45 people died in Jamaica last week, from Hurricane Melissa. At roughly the same time typhoons killed at least 259 people in the Philippines. This post is dedicated to them, and their families.

Their deaths were predictable and preventable. They were predicted, but they were not prevented. They were caused by the decisions of our governments, who have continued to license and permit new oil and gas projects despite 30 years of promises to get climate change under control. Those decisions (particularly those made since October, 2018) were made in full knowledge that people would die as a result. They didn’t know who, but they knew someone would.

We now have the know-how to make a reasonable estimate of climate deaths per project. I recommend this to all my clients taking part in the EA review of new projects, or additions or changes to projects. Of course regulators refuse to do this, that’s to be expected. In my view we must keep insisting until we get it. Which may ultimately take litigation. In that case having asked repeatedly, and been refused, is probably helpful.

Here are a few key milestones on the way to being able to do this, there were many more.

The first time the IPCC mentioned deaths from climate change was in the October 2018 Report on 1.5, which assessed the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees as being equivalent to 150 million deaths (that’s what got me started writing this blog, seven years ago). This was based on a paper by Drew Shindell, and others, entitled “Quantified, Localized Health Benefits of Accelerated Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reductions.”

Then in 2019 David Wallace-Wells wrote The Uninhabitable Earth, where he openly discussed the coming death toll of climate change and a failure to stay below 1.5 degrees by the year 2100, saying:

“Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of twenty-five Holocausts. It is three times the death toll of the Great Leap Forward – the largest non-military death toll humanity has ever produced.”

They (the IPCC, Shindell et al, and Wallace-Wells) were only discussing the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees – not the projected number of deaths for a situation where we exceed 2 degrees. That would be a lot more. That is still the path we are on, heading for at least 2.6 degrees of warming by 2100, despite promises made in the Paris Accords.

In 2021 R. Daniel Bressler published a paper called “The Mortality cost of carbon,” proposing a method to estimate the number of deaths caused by the emissions of one additional metric ton of CO2. This opened the door to assessing the number of deaths per project, or per nation, industry, etc. But no one did it right away, it took some time to percolate.

After that I started advising my clients to insist of regulators that this calculation be made.

Then in July of this year a team based at University New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, did it. For the first time, they calculated the number of deaths which are likely to be caused by a particular project – Woodside’s Scarborough gas project.

In other words, this is now doable. We can make a reasonable estimate of the number of deaths per project. Or per industry, or nation.

Is there any right more sacred than the right to life? When our governments permit projects that will likely lead to a certain number of deaths, there is a good argument to be made that people have a right to know.

Lawyers and climate justice advocates, we should be pushing for every project to be assessed on this basis.