Dadu, Pakistan – Inayatullah Laghari stands on his toes, pointing to a faint line on the school wall, a watermark left by floodwaters that submerged the building and surrounding villages during the devastating floods that hit Pakistan four years ago.
For him, it is a reminder of how much water has risen in his village Baid Sharif in Dadu district of Sindh, Pakistan’s worst-hit province, where agriculture is the mainstay for millions of farmers like Laghari.
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The 40-year-old farmer walks on a patch of nearby road, an area that was not under water in 2022. Whatever crop Inayatullah was able to save from his flooded storage room was placed on the patch, as he slept near the heap for a month to keep it safe.
“I had made up my mind that if the water level rose further, I would throw everything on the roof of the school, which was still above the water, and pray that the water would not reach there,” he says. “Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that, but whatever I had saved later got spoiled.”
The floods of 2022 – the worst to date in Pakistan’s recorded history – displaced 30 million people, killed over 1,700, submerged millions of acres of farmland, and destroyed or damaged over a million homes, with total damage estimated at a staggering $40 billion.
The devastating floods were a climate disaster in a country that contributes less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions. The government of Pakistan blamed the disaster on the country’s sensitivity to climate change, with Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman calling the floods a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions”, while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described it as a “monsoon on steroids”.
Today, Laghari is one of 39 Pakistani farmers from the worst-hit province of Sindh who have taken two German companies, RWE and Heidelberg Materials, to court over greenhouse gas emissions that they say contributed to the historic deluge in 2022.
RWE, headquartered in the German city of Essen, is one of Europe’s largest electricity producers. Heidelberg Materials, based in the German city of the same name, is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of construction materials. The two companies are among 178 industrial producers around the world that are responsible for 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to data from Carbon Majors, a climate change think tank that tracks historical emissions from the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers.
Miriam Sage-Mab, legal director of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which represents farmers, told Al Jazeera that the companies were singled out as “two of the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide in Germany” according to the Carbon Majors database.
Pakistani farmers filed a lawsuit against both companies in the Heidelberg court last December, which is currently reviewing the case.
Sage-Mab said neither company has any ground operations in Pakistan, but the lawsuit argued that despite the absence of physical proximity, the effects of the greenhouse gases they emit are felt thousands of kilometers away in Germany. She says that there is a strong possibility that the hearing of the farmers’ case will proceed.
For him, he said, the importance of the case lies in helping to define how responsibility for climate damage can be calculated and assigned, not only in courts, but also in future political negotiations related to climate finance.
The case is inspired by a Peruvian farmer who sued RWE over similar allegations in 2015. While a German court dismissed that case in 2025, it also ruled that companies could, in theory, be held liable for specific climate-related harms caused by their carbon emissions.
Such rulings make Germany “somewhat” a favorable jurisdiction for climate litigation, Sage-Mab said, adding that such international climate cases are increasingly being pursued around the world.
Approaching German courts to hold companies accountable in Pakistan is not a new thing.
Following a fire at a garment factory in Karachi in 2012 that killed more than 250 workers, one of the survivors and relatives of the victims filed a lawsuit in Germany in 2015 against a company called KiK, which sourced a large portion of its products from the Pakistani factory. The petitioners argued that the company failed to ensure basic fire and building safety standards.
While the case was dismissed on procedural grounds, it led KiK to compensate victims and helped accelerate debate around corporate accountability in global supply chains. In 2023, Germany introduced a supply chain law aimed at addressing human rights violations by companies operating abroad.
The Pakistan-based trade union, which helped the garment factory victims fight their case, is now helping 39 farmers, collecting and translating testimonies and evidence before sending them to the legal team in Germany.
Nasir Mansoor, general secretary of the National Trade Union Federation, told Al Jazeera that the farmers’ lawsuit is Pakistan’s first cross-border climate lawsuit.
“There has to be accountability,” he said. “We need to knock on their doors and tell them that what you’re doing is causing us trouble in Pakistan. This trial is a campaign for justice and to raise awareness of what is happening.”
In a statement in January, RWE said the lawsuit was “a further attempt to shift climate policy demands to German courts”, arguing that climate cases like Pakistan’s are “massively damaging for Germany as an industrial location” and undermine legal certainty that German companies will not be sued from other parts of the world even if they follow the law.
Heidelberg Materials confirmed receiving legal notice on the Pakistan case, but has not issued any public statement on the lawsuit.
Laghari says local authorities in Pakistan failed to support him in his recovery from the floods. He says people were either left to fend for themselves or were assisted by NGOs. Farmers also believe that there is nothing they can do to hold the Pakistani government accountable, especially in court.
“What is the point of making a case against him in the courts here?” Laghari asks. “We have some cases in villages that are stuck in court for 15 or 20 years, which our grandfathers filed years ago. You don’t get any justice from the local courts here. They are courts in name only. So we have filed our case in Germany.”
While farmers see foreign courts as their best chance for justice and compensation, some in Pakistan feel the responsibility to combat climate change cannot lie abroad.
Hammad Naqi Khan, head of World Wildlife Fund-Pakistan, told Al Jazeera that while it is important to hold major global emitters accountable, one should also question local authorities about how much they are helping communities become climate resilient.
“Yes, our emissions are lower, but that still doesn’t mean we should keep allowing coal-fired power plants or tell our industries to do whatever they want,” he said.
“Our focus should be on building resilience and adaptation. Preparing our farmers to face this crisis, preparing our fishermen, people living in the mountains. We need to build their capacity and ensure that our own local governance is improved.”
Pakistan’s climate and disaster management officials did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comments on the lawsuit.
Retired school teacher and farmer Gul Hasan Babar, who is also among the 39 plaintiffs, says any compensation from the suit will not only help individual farmers but entire villages.
“The money we receive will help people who have lost their homes and are still living in tents. They will finally have the chance to build homes to live in,” he told Al Jazeera.
Babar, 55, said that even if he lost the case, he hoped the trial would create the same kind of impact and awareness that the Karachi garment factory case had helped create. He said, “Then these companies will control their pollution and there will be less harm to our country. There will be less harm to the people.”
Laughari is optimistic about the outcome, but he also admits that things may not go his way.
He says, “We can just try to fight the case. If God willing, we will win. If we don’t do that, at least our lands will remain, whatever condition they are in.” “Our families will try to survive on whatever those lands provide.”
