Madrid, June 20 (EFE).- The Supreme Court faces this Tuesday what will be the first major “climate” decision in its more than 200 years of history and which could lead to forcing the Spanish Government to raise the emission reduction target set in the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), approved in 2021.
The Fifth Section of the Third Chamber (Contentious-Administrative) of the high court, specialized in urban planning and the environment, is expected to vote and rule on the lawsuit filed three years ago by Ecologistas en Acción, Greenpeace and Oxfam Intermón due to inactivity and lack of ambition of the Executive when facing the climate crisis.
Subsequently, the Fridays for Future collective and the Coordinadora de Organizaciones para el Desarrollo joined the process, which its promoters describe as the “first climate dispute against the Spanish State”.
The Paris Agreement
At first, they denounced the breach of the obligation imposed by the European Union to approve before 2020 an Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC), which received the approval of the Council of Ministers in March 2021.
After its approval, in June of that same year, they appealed the content of the PNIEC with regard to the objective of reducing emissions by 2030 compared to 1990, which was set at 23%, and which, in their opinion, should be raised, as minimum, 55%.
This increase is necessary because, according to the requesting organizations, with a reduction of 23% Spain is not in line with the commitments acquired when ratifying the Paris Agreement or with the scientific recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to limit warming global to 1.5°C this century.
For this reason, among other issues, they demand that the Supreme Court force the central government to review the mitigation objective, which, in no case, can be less than 55%, “guaranteeing in this regard human rights and the right to an adequate environment of present and future generations”.
citizen participation
Subsidiarily, they request that the PNIEC be annulled and a new one be drawn up, considering that during its processing there were “very serious deficiencies” with regard to citizen participation (none of the thousands of allegations presented during the process were not taken into account public consultation).
For the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jaime Doreste, an appraisal sentence would be “not only a success in the judicial fight against climate change”, but a milestone in Spanish law “with respect to the obligations of public powers to safeguard heritage nature and environmental quality, and the duty of care and guarantee of human rights”.
Among the range of possibilities open is an estimative ruling and that the mitigation objective must be revised upwards, that the Supreme Court considers that it cannot determine what that objective should be like or that it has not been proven that the current objective compromises the fundamental rights of the citizens, the lawyer explained to EFE.