Climate change is not only a crisis of emissions, technology, or regulation. It is also a crisis of narration. Who speaks, whose experiences are recognised, and how harm is framed shape whether responsibility is acknowledged and enforced. Climate accountability has largely been narrated by institutional actors, corporations, investors, and regulators, while those most affected have remained marginalised. This is beginning to shift. Communities are increasingly articulating their experiences within legal and political arenas. Building on discussions from the FAU Conference on the Future of Business and Human Rights, this blog argues that storytelling can function as a form of legal empowerment. By translating abstract legal claims into lived realities, narrative practices compel courts, regulators, and corporations to confront the human consequences of climate harm.

Borrowing from Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of a ‘crisis of narration’, though redirected here from cultural philosophy to legal epistemology, this article uses the term to describe a structural asymmetry in whose accounts are granted epistemic and legal authority. Technocratic and corporate framings dominate the production of evidence and risk, while lived experiences struggle to register as legally cognisable harm. Storytelling, in contrast, enables affected communities to shape the factual record, translate diffuse harms into justiciable injuries, and occupy procedural roles, plaintiff, witness, intervener, through which legal meaning is produced. This matters for the future of business and human rights (BHR). Emerging regimes, mandatory due diligence, climate disclosure, and corporate accountability frameworks, will be shaped not only by doctrinal design but by whose accounts of harm they recognise. Whether storytelling becomes embedded in these regimes, or remains peripheral, is therefore a pressing question.

The Human Voice in a Sea of Data

Climate governance has long relied on scientific modelling and statistical evidence. While indispensable, such data often fails to capture how climate change reshapes everyday life. Increasingly, civil society organisations (CSOs) and affected communities are addressing this gap by foregrounding personal narratives in public debate and litigation. Recent trends in climate litigation show a growing role for individuals and CSOs as claimants. This shift matters not simply because of increased case numbers, but because it changes who frames climate harm before courts. When affected communities initiate claims, they bring new forms of evidence, testimony, and narrative framing that embed lived experience within legal reasoning. Plaintiffs become narrators of climate injustice.

Storytelling performs an epistemic function. It enables courts to understand how climate change affects rights to life, health, food, housing, and livelihood. Crucially, storytelling does not replace scientific evidence. Rather, it complements it by providing the descriptive depth necessary to connect abstract data to legal categories such as foreseeability, causation, and vulnerability. Its influence is therefore indirect but significant. Narrative shapes how facts are pleaded, how standing is established, and how remedies are justified. It allows courts to move beyond abstract harm towards concrete human consequences.

The claims brought by Filipino survivors of Typhoon Odette (Rai) illustrate this dynamic. Their case against Shell documents loss of life, displacement, and destruction of homes. These accounts frame the judiciary as a potential site of redress against powerful fossil fuel actors. However, this “heroic court” narrative must be treated cautiously. Courts operate within doctrinal and evidentiary constraints, particularly in transnational cases. Narrative may generate public attention, but its legal impact depends on admissibility, doctrinal fit, and enforceability. Nonetheless, such accounts provide courts with a humanised frame through which climate harm can be assessed alongside scientific evidence.

Breathing Life into Legal Arguments

Recent climate litigation demonstrates how narrative interacts with legal reasoning. Three recurring moves are visible: framing diffuse climate harms as concrete injuries, linking those injuries to specific actors, and positioning claimants within recognised legal categories such as standing and duty of care. In Asmania et al. v Holcim Ltd, residents of Pari Island reframed rising sea levels and ecological degradation as specific harms to homes, livelihoods, and ancestral land. This anchored a global emissions claim in a localised context tied to a particular corporate actor. Similarly, in Lliuya v RWE, a Peruvian farmer linked the risk posed by a glacial lake to the emissions of a German energy company. The claim translated global climate change into a concrete property risk attributable, in part, to a single emitter.

