This Tuesday is the day D of the climate in Spain. The Supreme Court must rule on the lawsuit filed by several environmental organizations demanding a greater ambition in cutting emissions (from 23% to 55% in 2030). He weather judgment It is an unprecedented litigation in our country, which could align itself with other nations around us whose courts have already agreed with the demands of civil society in the face of the passivity of governments.
The trend set her Netherlands in 2019, with the ruling in favor of the complaint filed by the Urgenda Foundation, which forced the review of climate plans. Two years later, the Constitutional Court of Germany He described the objectives of the Climate Protection Law as “insufficient” and forced them to be revised upwards.
Something similar happened that same year in Francein the call case of the centuryin which the Administrative Court of Paris recognized the State’s responsibility for the “ecological damage” caused because of the climate crisis. In it United KingdomMeanwhile, the Supreme Court forced in 2022 the review of the strategy of zero emissions in 2050 because it is considered that the Government has not provided sufficient data to evaluate it.
The chain reaction was not long in coming, with climate lawsuits in countries as diverse as New Zealand o Pakistan, which last year suffered the worst floods in its history. According to UN estimates they are already more than 5,000 climate disputes underway in 38 countries.
In Spain, the initiative started in 2020 from Greenpeace, Ecologistas en Acción and Oxfam Intermon (later Fridays for Future, the Greta Thunberg organization, and the Coordinator of Development Organizations joined). The plaintiffs claimed the lack of ambition of the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), which contemplated a 23% reduction in emissions compared to 1990 at the end of this decade.
The five environmental associations ask to raise the bar for the reduction of emissions to 55%, based on the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The plaintiffs emphasize that the goal set at the time by the Government does not correspond to the commitment to “carry forward efforts” to keep the global increase in global temperature below 1.5 ºC, set by the Paris Agreement of 2015.
“An appraisal sentence in the climate trial will not only be a legal success in the fight against climate change,” warns Jaime Doreste, lawyer for the plaintiff organizations. “An enormous milestone can also be set in the obligations of the public powers to safeguard the natural heritage and environmental quality, and the duty of care and guarantee of human rights.”
Lorena Ruiz-Huertaanother lawyer who represents the organizations, assures that the lawsuit is based on “solid legal arguments“, including the doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights and European jurisprudence with cases in the Netherlands, Germany and France.
The claim is also based on “the best scientific evidence“, from the IPCC reports, to the studies on the “emissions gap” of the UN Environmental Program or the estimates of the State Meteorological Agency. The recent impacts of the climate crisis in Spain (drought, waves of heat, floods) also figure as evidence of the urgent need to reduce emissions of CO2.
In the middle of the countdown to the Supreme Court ruling, the so-called Scientific Manifesto for the Climate Emergencydemanding “forceful actions” and recalling that the political measures agreed so far – at European and international level – would mean a temperature rise of 3.2 degrees by the end of the centurywith catastrophic consequences.