Cost of emissions from five major Australian resource companies more than $900bn, study finds

Researchers have assessed the total damages from the collective emissions of BHP, Rio Tinto, Santos, Whitehaven Coal and Woodside Energy at more than US$600bn (A$929.47bn). Photograph: Krystle Wright/The Guardian

Five of Australia’s biggest fossil fuel producers could be on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in damages after a US research team developed a method to link individual companies to specific climate harms and put a dollar figure to the impact.

This is the result of a new peer-review study published in the journal Nature that sought to establish a method that would allow courts to quantify the economic loss caused by fossil fuel producers for one kind of climate impact – extreme heat.