August 1, 2025

The Challenges of Engaging With Climate Science in Corporate Target-Setting Cases

Key Points

The effectiveness of corporate target-setting hinges on the courts' engagement with climate science to define legal obligations, and whether they recognize mitigation pathways as enforceable tools.
High-profile cases demonstrated varied claimant strategies, balancing sector-specific targets with overarching global goals, complicating judicial responsiveness.
Judicial responses have shown reluctance to set firm emissions reduction targets, often citing the non-prescriptive nature of climate science as a barrier to specific rulings.
Emerging practices like normative filtering reflect ongoing debates in legal reasoning about how best to interpret scientific evidence for corporate accountability.

Abstract

This paper explores how courts and claimants engage with science-based mitigation pathways in corporate target-setting litigation. In these cases, claimants seek to translate macro-level climate objectives – designed to limit warming to 1.5°C – into enforceable legal obligations for individual companies. They typically favour 1.5°C-compatible pathways with limited or no overshoot, rejecting those that depend heavily on speculative carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. Based on writs of summons from high-profile cases such as Milieudefensie et al. v. Shell (2019), Notre Affaire à Tous v. TotalEnergies (2020), and Greenpeace v. ENI (2023), the paper highlights the emerging practice of ‘normative filtering’ through legal reasoning. It also sheds light on the different strategic approaches adopted by claimants, particularly in the debate between applying sector-specific reduction targets and adopting a global target applicable to all businesses. The paper also turns to judicial responses, drawing on the Hague Court of Appeal ruling in Milieudefensie v. Shell (2024), which illustrate courts’ reluctance to impose quantified emissions reduction targets on a single company based on a specific mitigation scenario. Ultimately, the article contends that the success of corporate target-setting cases hinges on the judiciary’s willingness to engage more proactively with mitigation scenarios as normative tools, rather than deferring to their ‘policy-relevant but non-prescriptive’ origins.

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