ESG Enforcement Tracker

Key facts:

In May 2024, three NGOs (Bloom, Alliance Santé Planétaire and Nuestro Futuro) and 8 individuals who had been affected by extreme weather filed a criminal complaint in Paris for TotalEnergies’s contribution to climate change and its “fatal impact on human and non-human lives”. The complaint targeted TotalEnergies’s directors and its largest shareholders and four offences were envisioned by the complaint: reckless endangerment, involuntary manslaughter, failure to combat disaster and damage to biodiversity.

TotalEnergies, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world, continues to devote some two thirds of its investment to fossil fuel projects and has announced the development of a number of oil and gas projects since 2021.

Having considered the criminal complaint, the French public prosecutor dismissed it on the grounds that activities emitting greenhouse gases were not necessarily illegal in and of themselves, and that the multifactorial nature of extreme weather events made it impossible to show that TotalEnergies’ activities caused the death of a particular person.

Following the dismissal of the criminal complaint, the three NGOs are said to be considering the possibility of civil proceedings.