or necessary. The full roster of 111 carbon majors is associated with a sprawling, multi-decade damages estimate, illustrating how cumulative emissions contribute to the long arc of climate risk and economic costs.
The researchers also present sensitivity analyses to show how different assumptions about starting dates—or the pace of economic damages in particular regions—can shift the overall totals. They offer alternative baselines, such as using the long historical window starting in the mid-19th century, or beginning in the late 1970s when some of the earliest corporate risk assessments emerged. These alternative scenarios yield different but still substantial damage estimates, reinforcing the central conclusion that corporate emissions have profound and measurable economic consequences over time. The analysis thus provides a framework for exploring questions of responsibility in both historical and contemporary contexts, while acknowledging the uncertainties inherent in projecting climate and economic outcomes across many decades.
It is important to note what the study does not claim. The authors caution that they do not attempt to quantify the benefits of burning fossil fuels in any period, nor do they attempt to enumerate all non-climate costs, such as health-related pollution impacts that fall outside the climate framework. By focusing on climate-driven economic damages, the analysis isolates a specific pathway of cost linked to a subset of activities and their emissions. This specificity helps sharpen the accountability conversation while leaving room for separate analyses of other social and environmental costs associated with fossil fuel use. The resulting figures should be interpreted as estimates of climate-related damages attributable to major emitters, presented within the probabilistic and methodologically defined bounds of attribution science. Policymakers and legal scholars can use these estimates as a basis for further inquiry, risk assessment, and potential redress, subject to the evolving standards of evidence and standards of liability in different jurisdictions.
Period-by-period insights and what starting points reveal
Beyond modeling a single historical window, the researchers compare damages across different starting points to reveal how the length and timing of emissions history affect the scale of economic losses. They translate a portion of the climate impact into damages by considering a specific share of global emissions—roughly 5 percent—as a reference point. That 5 percent threshold represents a substantial slice of the world’s carbon output, roughly equivalent to a quarter of the United States’ annual contribution or slightly more than Brazil’s total emissions. By applying the attribution framework to these varying baselines, the study demonstrates how the overall damage estimates climb or decline depending on when the analysis begins.
Looking at the full period with reliable global temperature records beginning in the mid-19th century, the damages attributed to the 5 percent of emissions rise to several trillion dollars. Beginning the analysis at 1977, when internal corporate research began to warn of climate risks, reduces the total damages somewhat but still yields a multi-trillion-dollar figure. If the analysis instead uses 1990 as the point at which scientific consensus solidified that climate change was occurring, the resulting damages remain substantial but are reduced further. These comparative results underscore the sensitivity of damage estimates to historical framing and the underlying assumptions about when climate risk became a recognized factor in corporate strategy and public policy. The takeaway is that historical context matters for quantifying accountability, and the framework can be tuned to reflect different narratives about when responsibility began to accumulate in a measurable way.
In addition to the long-horizon totals, the study presents event-level analyses that highlight the economic costs tied to specific climate incidents. For example, when examining a heat wave in North America in 2012, the researchers attribute nearly $30 billion in damages to Chevron’s share of the event. They also report substantial but smaller figures for other notable heat events—Russia in 2010 and France in 2003, which yielded damages of about $28.8 billion and $3 billion respectively. These event-focused results illustrate how attribution science can scale to concrete, district- or country-level losses, offering a granular view of how corporate emissions translate into real-world economic consequences. The figures emphasize the outsized impact that heat events can have when coupled with economic and demographic vulnerabilities, especially in regions with high population density and critical infrastructure. The event-level analysis thus complements the broader, long-term estimates by showing how emissions are linked to tangible, observable costs in a given timeframe.
