Why Pakistani farmers are suing two German companies for deadly 2022 floods

Dadu, Pakistan – Inayatullah Laghari stands on his toes to point at a faint line on the school wall, a watermark left by the floodwaters that had submerged the building and the surrounding villages during the catastrophic floods in Pakistan four years ago.

For him, it is a reminder of just how high the water rose in his village of Baid Sharif in Dadu district of Sindh, the worst-hit Pakistani province, where agriculture is the mainstay for millions of farmers like Laghari.

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The 40-year-old farmer walks over to a patch of road nearby, an area that hadn’t come underwater in 2022. Whatever harvest Inayatullah was able to rescue from his flooded storage room was kept on the patch, as he slept beside the pile for a month to keep it safe.

“I had made up my mind that if the water rose any higher, I would throw all the stock onto the school roof that was still above water and pray the water didn’t reach there,” he says. “Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that, but most of what I rescued got spoiled later on.”

Laghari showing the faint mark left by floodwaters at a school in Dadu [Al Jazeera]

The 2022 floods – the worst ever in Pakistan’s recorded history – displaced 30 million people, killed more than 1,700, inundated millions of acres of farmlands, and destroyed or damaged more than a million homes, with the total damages estimated at a stunning $40bn.

The devastating floods were a climate disaster in a country that contributes less than 1 percent to global carbon emissions. Pakistan’s government attributed the disaster to the country’s vulnerability to climate change, with the minister of climate change, Sherry Rehman, calling the floods a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions” while the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described it as “monsoon on steroids”.

Today, Laghari is among 39 Pakistani farmers from Sindh, the worst-hit province, who have taken two German companies, RWE and Heidelberg Materials, to court over their greenhouse gas emissions, which they say contributed to the historic deluge in 2022.

RWE, with headquarters in Germany’s Essen town, 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 building materials. The two companies are among 178 industrial producers worldwide 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 Saage-Maab, legal director at the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which is representing the farmers, told Al Jazeera the companies were selected for being “two of the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide in Germany”, according to the Carbon Majors database.

The Pakistani farmers filed their lawsuit against the two firms last December in a Heidelberg court, which is currently reviewing the case.

Saage-Maab said neither company has any ground operations in Pakistan, but the lawsuit argues that despite the absence of physical proximity, the effect of the greenhouse gases they emit in Germany is felt thousands of kilometres away. She says the farmers’ lawsuit has a strong chance of proceeding to trial.

For her, she said, the significance of the case lies in helping define how responsibility for climate harm can be calculated and assigned, not just in courtrooms, but also in future political negotiations dealing with climate finance.

The case is inspired by a Peruvian farmer who, in 2015, sued RWE on similar charges. While a German court dismissed that case in 2025, it also ruled that companies can, in principle, be held liable for specific climate-related harms caused by their carbon emissions.

Saage-Maab said rulings like these make Germany a favourable jurisdiction for climate litigation “to some extent”, adding that such transnational climate cases are increasingly being pursued around the world.

Turning to German courts for holding companies accountable is not new in Pakistan.

After a fire tore through a garment factory in Karachi in 2012, killing more than 250 workers, one of the survivors and relatives of the victims filed a lawsuit in Germany in 2015 against KiK, a company that 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 rejected on procedural grounds, it led to KiK paying compensation to the victims and helped prompt debates 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.

Aerial photograph taken on September 1, 2022 shows a flooded area in Dadu [Husnain Ali/AFP]

The Pakistan-based trade union that helped the garment factory victims fight their case is now helping the 39 farmers, gathering 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 the farmers’ lawsuit is Pakistan’s first cross-border climate litigation.

“There needs to be accountability,” he said. “We need to knock on their doors and tell them that whatever you’re doing, it’s causing us to suffer over here in Pakistan. This lawsuit is a campaign for justice and raising awareness of what’s happening.”

In a statement in January, RWE said the litigation was “yet another attempt to shift climate policy demands to German courtrooms”, arguing that climate cases such as the one from Pakistan are “massively damaging to Germany as an industrial location” and undermine legal certainty that German companies will not be sued from other parts of the world even after complying with the law.

Heidelberg Materials confirmed receiving a legal notice on the Pakistan case, but has not issued a public statement on the lawsuit.

Laghari stands in his fields [Al Jazeera]

Laghari says the local authorities in Pakistan failed to support them in recovering from the floods. People were either left to fend for themselves or were assisted by the NGOs, he says. The farmers also believe there is nothing they can do to hold the Pakistani government accountable, especially in a court of law.

“What’s the point of making a case against them in the courts here?” Laghari asks. “We have some cases in the villages that have been stuck in court for 15 or 20 years, ones that our grandfathers filed years ago. You get no justice from the local courts here. They’re courts only by name. That’s why we filed our case in Germany.”

While the farmers see foreign courts as their best chance at justice and compensation, some in Pakistan feel the responsibility for confronting 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 responsible, one should also question local authorities about how well they are helping communities become climate resilient.

”Yes, our emissions are low, but that still doesn’t mean we keep on allowing coal-fired power plants or we tell our industries to do whatever they like,” he said.

“Our focus must be on building resilience and adaptation. To prepare our farmers to face this crisis, to prepare our fishermen, the people living in the mountains. We need to build their capacity and ensure that our own local governance has improved.”

Pakistan’s climate and disaster management authorities did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comments on the lawsuit.

Gul Hasan Babar, a retired school teacher and farmer who is also among the 39 litigants, says any compensation from the lawsuit will help not just individual farmers but entire villages.

“The money we will get will help those who lost their homes and are still living in tents. They will get a chance to finally build a house to live in,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that it would also allow farmers to improve their lands by investing in supplies that revive soil fertility damaged by the floods.

Babar, 55, said even if they lost the case, he hoped the lawsuit would trigger the kind of effect and awareness the Karachi garment factory case helped produce. “These companies will control their pollution then, and our country will suffer less. People will suffer less,” he said.

Laghari is hopeful about the outcome, but he also recognises that things might not go their way.

“All we can do is try to fight the case. If God is willing, we will win. If we don’t, then at least we will still have our lands, in whatever condition they are in now,” he says. “Whatever those lands provide, our families will try to survive on it.”