What attribution science means for your board: Building awareness and managing the exposure
Attribution science is not a problem for future boards to manage. The scientific foundations are established. The legal frameworks are forming around them. Executives and directors who understand what is coming – and build governance responses now – will be in a fundamentally different position to those who do not.
Why this is a board issue, not a management issue
There is a natural tendency to treat emerging legal and scientific risks as management problems to be delegated downward – to the sustainability team, the legal department or the chief risk officer. That instinct is understandable but misapplied in this context. The reason is that attribution science creates personal exposure, not just organisational exposure. The legal frameworks being built around it – from the German civil law principles established in Lliuya v. RWE, to the EU Environmental Crime Directive's provisions on individual liability, to the ICC proposal for ecocide as a fifth international crime – are designed to reach the decision-makers at the top of organisations, not just the organisations themselves.
A board that has delegated its attribution science exposure to the sustainability function and receives periodic updates through the standard management reporting channel is not exercising governance over this risk. It is creating a governance record that will look, in retrospect, as if it never really understood what was at stake. The question boards need to ask is not 'has management addressed this?' but 'can we demonstrate, independently and with evidence, that we understood the risk and took appropriate action?'
Understanding your organisation's exposure
The starting point for any board is understanding the organisation's actual attribution exposure. This requires knowing the organisation's Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions with sufficient precision to understand where it sits in the global emissions distribution – not just in relative terms ('we are below sector average') but in absolute terms that a court or regulator could work with. The Carbon Majors Database currently covers 180 major industrial producers. As attribution science extends to a broader range of emitters and a broader range of damage categories, the population of companies with quantifiable attribution exposure will grow significantly.[1]
For companies outside the fossil fuel sector, this may seem like a distant concern. It should not. Attribution science is developing to cover not just the direct emissions of energy producers but the embedded emissions in manufactured goods, the land use impacts of agricultural supply chains and the financed emissions of financial institutions. Milieudefensie's 2025 claim against ING Bank is a leading indicator: the science and legal frameworks that were applied to RWE's power plants are being applied to the bank that funded fossil fuel development. The logic, once established, has no inherent sector boundary.
What your Scope 3 data is really doing
One of the most practically significant implications of attribution science for corporate governance is the role it assigns to Scope 3 emissions data. Scope 3 emissions – the indirect emissions in a company's value chain, both upstream and downstream – have long been the most contested and least reliable category of corporate greenhouse gas reporting. Companies have argued that Scope 3 data is difficult to calculate, subject to double-counting and beyond their operational control to manage. Regulators and investors have pushed back, arguing that Scope 3 is often the largest category of a company's climate impact and that systematic omission of Scope 3 from disclosures distorts the picture materially.
The 2025 Nature study used Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions data from major fossil fuel companies to build its attribution framework. The inclusion of Scope 3 – specifically, the emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels sold by a company, rather than just the emissions from its own operations – is critical to the framework's reach. A company that reports only Scope 1 emissions while omitting Scope 3 is presenting an attribution picture that may be an order of magnitude smaller than its actual footprint. In a liability context, that is not a disclosure preference. It is an evidential gap that plaintiffs and prosecutors will exploit. Norton Rose Fulbright has highlighted in its climate litigation analysis that 'the question of whether downstream or Scope 3 emissions from fossil fuel projects must be considered by decision-makers came into sharper focus in 2024.'[2][3]
The quality of your emissions data matters legally
Attribution frameworks work by taking a company's reported emissions figures and tracing their atmospheric and climatic consequences. The quality of that calculation is therefore directly dependent on the quality of the underlying emissions data. Emissions data that is estimated rather than measured, that uses methodologies inconsistent with GHG Protocol standards, that has not been independently verified or that excludes material categories of Scope 3 emissions without adequate justification is not just a disclosure quality issue. It is a liability quality issue.
