Who’s your neighbor now?

Fossil fuels: the F word in duplicate. While international climate conferences get bogged down in ineffectual declarations and unmet targets, courts of law have become significant sites of climate action. In The Climate Trial (2026) activist-turned-anthropologist Noah Walker-Crawford tells the story of a case at the forefront of the judicial battle against climate change. In 2015, a Peruvian farmer sued German energy company RWE, claiming damages for flood risk to his home in the Andes ­— and almost won. The unlikely part was that the company doesn’t actually operate in Peru. But with scientific studies showing how much individual polluters contribute to global warming, what matters is that its emissions do. 

Even though last year a German appeal court finally ruled in favour of RWE, it affirmed its 2017 decision that under German nuisance law a company like RWE could be held legally liable for its share of damage threatened by global warming to a property halfway across the world.

In his book, Walker-Crawford sets out the chain of events behind this improbable lawsuit. In 2014, climate activists from non-profit Germanwatch had witnessed faltering negotiations at the UN Climate Change Conference in Lima. They wanted to put more pressure on industry and governments through legal action, and so after the conference, they travelled to the Cordillera Blanca — a Peruvian mountain range affected by glacier melt — to see whether there was a case there to support. Until that point, Walker-Crawford recounts, no lawsuit had ever successfully held a company or country liable for its contribution to climate change.

Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk has been burning coal to generate electricity since the late nineteenth century. The company runs lignite mines and coal-fired power stations across Europe and North America, while it also invests in renewables and battery storage. However, in 2015, RWE was the highest carbon emitter in Europe and thus an obvious target for a lawsuit in Germany. But who could bring the claim? 

Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a farmer and mountain guide, lives in Huaraz, a town beneath Lake Palcacocha surrounded by mountains. It has become a precarious place. He has witnessed the glaciers melting and the rising volume of water in the lake, which increases the risk of flooding the town below. As Walker-Crawford explains, Andeans engage with mountains as living beings and they feel their suffering as the glaciers retreat. The traditional response is to offer pago — a tribute — to appease the mountains, but Lliuya came to recognise that « blame for the changes [lay] not with Peruvians like himself but with wealthy countries and large companies » and he wanted to take some action. Walker-Crawford was instrumental in making that happen: not only had he previously worked at Germanwatch but he was then living in the Andes doing academic research. Through mutual friends, he helped introduce Lliuya to the German activists who told him that he had a case.