As with any complex scientific approach, several caveats accompany these results. The authors caution that attribution analyses depend on model specifications, data quality, and the assumptions embedded in the hazard-damage linkages. The results should be interpreted as probabilistic estimates that convey the likelihood and potential magnitude of damages rather than precise, single-point numbers. The uncertainties inherent in climate sensitivity, future adaptation, economic conditions, and policy changes all influence the final figures. The framework offers a structured way to compare scenarios and to explore how sensitive results are to different inputs, which is valuable for risk management, insurance, and legal planning. The emphasis on probabilistic ranges invites stakeholders to consider a spectrum of possible outcomes, rather than a single definitive price on a company’s carbon contributions. This probabilistic framing is particularly important when it comes to legal applications, where evidentiary standards and burden of proof can vary by jurisdiction and context.
The regional variation in damages also has significant policy implications. The concentration of costs in tropical regions highlights how vulnerability and development level interact with climate risk. It suggests that corporate accountability for climate damages may intersect with international development policy, disaster risk reduction, and financial risk transmission across borders. The study’s regional breakdown can inform targeted adaptation investments and climate finance discussions, helping to prioritize resilience-building in areas most susceptible to climate-driven economic losses. It also points to the potential for differential treatment in any legal claims, where jurisdiction, the scale of damages, and local economic structures could shape the paths toward redress or settlement. Overall, the period-by-period insights reinforce the message that the climate economy operates on long time horizons and that responsible actors may face cumulative costs that reflect decades of emissions.
Potential legal implications and who bears responsibility
Callahan and Mankin explicitly connect their attribution framework to potential legal liability. They argue that science has progressed to a point where it can illuminate causal relationships that bear on claims of harm. In civil liability terms, many suits require plaintiffs to establish a causal connection between a defendant’s actions and an injury, sometimes through a but-for standard: if the defendant’s actions had not occurred, the injury would not have happened. The study’s approach aligns with that logic by comparing a climate scenario including all emissions with a hypothetical world where specific emissions from particular companies are removed. In such a framework, damages described in the analysis can be interpreted as the portion of costs that would not have occurred in the absence of those emissions, under certain model assumptions.
The authors acknowledge that translating attribution results into legal standards is not straightforward. Several ongoing questions shape the feasibility of litigation: Which party should be held liable—an individual company, a consortium, or an entire sector? How should responsibility be allocated when emissions are interdependent and cross-border? Could suits target state actors for failing to regulate or protect the public from climate risks? And how should the law adapt to accept attribution-derived damages as evidence of causal contribution? These questions reflect broader jurisprudential debates about the scope of liability, causation, and apportionment in environmental harms. They also point to the need for standardized methodologies and transparent data when courts assess climate responsibility across different cases and jurisdictions.
Beyond the question of liability, the study also references existing legal theories that have been invoked in other contexts, such as public nuisance or misrepresentation regarding climate risks to investors. The authors do not claim that attribution-derived costs automatically translate into liability under these or other theories; rather, they propose that the attribution approach provides a rigorous evidentiary basis that could support future claims. The legal landscape for climate accountability remains unsettled and varies by legal system, but the study’s framework offers a structured, scientifically grounded method for estimating the scale of damages associated with corporate emissions. This could potentially inform settlements, fines, or policy-driven accountability mechanisms that complement existing regulatory approaches. If adopted, such a framework would push corporations to consider climate risk as a material factor in their long-term financial and strategic planning.
The study also implies that the use of attribution science in courtrooms would require careful construction of expert testimony, standardization of models, and transparent disclosure of assumptions and uncertainties. Legal practitioners would need to assess the reliability and relevance of the climate-to-damages linkages for each case, ensuring that the evidence presented aligns with the standards of admissibility, credibility, and tolerance for competing expert interpretations in different jurisdictions. The potential for litigation funding, class actions, and settlements that reflect a company’s share of climate damages could rise as this framework gains traction. However, the authors caution that litigation is only one possible avenue for redress, and the broader policy landscape—including climate finance, regulation, and public health investments—will continue to shape how societies address the costs of emissions over time.