Other cases further illustrate this dynamic. In Sharma v Minister for the Environment, Neubauer v Germany, and Milieudefensie v Shell, carefully selected claimants, often youth or directly affected communities, enabled courts to apprehend climate change as present harm rather than future risk. These narratives supported findings on duty of care, intergenerational rights, and corporate obligations. Storytelling here is not mere rhetoric. It is constitutive of legal reasoning. It translates complex scientific evidence into rights-based claims that courts can assess. Even unsuccessful cases can produce what may be termed a “narrative victory.” This refers to outcomes that reshape legal and public understanding without achieving remedial outcome. Such cases establish that certain harms are legally cognisable, identify plausible responsible actors, and create factual records for future litigation. In Lliuya v RWE, although the claim was unsuccessful, the court recognised that corporate emissions could, in principle, give rise to liability for transboundary harm. This opened doctrinal space and contributed to a shift in how climate harm is framed, as attributable, personal, and justiciable. Storytelling also functions as ‘civic evidence.’ It grounds diffuse and long-term harms in lived experience, complementing scientific data. Visual forms, such as images and data visualisations, can further translate complex risks into accessible and persuasive representations, as seen in cases like Kanuk v State of Alaska.

Countering Corporate Climate Narratives

While affected communities increasingly deploy storytelling in litigation, corporations construct their own narratives directed at consumers and the public. Claims of “carbon neutrality,” “net-zero pathways,” and sustainability commitments shape perceptions of corporate responsibility. These narratives are now subject to growing legal scrutiny. Consumer protection law, particularly under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, is increasingly used to challenge greenwashing. In France, proceedings against TotalEnergies questioned discrepancies between its public climate claims and continued fossil fuel activities. Courts assessed these representations from the perspective of the “average consumer,” treating sustainability claims as legally verifiable statements rather than aspirational rhetoric. Similar developments are visible elsewhere. In Australia, EnergyAustralia entered into an enforceable undertaking following findings that its “carbon neutral” claims were misleading. In Germany, courts prohibited Apple from advertising certain products as carbon neutral due to insufficient substantiation. These cases signal an important shift. Corporate storytelling is no longer confined to public relations; it has become a site of legal accountability. Narratives of sustainability must now align with evidence and material practices.

Building Narrative Infrastructure

For storytelling to function as legal empowerment, it requires supporting infrastructure: institutional and social mechanisms that document, amplify, and translate marginalised voices into legal claims. Civil society initiatives such as Climate Diaries collect first-person testimonies from farmers, fishers, Indigenous communities, and workers, transforming lived experience into publicly accessible evidence. Similarly, platforms like Make Big Polluters Pay create transnational archives of harm that support advocacy and litigation.

Legal institutions are also beginning to recognise the role of participatory narratives. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in Advisory Opinion 32/25, emphasised the need for meaningful public participation in environmental governance and corporate due diligence. Affected communities must have genuine opportunities to be heard. In this sense, storytelling moves beyond moral appeal and becomes embedded within procedural guarantees of environmental democracy.

Conclusion: Towards a Plurality of Accountability

Climate litigation is not only a legal strategy but a site of narrative contestation. Storytelling links lived experience to legal claims, enabling communities to reframe harm, attribute responsibility, and reshape accountability. It does not merely supplement legal reasoning; it helps construct the meaning of justice itself. This points towards a plurality of accountability: a legal and political space in which diverse experiences of climate injustice are recognised. By embedding these voices, narrative strategies challenge the dominance of technocratic and corporate framings and make law more responsive to lived realities.

However, two qualifications are necessary. First, storytelling is not without risks. It can oversimplify complex realities, expose claimants to retraumatisation, and be instrumentalised by powerful actors. Moreover, only those harms that can be narrated and documented tend to reach courts, leaving others underrepresented. Second, narrative is not a substitute for structural reform. It cannot, on its own, establish legal duties, enforce accountability, or deliver remedies. Its role is to shape what the law is prepared to recognise, not to replace legal frameworks.

For BHR, this implies a concrete agenda. Corporate due diligence regimes should treat affected-stakeholder narratives as a required input into risk identification, subject to verification. Litigators should integrate narrative strategies into case design, aligning lived testimony with legal categories such as foreseeability and proximity. Courts and regulators should ensure that evidentiary rules and procedural frameworks allow meaningful consideration of these accounts. Understood in this way, storytelling becomes more than rhetoric. It becomes part of the institutional architecture of accountability, embedded in due diligence, recognised as evidence, and subject to legal scrutiny.