From Causation to Contribution: The TotalEnergies Decision and the Emergence of a Contribution-Based Environmental Accountability

On 25 June 2026, the Paris Judicial Court delivered its first merits judgment in the climate vigilance case against TotalEnergies. The claimants sought to use the French Duty of Vigilance Law to require TotalEnergies to account for its climate impacts, including scope 3 emissions, and align its strategy with pathways capable of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. While the court refused to prescribe a particular transition pathway, it nevertheless held that emissions of TotalEnergies’ products (scope 3) must be addressed in the company’s vigilance plan. 

The decision confronts one of the central difficulties of climate corporate accountability: how to allocate responsibility to companies for scope 3 emissions. The court addresses this challenge by extending vigilance obligations to scope 3 emissions on the basis of contribution to climate harm and the nature of TotalEnergies operations. In this regard, the judgment recognizes that a company’s contribution to climate-related risks can ground due diligence obligations even in the absence of direct causation of specific climate harms. This post explores these findings.

A Familiar Objection: Scope 3 Emissions Belong to Someone Else

One of the biggest challenges of climate litigation is the lack of explicit causality between a company’s own action and the impacts caused by its scope 3 emissions. This difficulty is particularly pronounced in relation to scope 3 because it covers many upstream and downstream indirect emissions, and causal chains become longer and more dependent on the conduct of independent third parties. As such, the attribution of legal responsibility becomes challenging. It was against this background that TotalEnergies advanced a common argument: scope 3 emissions result from the activities of customers who use the company’s products, actors over whom it exercises no control (pp.49-50; 152-153).

The Court’s Different Question

The court does not respond to this matter by focusing on who controls the activities that cause emissions. Instead, it reframes the problem and focuses on whether emissions generated through the combustion of its products could still be understood as a consequence of TotalEnergies activities (pp.155-157). 

From Control to Contribution and Influence: An Emerging Doctrine of Climate Causation?

The decision notes that the nature of activities of TotalEnergies, namely the extraction, refining, and marketing of a barrel of oil ‘inevitably’ leads to its combustion and to the resulting release of greenhouse gases (p. 175). Moreover, it highlights that TotalEnergies can measure these emissions and report them, as well as its investment choices and energy portfolio that affect their future volume. The company is therefore not merely linked to climate impacts but it possesses the capacity to influence them (p. 181). On that basis, the court appears to embrace a specific logic to define the responsibility in relation to scope 3 emissions: where a company’s own activities have a sufficiently strong causal connection to the relevant harm, and the company has the ability to influence the resulting impact, it has a duty to conduct due diligence. 

It is worth noting that the decision does not abandon control entirely, but neither does it require complete control as the only precondition for responsibility. The resulting model is one of contribution combined with influence: companies may have vigilance obligations regarding harms that arise through the actions of others when their own activities materially contribute to those harms, and they possess some capacity to affect the outcome. 

This approach draws from the concepts of contribution, leverage, and business relationships embedded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (OECD Guidelines), which inspired both the French Duty of Vigilance Law and the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). In this sense, its reasoning could prove relevant for the interpretation of other risk-based due diligence frameworks that similarly require companies to address adverse climate impacts to which they contribute or over which they possess leverage. 

Climate Due Diligence is Not Tort Liability

Unlike traditional tort claims, which often require proof that a defendant caused a specific harm, the French Duty of Vigilance Law focuses on how a company identifies and manages human rights and environmental risks associated with its activities. It requires companies within its scope to establish and effectively implement a vigilance plan that identifies those risks and discloses how they are addressed.

This distinction separates climate due diligence litigation from other types of climate litigation. In this respect, the judgment applies the risk-based logic found in the UNGPs, the OECD Guidelines, and the risk-prevention structure subsequently adopted in the CSDDD. Rather than establishing tort liability for climate change impacts, the court constructs a framework of accountability centred on risk management.

Opportunities

Although the judgment is confined to climate risks within the French Duty of Vigilance Law, it may have implications for other due diligence initiatives and beyond climate change. The reasoning suggests a possible approach for assessing when companies should undertake due diligence in relation to climate impacts linked to their activities, even where they do not directly control the harmful outcome. Other environmental risks such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, marine and air pollution and land degradation can equally present a diffuse, cumulative and transboundary nature, and be linked to complex chains of activities. As environmental due diligence obligations continue to develop across the EU, the TotalEnergies decision may therefore offer an important indication of how courts will likely approach similar environmental risks: determining whether the company contributes to a material risk and has sufficient leverage to mitigate its potential impacts. 

Limitations

Although the judgment recognises that TotalEnergies contributes to climate-related adverse impacts and that these impacts must be included within the company’s vigilance obligations, the decision does not engage with what the adequate specific emissions reductions or transition pathway would be, nor does it explain how to remediate the adverse impacts on climate to which the company contributed through its activities (pp. 215–220). The decision therefore strengthens climate accountability at the stage of risk identification and causality by requiring TotalEnergies to update its climate risk mapping and related vigilance measures within six months to include scope 3 emissions, but leaves open the question of remedy and actual climate mitigation pathway. 

Conclusion

The lasting importance of this decision is, at least, threefold. Its immediate contribution lies in its willingness to bring scope 3 emissions within the scope of climate due diligence. In this regard, it suggests that responsibility should not be determined solely by who controls emissions, but by the contribution to climate risk and leverage to influence its trajectory. For decades, legal responsibility has been discussed through the language of causality. The judgment suggests that, within due diligence regimes, the more relevant questions may increasingly be those of contribution, influence, and leverage. Lastly, by focusing on the company’s contribution to climate risk, the court articulated a rationale that could prove relevant for other environmental harms that similarly raise challenges that cannot always be resolved through traditional notions of direct control. In this respect, TotalEnergies may offer an important indication of how environmental due diligence obligations could be assessed across a broader range of contexts, both under the French Duty of Vigilance Law and under emerging European due diligence frameworks. If that intuition gains traction, TotalEnergies may ultimately be remembered less as a climate litigation case than as an early step towards addressing globally distributed environmental harms.

Luiza Rocha is a PhD Candidate at NOVA School of Law and a Research Associate at the NOVA Business, Human Rights and the Environment Knowledge Centre.