In sum, the attribution-based damages framework presents a compelling possibility for reframing climate accountability through a mathematical and econometric lens. It provides a plausible route for linking corporate emissions to specific climate-induced costs, thereby informing potential legal strategies and policy discussions. While the legal pathway remains complex and contingent on jurisdictional rules and evidentiary standards, the methodology offers a robust starting point for arguing that climate damages have identifiable human origins that can be traced back to particular corporate actors. As courts, policymakers, and stakeholders continue to navigate these questions, attribution science stands as a powerful tool that could redefine how society assigns responsibility for climate risks and their economic consequences.
Limitations, caveats, and the path forward
Despite the ambitious scope of the attribution framework, several important caveats temper the interpretation of the results. First, the approach relies on climate and economic models that carry inherent uncertainties. The estimated damages are probabilistic, not definitive numbers, and their accuracy depends on model specifications, data inputs, and the choice of baselines. Small changes in assumptions—such as the exact rate of climate sensitivity to CO2, the degree of natural climate variability, or future economic growth trajectories—can shift the results meaningfully. Consequently, the numbers reported in any single study should be viewed as indicative ranges rather than precise tallies. This underscores the need for transparent reporting of uncertainties, sensitivity analyses, and cross-validation with independent methodologies to build confidence in the estimates.
Second, the analysis does not attempt to quantify all costs associated with fossil fuel use. It deliberately isolates climate-driven economic damages and excludes other negative externalities, including direct health harms from pollution or broader ecological degradation. While this focus helps isolate a particular channel of costs, policy decisions and litigation will likely require a broader accounting that encompasses health, ecosystem services, social disruption, and other climate-related harms. Integrating those additional dimensions would require extending the framework to incorporate a wider set of damage pathways and interactions, which is a complex but essential step for comprehensive accountability.
Third, the attribution of damages to specific companies involves attributing outcomes to particular emission sources, which can be challenging when emissions are produced along a long supply chain or across linked financial and corporate networks. The methodology assumes that emissions can be traced with sufficient precision to individual actors, but real-world emissions accounting often involves shared responsibility, joint ventures, and indirect contributions through consumer use of fossil fuels. This complexity means that in practice, the apportionment of damages to a single company or a handful of firms will likely be contested and require careful legal and accounting treatment. Policymakers and litigants will need to define clear rules for attribution, including how to handle joint responsibility, shared emissions, and the role of intermediaries in the supply chain.
Fourth, the approach emphasizes historical analysis and probabilistic future projections, which can raise questions about the relevance of past findings to current or future policy and litigation. Shifts in energy markets, technological innovations, regulatory reforms, and behavioral changes can all alter the trajectory of emissions and climate damages. While the framework can incorporate updated data and scenarios, stakeholders should recognize that the results reflect a snapshot conditioned on the data and models used at the time of analysis. Continuous updating and refinement will be essential as new data, methods, and policy contexts emerge.
Fifth, the study’s regional breakdown highlights that damages are not evenly distributed, with tropical and developing regions often bearing a disproportionate share of the costs. This distribution underscores ethical and geopolitical considerations, including questions about climate justice and the responsibility of wealthier economies to support resilience and adaptation in more vulnerable regions. Any policy or legal response informed by attribution-based damages will need to grapple with these equity concerns, ensuring that accountability mechanisms are fair, transparent, and sensitive to historical emissions, development needs, and capacity to respond to climate risks.
Looking ahead, researchers envision a number of avenues to refine and scale the attribution framework. Enhancements could include integrating more granular, sector-specific data, improving the treatment of supply chains, and widening the set of economic outcomes beyond GDP-like measures to include wages, employment, health costs, and long-term productivity. Cross-disciplinary collaboration among climate scientists, economists, legal scholars, and data scientists will be essential to operationalize the approach in policy and courtrooms. Standardized protocols, reproducible code, and open-data practices would help ensure that different teams can reproduce results, compare methodologies, and build consensus on credibility and applicability. The evolving legal landscape will likely shape how this research is received, interpreted, and applied, with trial courts, regulatory bodies, and international forums playing pivotal roles in defining admissible methods and acceptable levels of proof.