In any litigation or enforcement proceeding in which attribution science is applied to a specific company, the defendant's own emissions data will be examined. If that data is incomplete, unverified or internally inconsistent, the scientific attribution calculation will be challenged – but so will the organisation's governance record. A company that cannot demonstrate a robust, independently assured basis for its emissions data will find itself in a doubly difficult position: challenged on the science and challenged on the governance. Independent third-party assurance over greenhouse gas emissions data – conducted to a recognised standard, by a credentialled provider, with adequate scope – is the foundation of a defensible position.
What boards should be doing: a practical framework
The governance response to attribution science exposure involves four interconnected elements. The first is emissions data quality. Boards should be asking whether the organisation's Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions data is accurate, complete, consistent with recognised methodologies and independently assured to a standard that would withstand legal scrutiny. This is not a question for the sustainability report sign-off process. It is a question for the audit committee.
The second is legal scenario analysis. Board risk frameworks should include a scenario in which attribution science is applied to the organisation's historical emissions and a quantified damages claim is filed in a jurisdiction where corporate climate liability has been established in principle. What would that claim look like? What is the organisation's best evidential position? What governance documentation exists to demonstrate that the risks were understood and managed? Where are the gaps? This analysis does not need to be public, but it does need to be honest.
The third is supply chain emissions governance. The most significant attribution exposure for many companies lies not in their own operations but in the upstream and downstream emissions embedded in their value chains. Hogan Lovells has advised that companies should 'embed robust ESG due diligence processes across clients, counterparties and suppliers' and should 'review ESG disclosures, advertisements and transition plans to ensure they are credible, data-backed and legally defensible.' Supply chain due diligence that cannot produce verified emissions data for material suppliers is an evidential gap in any attribution-based claim.[4]
The fourth is disclosure review. Everything a company says publicly about its environmental performance – in its sustainability report, in its regulatory filings, in its investor communications, in its marketing – is potentially admissible evidence in a proceeding where its environmental conduct is at issue. Disclosures that overstate environmental performance, understate emissions or make net zero commitments that are not backed by credible, independently verified transition plans create compounding exposure. The company faces potential liability for its emissions and for its misrepresentation of them.
The window to act
The boards that build their governance response to attribution science now are the ones that will be able to demonstrate, when they need to, that they understood the risk and acted proportionately.
Attribution science has passed the threshold at which it can be dismissed as speculative. The 2025 Nature study is peer-reviewed, published in a leading scientific journal and already informing legislation and litigation. The Lliuya v. RWE judgment has established the principle of corporate civil liability for climate-related harm in a European higher court. Vermont and New York have embedded attribution science in statute. Over 3,000 climate cases have been filed globally and the number continues to grow.
The Grantham Research Institute at LSE has confirmed that 'as climate attribution science grows in scale and accuracy, legal pressure on companies to contribute to the climate costs they are responsible for will likely keep growing.' The direction of travel is established. The only question for boards is whether they are building governance infrastructure that is proportionate to that direction or whether they are waiting for a claim to arrive before they start.[5]
The boards that build their governance response to attribution science now – that invest in emissions data quality, independent assurance, supply chain traceability and legally defensible disclosure – are not just managing risk. They are building a position of genuine institutional credibility that will matter to investors, to insurers, to regulators and to courts. That is a position worth building before it is required.
References
[1] InfluenceMap, 'Carbon Majors: 2023 Data Update'. https://influencemap.org/briefing/The-Carbon-Majors-Database-2023-Update-31397
[2] Callahan, C.W. and Mankin, J.S., 'Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability', Nature, vol. 640, pp. 893–901 (April 2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08751-3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08751-3
[3] Norton Rose Fulbright, 'Climate Change Litigation Update' (July 2025). https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publications/674162d1/climate-change-litigation-update-july-2025
[4] Hogan Lovells, 'Climate Liability Litigation: A Growing Risk for UK Financial Institutions' (2025). https://www.hoganlovells.com/en/publications/climate-liability-litigation-a-growing-risk-for-uk-financial-institutions
[5] Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE, 'Institute Responds to Lliuya v RWE Verdict' (28 May 2025). https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/institute-responds-to-lliuya-v-rwe-verdict/