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PARIS (Reuters) – The Paris administrative court rejected on Friday the request of NGOs united within the “Case of the Century” to sentence the French state to a penalty of one billion euros for climate inaction, estimating that repair of the ecological damage “was late but is now complete”.
This court decision marks a new stage in this campaign launched in March 2019 by the complaint of NGOs (Notre Affaire à Tous, Greenpeace France and Oxfam France) after a petition which collected 2.3 million signatures. The NGOs have announced their intention to appeal.
On October 14, 2021, the Paris administrative court gave the French government until the end of 2022 to take measures to repair the “ecological damage” caused by non-compliance with its commitments to combat climate change. .
These greenhouse gas emissions generated by the non-compliance with commitments made by the State were then assessed by the court at 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq), four times the figure put forward by the plaintiffs.
In its judgment on Friday, the administrative court considers that in view of the data available for the years 2021 and 2022, “the compensation for the ecological damage could not be considered complete on the date of December 31, 2022, the share of the damage remaining to repair amounting to 3 or 5 Mt CO2eq, depending on the assumptions made.
But, it “did not consider that there was reason to issue additional enforcement measures since the analysis of GHG emissions in the first quarter of 2023 compared to 2022 (-4.2%, i.e. 5 Mt CO2eq) had already made it possible to repair the damage remaining to be covered.
“The court also considered that if external circumstances, linked to the Covid-19 epidemic or the war in Ukraine, had also influenced the drop in CO2 emissions, there was no need to neutralize them. the effects, since this repair is assessed in light of the emissions objectives set by the first carbon budget.”
A position that Greenpeace regretted: “The judges chose to ignore the non-compliance with the 2021 deadline as well as the origin of the recent drops in greenhouse gas emissions, linked to cyclical factors external to State action, and preferred not to take into account the climate delay since the 2021 conviction,” lamented the NGO in a press release.
(Written by Jean-Stéphane Brosse, edited by Blandine Hénault)
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