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Climate litigation is the focus of today’s newsletter as more than 600,000 Brazilians are suing BHP over the 2015 Mariana dam collapse, while a Peruvian farmer is suing Germany’s energy giant RWE over the company’s emissions and its effects on the melting of glaciers near his hometown.
Nineteen people were killed when the Mariana dam in southeastern Brazil collapsed and unleashed a wave of toxic sludge, leaving thousands homeless, flooding forests and polluting the Doce River.
Mothers of children who died in Brazil's worst environmental disaster demanded justice for their loved ones after submissions in their London lawsuit came to an end this week.
"It was the day that destroyed my life... the day that took away my son," Gelvana Silva, 37, said outside London's High Court. She lost her seven-year-old son Thiago in the flood.
The women are joined by 46 local governments and around 2,000 businesses in a lawsuit worth up to 36 billion pounds ($46.63 billion), making it one of the largest cases in English legal history.
The dam was owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Vale and Anglo-Australian BHP, the world's biggest miner by market value.
Tom Goodhead, CEO of Pogust Goodhead, representing the claimants, expects a decision this summer.
Elsewhere, the Higher Regional Court of Hamm will be hearing a case by Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya, backed by activist group Germanwatch, claiming RWE's greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the melting of the Andean glaciers, which has raised the water level at Laguna Pacacocha, creating a significant flood risk to his home in the nearby town of Huaraz.
Lliuya is demanding the energy company contribute some 21,000 euros ($22,000), to an estimated $3.5 million cost of a flood defence project.
He argues that RWE has contributed nearly 0.5% of global manmade greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution and should pay the equivalent portion of flood protection costs in the area.
And finally, several U.S. farmers and non-profit organizations filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing it is illegally withholding Department of Agriculture grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The five farmers involved in the suit were awarded grants from a USDA Rural Energy for America Program to install solar panels. The three non-profits involved were awarded Forest Service grants.