On 25 June 2026, as France endured its second deadly heatwave of a summer barely begun, the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris delivered a landmark ruling against Total Energies, following a complaint filed in 2020 by a coalition of NGOs and the Ville de Paris to force it to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The decision is the culmination of eight years of proceedings that finally reached the merits over two days of hearings on 19 and 20 February 2026. At stake were two fundamental legal questions about the scope of corporate climate responsibility under France’s pioneering 2017 duty of vigilance law.
The timing is grimly fitting. Across Western Europe, people are dying from extreme heat. Media reports already link the ongoing heatwaves to a rising death toll, with the elderly, young children, outdoor workers, and low-income households bearing the heaviest burden. Final excess mortality figures will take months to compile, but the human cost is already visible in overwhelmed hospitals, and emergency services. Yet what Europe is experiencing now is what communities at the frontline of the climate crisis have long endured. That these extremes are now regularly reaching Europe does not make it new; it makes it undeniable to European citizens.
Against this backdrop, TotalEnergies’ response to the ruling reads as tone-deaf. The company expressed “satisfaction” that the court declined to ban new fossil fuel projects or impose production cuts—while barely acknowledging the core finding: that its plan de vigilance was legally deficient for excluding scope 3 or ‘downstream’ emissions. The statement promises vaguely to “assess the next steps to be taken following the Court’s decision”, with no commitment to appeal and no sign of consideration for the urgency of the crisis.
The Two Questions the Court Was Asked
At the heart of this case were two questions that French courts had never answered before.
The first concerned the scope of the law. France’s 2017 loi de vigilance obliges large companies to establish and implement a vigilance plan covering serious risks to human rights and the environment, arising from their own activities and those of their supply chains. The law, however, left two ambiguities unresolved. Does the term “environment” encompass climate or is climate a too diffuse and global phenomenon? And does the obligation to implement a vigilance plan extended to so-called “Scope 3” emissions—for TotalEnergies, the greenhouse gases released not by TotalEnergies itself, but across the entire downstream chain once its products leave its hands: through processing, distribution, and above all the burning of its oil and gas by its customers?
On both points, the court ruled in favour of Notre Affaire à Tous and its co-claimants—a coalition of environmental NGOs and local authorities, finding that TotalEnergies had been failing its vigilance obligations.
The court held that climate risks are not external to the environment but constitute “a serious, present and future threat to the enjoyment of human rights.” It therefore interpreted the term “environment” broadly, encompassing climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions—a harm expressly recognised at the European and international level including through evolving customary international law obligations. Drawing on both the scientific consensus and the jurisprudence of international courts, including the European Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice, the Court situated climate change squarely within the law’s human rights dimension. Consequently, companies are required to address climate risks in their plans de vigilance, as identifying and mitigating such risks forms part of their obligation to prevent serious adverse impacts on human rights, rather than merely to protect the environment.
The second question was evaluative: having established what the law requires, did TotalEnergies’ existing vigilance plan actually comply? Here too, the court found that by excluding Scope 3 emissions from its risk mapping entirely, the plan was legally deficient. The court gave TotalEnergies six months to remedy this, with the case returning on 21 January 2027. The court was careful, however, to define the limits of its role. It refused to prescribe specific decarbonisation pathways or temperature-aligned targets. As the judgment states: “The law establishes judicial oversight over the integration into the plan of reasonable, concrete, coherent and proportionate vigilance measures, and over their effective implementation. It cannot lead the judge to substitute themselves for the company in requiring it to adopt specific and detailed measures. Accordingly, it is not for the court to set for TotalEnergies SE the target to be achieved in order to prevent or mitigate the negative climate impacts resulting from its activities.”
That restraint—leaving the 1.5°C pathway to legislators and regulators rather than judicial prescription—makes the regulatory retreat described below all the more troubling.
The Regulatory Retreat
And yet, regulators have retreated. The most striking recent example is at the European level. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), adopted in 2024, was significantly shaped by the same principles underpinning the French loi de vigilance and represented the most ambitious attempt yet to embed corporate climate accountability into binding law. The directive required in-scope companies to adopt climate transition plans aligned with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target—with time-bound, enforceable targets covering Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. It was, in other words, designed to give legal teeth to, precisely, the obligations that the Paris court has now confirmed exist under French law.
At its heart, the article 22 provision required large companies not merely to publish a climate transition plan, but to adopt one and—critically—to put it into effect. It was conceived as an obligation of means rather than of results: companies were not required to guarantee the achievement of specific targets, but they were required to act in good faith and take concrete steps toward them. The emphasis was on implementation, not paperwork. A transitional plan that sat on a shelf, unconnected to investment decisions or operational change, would not suffice.
