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.