A Paris court ordered TotalEnergies to improve climate risk reporting within six months, rejecting activists’ demands for mandatory fossil fuel production cuts and a halt to new oil and gas projects.
A Paris court on Thursday ordered French energy giant TotalEnergies to strengthen its climate risk reporting by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions generated by the use of its oil and gas products, giving the company six months to submit a revised assessment.
The ruling stopped short of granting demands from environmental campaigners who had sought to force the company to cut fossil fuel production, but it marks the first time France’s 2017 corporate duty of vigilance law has been applied to climate change.
The decision came as France endured a record heatwave that has swept across much of Europe, intensifying concerns over the growing impact of global warming.
The court instructed TotalEnergies to provide a new assessment of the environmental risks linked to the consumption of its products before a fresh hearing scheduled for January 2027.
Under France’s 2017 duty of vigilance law, large companies are required to identify and prevent human rights abuses and environmental risks linked to their activities.
In its ruling, the court said the legislation was not designed to make companies “responsible for the risks linked to climate change, which result from all human activity on the planet since the Industrial Revolution.” Instead, it requires companies to take action “according to their own situation.”
The legal action was launched in 2020 by environmental organisations Notre Affaire à Tous, Sherpa, ZEA and France Nature Environnement together with the city of Paris.
The groups argue that TotalEnergies is among the world’s largest historical emitters of greenhouse gases. They had asked the court to order the company to reduce oil production by 37 percent and gas production by 25 percent by 2030. They also sought an end to all new fossil fuel projects.
The ruling comes as Europe grapples with an intense heatwave that has spread to the United Kingdom and Spain, where authorities, like those in France, have issued red alerts warning of dangerous temperatures affecting tens of millions of people.
The extreme heat has forced the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum to limit visiting hours while schools and transport services across the continent have also faced disruptions.
Scientists say human-caused climate change is driving more frequent and severe extreme weather events. Projections by the United Nations climate agency indicate that the next five years are likely to break additional global heat records.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe is the fastest-warming continent in the world, with temperatures rising at twice the global average rate since the 1980s.
The World Health Organization’s Europe office said this month that more than 200,000 people across Europe have died from heat-related causes over the past four years and that most of those deaths could have been prevented.
Thursday’s ruling is the latest in a series of landmark climate decisions worldwide.
Last year, the United Nations’ top court, the International Court of Justice, said countries could breach international law if they fail to take adequate measures to protect the planet from climate change.
In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that governments must do more to protect people from the consequences of climate change.
In 2019, the Netherlands’ Supreme Court delivered the first major legal victory for climate activists, ruling that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change is a human right and that governments have a duty to safeguard their citizens.
Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands.