Less than a year after, the political winds shifted. Against a backdrop of renewed geopolitical uncertainty—Donald Trump’s return to the White House, persistent energy insecurity following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and mounting pressure from industry to ease the regulatory burden on European business—the European Commission proposed a package of amendments to the directive. Among them was a significant revision of article 22: the amended provision would require only that they adopt a transitional plan. The obligation to act would become an obligation to declare.
The warnings against weakening this provision were clear and came early. In May 2025, a group of over thirty legal scholars from across Europe—led by Thom Wetzer, founding director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme—wrote to the European Commission urging it to preserve Article 22 in its entirety. Their letter set out four concerns: that weakening the provision would leave Member States unable to meet their legal obligations to regulate corporate greenhouse gas emissions ; that the absence of a binding framework would fragment the internal market and increase litigation risk; that disclosure without implementation would encourage greenwashing and heighten companies’ legal exposure; and that delaying corporate climate transitions would make them more disorderly and costly in the long run. They concluded that without strong transition plan requirements, the regulatory gap would simply be filled by courts across member states—creating uncertainty and inefficiency for companies operating across the single market.
Those warnings were ultimately disregarded, in a process that has also raised broader concerns about the opacity of certain urgent legislative procedures. In February 2026, article 22 was removed in its entirety. The effect is a significant recalibration of the regulatory architecture that had been intended to operationalise corporate climate accountability across Europe—and one with immediate domestic consequences, as already witnessed in France. On 3 February 2026, the Ministère Public—the public prosecutor representing the French state—made an unusual intervention, urging the tribunalto adopt a restrictive interpretation of “environment” under the loi de vigilance that would exclude climate-related obligations from its scope.
That a state prosecutor intervened at the eleventh hour, in a civil case, to argue against the very interpretation the court ultimately embraced, speaks volumes about the political pressures bearing on corporate climate accountability at this moment. Those pressures have not gone unnoticed by courts themselves. Across domestic, regional, and international jurisdictions, judges are increasingly explicit about both the advances and the limits of legal interpretation in this field.
While courts continue to strengthen procedural obligations—particularly in relation to risk identification, due diligence, and the completeness of corporate climate governance—they are also more candid about the limits of judicial authority to prescribe concrete decarbonisation pathways. This emerging boundary between judicial clarification and political choice is not a retreat from ambition. Rather, it reflects an acknowledgement that existing legal tools are already being stretched close to their institutional limits, and that what remains undone is not a legal problem but a political one.
Two Dependencies, One Crisis
The case reveals a deeper tension between two forms of dependency. The first is economic: contemporary societies remain structurally reliant on fossil fuels for transport, heating, industrial production, and public services. This dependency has an important social dimension that cannot be ignored. The gilets jaunes movement in France—emerging in November 2018 and extending into 2020, during the early stages of this litigation—illustrated with clarity how fuel taxation and rising energy costs can disproportionately affect working and middle-class households, especially in rural and peri-urban areas with limited access to viable alternatives.
Yet a second, more fundamental dependency is under-articulated in policy and litigation debates: the dependence of human societies on a stable and habitable climate system. The first dependency is, in practice, eroding the material conditions necessary for the second. Those most structurally dependent on fossil fuels today are also among those most exposed to the accelerating climate impacts those fuels generate.
TotalEnergies’ reaction to the judgment is notable for what it omits. Beyond procedural satisfaction with the outcome, there – unsurprisingly - is little acknowledgment of in the broader climate harms already unfolding across Europe, nor of the structural incompatibility between continued fossil fuel expansion and a 1.5°C-consistent pathway. The emphasis remains on compliance with the narrow contours of the legal ruling rather than engagement with its underlying climate implications.
What Comes Next
The Paris tribunal has ordered TotalEnergies to complete its vigilance plan within six months, including the integration of Scope 3 emissions into its risk mapping. The judgment is therefore best understood as both a milestone and a boundary marker. It clarifies the legal requirements of vigilance obligations while reaffirming the institutional limits of litigation in driving systemic decarbonisation. Courts can refine legal duties and ensure procedural adequacy; they cannot substitute for industrial policy or determine the trajectory of economic transformation. That responsibility remains political.
As the International Court of Justice observed, the climate crisis is “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet.” The Court was clear that law has “an important but ultimately limited role in resolving this problem,” and that a lasting solution “requires human will and wisdom—at the individual, social and political levels—to change our habits, comforts and current way of life.”
The Paris ruling against TotalEnergies is one more demonstration that courts have heard that call and are doing their part. The question is no longer whether the law is adequate to the challenge—it is whether those with the power to act on it will choose to do so, before legal clarification becomes an epitaph for the action that never came.
