On June 25, as a record heat wave gripped France, the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris handed down a decision that climate lawyers had waited eight years to see. The court ruled that TotalEnergies, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, had failed to meet its obligations under France’s 2017 “duty of vigilance” law – the first time that statute has been applied to climate change. The case, brought in 2020 by a coalition of environmental NGOs and the City of Paris, gave the company six months to produce a climate-risk assessment covering not just its own operations but the emissions its customers generate when they burn its products.
Two questions sat at the heart of the ruling, and the court answered both in the claimants’ favor. First, does “environment” in the vigilance law encompass climate – a phenomenon so diffuse and global that the public prosecutor had urged a narrow reading to exclude it? The court said yes, situating climate harm within the human-rights dimension the law was built to protect and drawing on rulings from the European Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice. Second, does the duty reach so-called Scope 3 emissions, the greenhouse gases released downstream, once the oil and gas leave the company’s hands? Again, the court said yes.
The decision was a landmark and a compromise at once. The court declined to order TotalEnergies to cut production by the 37 percent the plaintiffs sought, imposed no financial penalty for now, and scheduled a fresh hearing in January 2027 to review the company’s revised plan. But by confirming that a corporation’s vigilance duty extends to the climate consequences of its products, the ruling hands campaigners across Europe a template, and, as one attorney noted, the French law has already served as a model for legislation elsewhere on the continent and at the EU level. The immediate order is modest; the precedent is not.
If a company can be held legally responsible for the emissions its customers produce, where does corporate climate liability end – and will other courts follow the French lead or draw the line more narrowly?