Practical implications for policy, finance, and accountability
The possibility of attributing climate damages to individual corporate emitters carries wide implications for public policy, financial markets, and corporate governance. Policymakers could consider adopting attribution-based damage assessments as a complement to existing regulatory instruments, including environmental liability regimes, climate-related disclosure requirements, and risk-based capital standards for financial institutions exposed to climate risk. By quantifying the potential costs of emissions at the corporate level, regulators could design more precise incentives or penalties that reflect a company’s specific contribution to climate harm. This could influence licensing decisions, permitting processes, and the allocation of climate finance for mitigation and adaptation. It could also inform baselining and disclosure requirements for investors who need to account for climate-related liabilities in their portfolios.
For the financial sector, the framework offers a new lens for assessing climate risk and accountability. Insurance companies, asset managers, and lenders may use attribution-derived estimates to price risk, set capital reserves, or adjust underwriting policies for fossil fuel-related exposures. The prospect of sizable, company-specific liability estimates could alter risk premia, credit ratings, and investment strategies, reinforcing incentives for rapid decarbonization and more robust risk management. It also creates a potential market dynamics question: will strategic shifts by major emitters toward lower-carbon technologies reduce the attributable damages, or will market-adjusted expectations undermine the economic resilience of high-emitting firms? The answers will depend on evolving scientific consensus, policy developments, and the legal environment.
For corporations, the study foregrounds climate risk as a material, potentially quantifiable financial liability. Firms may respond by strengthening governance around climate risk, enhancing disclosure of emissions and their financial implications, and accelerating strategies to reduce carbon intensity. The potential exposure to attribution-based damages underscores the strategic importance of climate risk management, scenario planning, and investment in low-carbon technologies. It also highlights the need for clear, credible corporate narratives about how emissions are being managed and how future risk is being mitigated. The emergence of such liability paradigms could influence corporate behavior, market competition, and the pace of energy transition across sectors.
The public discourse surrounding climate accountability could be reshaped by the ability to attach concrete dollar figures to emissions contributions. Communities affected by climate hazards, non-governmental organizations, and civil society groups may gain an additional evidentiary tool for seeking redress or advancing reform. However, it is essential to maintain rigorous standards of evidence and to safeguard due process, ensuring that attribution-based damages are approached with scientific integrity, fairness, and proportionality. The path forward will involve collaboration among scientists, lawyers, policymakers, and the broader public to establish norms for evidence, liability, and accountability that reflect both the scientific realities of climate change and the ethical imperatives of climate justice.
Conclusion
The emerging attribution-based framework offers a powerful, data-driven way to quantify the economic costs of climate-changing emissions at the level of individual companies. By linking emissions to temperature changes, extreme weather, and ultimately to measurable economic damages, the approach translates abstract climate risk into concrete quantities that can inform policy, finance, and law. The results indicate that the top carbon majors collectively account for trillions of dollars in damages, with notable examples such as substantial costs linked to major heat events and multi-year assessments spanning decades. The analysis also emphasizes that damages vary by period, geography, and vulnerability, highlighting the regional and historical dimensions of climate risk.
While promising, this framework comes with important caveats. It relies on models with inherent uncertainties, requires careful handling of attribution to specific entities within complex supply chains, and necessarily excludes some non-climate costs. The legal implications are equally nuanced, requiring careful consideration of causation, liability standards, and equitable treatment across jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the methodology provides a rigorous path toward understanding corporate responsibility for climate damages and offers a structured basis for risk assessment, policy design, and potential redress. As climate science, economics, and law continue to advance, attribution-based damages could play an increasingly central role in how societies allocate responsibility for climate risk, incentivize decarbonization, and pursue accountability for harms linked to fossil fuel emissions.