The court ordered Shell to stop causing dangerous climate change and to bring its emission reductions in line with the Paris Agreement targets. This means that Shell must reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030 from 2019 levels. The judgment is another first in that a company, as opposed to a state, is being held responsible for complying with international environmental law. Please can we use this paragraph as a subtitle in the next page, the next page is a little bland. It paves the way for other large companies that emit more greenhouse gases than entire countries to be held accountable for complying with internationally negotiated responses to climate change. While these developments are cause for celebration, optimism
is dampened by Shell and other companies’ far less publicised conduct in respect of disputes where environmental policy and legislative tightening affect their bottom line. Too often they are declaring these to be investment disputes and resorting to international investment dispute bodies for relief. For example, in another longstanding oil spill dispute in Nigeria, Shell’s subsidiary was ordered by a Nigerian court to pay damages amounting to millions of US dollars. Shell’s response was again not to accept liability for the environmental damages that it has caused. Instead, it filed a claim for arbitration against the Nigerian government with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) on 10 February 2021.
Shortly after this, on 12 February, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court held that two Nigerian communities could bring a class action against Royal Dutch Shell for environmental damages — another win for the accountability of multinational companies. In what is turning out to be a year of losses for Shell in court, on 26 May 2021, a Dutch district court handed down judgment against Shell in a case brought by several NGOs. They argued that Shell is among a group of 25 multinationals that have been responsible for more than half of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in the past three decades, and that Shell has a history of misleading statements and inadequate climate action which violated the rights of Dutch citizens.
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