Shell’s 45% Climate Order Reaches Court

The Dutch Supreme Court heard arguments on 22 May in Milieudefensie v. Shell, a case watched well beyond the Netherlands because it asks a practical question judges have so far avoided: can a court tell a company exactly how much to cut its emissions?

Across five European jurisdictions, courts have now accepted that fossil fuel companies have a legal duty to respond to climate change. They have not yet turned that duty into a binding number.

The order that started it all

In 2021, a district court in The Hague ordered Shell to reduce its worldwide CO₂ emissions by 45% by 2030. That included indirect emissions from customers burning Shell fuel, the so-called Scope 3 emissions that account for much of an oil company's climate footprint.

The legal hook was the unwritten duty of care in Dutch civil law, under Article 6:162 of the Dutch Civil Code. In plain terms, the court said Shell's obligations did not stop at obeying written regulation. It also had a civil-law duty not to act in a way that foreseeably harmed others. No court had previously imposed a concrete climate target on a corporation.

In November 2024, the Court of Appeal overturned the order. The judges accepted that Shell had a climate duty of care, but said there was no scientific consensus allowing a court to assign a precise reduction percentage to a single company. If Shell alone cut sales, production could simply move to competitors, the court found.

The Hoge Raad, the Dutch Supreme Court, will now decide whether the lower courts applied the law correctly. It is expected to issue an advisory opinion by late 2026 and a final ruling in early 2027.

Courts across Europe accept the duty, then stop short

The Dutch case sits inside a wider European pattern. In Germany, the Higher Regional Court of Hamm confirmed in May 2025 that energy company RWE could in principle be held liable for climate harm thousands of kilometres away, before dismissing the specific claim on the facts.

In France, courts will rule on 25 June on whether TotalEnergies must align its production strategy with the Paris Agreement under the country's 2017 duty-of-vigilance law, after a trial that began in February 2026. Courts in Italy and Switzerland have also accepted jurisdiction over corporate climate cases (Lexxion, Morgan Lewis) without imposing concrete orders.

The line is becoming clear. Courts are increasingly willing to say that large emitters owe a climate duty. They are much less willing to say what that duty requires in tonnes, percentages or investment decisions.

EU legislation might have filled that gap, but the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive has been pulled back. The CSDDD, the EU's 2024 law requiring large companies to address environmental harm in their supply chains, was severely weakened in February 2026. Its mandatory climate transition plan was deleted. Civil liability rules were removed. Its scope was narrowed to companies with more than 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in turnover, covering fewer than 1,000 firms across the EU.

That matters for Ireland too. Irish companies and Irish funds operate inside the same EU rulebook, and the question for boards is no longer just what Brussels requires on paper. It is whether national courts will start turning broad climate duties into hard commercial constraints.

What Shell does while it litigates

Shell says it takes climate change seriously and argues that courts should not micromanage corporate strategy. Its capital allocation tells a sharper story.

In 2024, Shell spent about $12.7 billion on upstream oil and gas and $2.5 billion on renewables. It returned $22.5 billion to shareholders. In February 2026, its chief executive publicly questioned the company's 2050 net-zero commitment.

Milieudefensie, Friends of the Earth Netherlands, is not waiting for the Supreme Court. In April 2026 it filed a new lawsuit demanding that Shell halt investment in new oil and gas fields.

That change in legal strategy is revealing. Campaigners are moving away from asking courts to calculate an emissions percentage and towards asking them to intervene in investment decisions directly.

What comes next

The TotalEnergies ruling on 25 June could arrive before the Dutch Supreme Court decides the Shell case. If the French court goes further than its Dutch counterpart, it could produce the first binding judicial order linking corporate production to climate targets.

The LSE Grantham Research Institute counted 226 new climate cases filed globally in 2024, with corporate defendants taking a growing share. Across all five jurisdictions, a legal duty to act on climate now exists on paper. What that duty actually forces a company to do remains unsettled by both courts and legislators.