A new peer-reviewed study has found that 111 of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies are directly responsible for an estimated $28 trillion in global economic damage caused by climate change. The research, conducted by scientists at Dartmouth College and published in the journal Nature, provides one of the most detailed scientific assessments to date linking individual corporate emissions to real-world financial harm.
The findings are intended to inform and bolster efforts to hold major emitters financially accountable for climate change under existing and emerging liability frameworks. “Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming,” the study’s authors wrote. “Using scope 1 and 3 emissions data from major fossil fuel companies, peer-reviewed attribution methods and advances in empirical climate economics, we illustrate the trillions in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual companies.”
According to the analysis, more than half of the total damage is attributable to just 10 companies, including Chevron, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Pemex, the British Coal Corporation, Coal India, and the National Iranian Oil Co. Saudi Aramco and Gazprom alone are estimated to have each caused over $2 trillion in heat-related damage.
The scale of the losses is staggering. The $28 trillion figure is just shy of the total value of all goods and services produced in the United States in 2024. The researchers calculated that for every 1 percent of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere since 1990, $502 billion in heat-related economic damage has occurred. The study only considered losses due to extreme heat, not those resulting from other climate events such as floods, hurricanes, or droughts.
To arrive at these estimates, the team used emissions data going back 137 years and applied sophisticated computer modeling techniques to simulate what global temperatures would have looked like in the absence of emissions from specific companies. They then compared those projections with actual temperature data to estimate how much warming each company had caused. According to the researchers, Chevron’s emissions alone increased Earth’s surface temperature by 0.045 degrees Fahrenheit.
They further applied a formula that connects extreme heat intensity to economic output, calculating the impact of each company’s pollution on the planet’s five hottest days using 80 additional simulations. The approach builds on methodologies used for more than a decade to attribute specific extreme weather events to climate change.
Lead author Christopher Callahan, now an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University, said the study is an attempt to determine “the causal linkages that underlie many of these theories of accountability.” Co-author Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth, noted, “Everybody’s asking the same question: What can we actually claim about who has caused this? And that really comes down to a thermodynamic question of can we trace climate hazards and/or their damages back to particular emitters?”
The answer, according to the study’s authors, is yes. “Drawing quantitative linkages between individual emitters and particularized harms is now feasible, making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims,” the paper states.
Although legal systems around the world have struggled to pin down climate liability, the study could provide a significant evidentiary boost to ongoing litigation. According to Zero Carbon Analytics, 68 climate damage lawsuits have been filed globally, with more than half of them in the United States. Mankin believes this study may shift the conversation: “This really laid clear how the veil of plausible deniability doesn’t exist anymore scientifically. We can actually trace harms back to major emitters.”
So far, none of the lawsuits filed against fossil fuel corporations for climate damages have succeeded. Still, the science continues to evolve. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, called the methods “quite robust” and said, “It would be good in my view if this approach would be taken up more by different groups. As with event attribution, the more groups do it, the better the science gets and the better we know what makes a difference and what does not.”
Other scientists echoed the study’s significance. “We have now reached a point in the climate crisis where the total damages are so immense that the contributions of a single company’s product can amount to tens of billions of dollars a year,” said Chris Field, a Stanford University climate scientist who did not participate in the research. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, described the results as a “proof of concept,” though he emphasized the figures are likely a conservative estimate of the total damage caused by these firms.
Shell declined to comment on the study. Other major companies named—Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP—did not respond to requests for comment.
In the past, individual companies’ responsibility for climate damage was obscured by the sheer scale and complexity of climate data. But the Dartmouth study represents a significant step forward in quantifying corporate accountability. Its conclusions may reshape both public discourse and the legal landscape surrounding fossil fuel-driven climate change.
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