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

Case relates to RWE and Heidelberg Materials, accused by farmers of emissions that intensified the catastrophic floods and destroyed farmlands.

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.

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.”

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.