Are we closing in on true ‘end-to-end’ attribution?

Two decades of climate change attribution research have shed light on the impacts of climate change occurring worldwide. The first wave of attribution research quantified climate change impacts on the intensity and probability of extreme weather events and slow-onset changes in glaciers and sea levels. Over the past decade, impact attribution studies have extended these methods to assess the attributable impacts of extreme events on agriculture, health, economic losses and biodiversity. Concurrently, source attribution research quantified individual emitters’ contributions to climate change impacts.

The emissions of individual actors cause climate change impacts. The approximately linear relationship between cumulative CO₂ emissions and global temperature rise, combined with the fact that many climate change impacts become progressively worse with rising global temperatures, provides a conceptual basis for this claim. Steady progress towards being able to quantify individual emitters’ contributions to specific losses has brought us closer to true ‘end-to-end’ attribution. However, while studies have quantified emitters’ contributions to aggregate impacts such as regional economic losses, are there circumstances in which we might be able to attribute specific, individual losses to individual actors? This presentation will discuss the scientific possibility of achieving this objective and the legal consequences that may follow.