PARIS (AP) — A court in Paris ruled on Thursday that energy company TotalEnergies must account for its consumers' greenhouse gas emissions, giving the French firm six months to report the environmental risks caused by the consumption of its gas and oil products.
The decision, which comes amid a record heat wave in France, fell short of requests from the climate organizations who brought the lawsuit to force the company to reduce its oil and gas production.
The court scheduled a new hearing for January to consider TotalEnergies’ new assessment under a 2017 law that requires companies to prevent human rights abuses and environmental risks. It's the first time that the so-called corporate duty of vigilance law is being applied to climate change.
The law is not intended to make companies “responsible for the risks linked to climate change, which result from all human activity on the planet since the Industrial Revolution” the court said in a statement, but rather requests them to act “according to their own situation.”
Environmental groups Notre Affaire à Tous, Sherpa, ZEA, France Nature Environnement, together with the city of Paris, launched the proceedings in 2020.
The groups said that they were happy that the court decided that climate change was included in the 2017 duty of vigilance law.
“This decision marks a significant step forward, confirming that the duty of vigilance fully applies to climate risks generated by multinational corporations,” they said in a statement.
They claim that TotalEnergies is one of the largest historical emitters of greenhouse gas and asked the court to require the company to reduce oil production by 37% and gas production by 25% by 2030. The lawsuit also asked for a halt to all new fossil fuel projects.
Sébastien Duyck, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, told The Associated Press that including the effects of climate change in the duty of vigilance law could set a precedent across Europe. This legislation “is a key legal path to corporate accountability,” he said, adding that the French law has “served as a model for other laws of the same nature in other countries and at the EU level.”
The court's decision comes as Europe is experiencing a heat wave. Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.
The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum have been forced to restrict visiting hours, and school and transportation schedules have been interrupted across the continent.
Human-caused climate change is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and U.N. climate agency projections say the next five years are likely to shatter more heat records.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organization’s Europe office said this month.
The decision is the latest in a series of rulings in climate change cases. Last year, the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice, said that countries could be in violation of international law if they fail to take measures to protect the planet from climate change. In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that countries must better protect their people from the consequences of climate change.
In 2019, the Netherlands’ Supreme court handed down the first major legal win for climate activists when judges ruled that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change was a human right, and that the government has a duty to protect its citizens.
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Molly Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands.
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