Risk mapping: Treat scope 3 as included

On 25 June 2026, the Paris Judicial Court handed down a decision that climate litigation watchers across Europe and beyond had been anticipating for years. For the first time, a French court ruled that a company’s vigilance plan was legally deficient because it failed to address scope 3 emissions. TotalEnergies appealed the judgment on 27 July 2026, opening a new judicial phase whose outcome is being closely watched well beyond France. This is not an isolated case: it builds on a young but fast-maturing body of duty-of-vigilance case law that, since the ruling against La Poste, is steadily giving concrete shape to a law that once existed mostly on paper. Ksapa breaks down what the court decided, how it fits into a broader international pattern of climate litigation, and what companies everywhere should take from it.

The 25 June 2026 Ruling: What the Paris Court Decided

The case originated in a 2020 lawsuit filed by the NGOs Notre Affaire à Tous, Sherpa, Zéa and France Nature Environnement, together with the City of Paris, against TotalEnergies under France’s 2017 duty of vigilance law — the first binding corporate human rights and environmental due diligence statute of its kind worldwide. The plaintiffs argued that the company’s vigilance plan failed to identify the full range of climate risks generated by its activities, and asked the court to bar new oil and gas projects and to impose a judicially-set production reduction target.

The court’s ruling was carefully calibrated. On one hand, it held that the concept of “environment” under the 2017 law encompasses climate change, and that the relevant scope of greenhouse gas emissions to be mapped includes scope 3 — the indirect emissions released when customers burn the oil and gas products the group sells. On this basis, the court found TotalEnergies’ vigilance plan incomplete and ordered the company to update it within six months, with immediate enforceability, incorporating scope 3 risks and corresponding mitigation measures. On the other hand, the court declined to ban new projects or to set a production target itself, stating plainly that it is not the judge’s role to determine a company’s own climate trajectory. A detailed legal analysis of the court’s reasoning on scope 3, including the paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown of the judgment, is available from Verfassungsblog’s review of the ruling, which situates the decision within the wider evolution of corporate climate accountability in court.

The court also built in a follow-up mechanism that is unusual by international standards: the case has been referred to 21 January 2027, before the pre-trial judge of the 34th civil chamber, for judicial review of whether TotalEnergies has actually integrated scope 3 into its plan. This turns the ruling into an ongoing process rather than a one-off verdict — a design choice that a detailed analysis published on EJIL:Talk! describes as significant precisely because the court awarded a concrete remedy rather than a purely declaratory finding, ordering the company to adopt “reasonable, concrete and consistent” mitigation measures rather than simply acknowledging the risk. In its own official English-language statement issued the same day, TotalEnergies welcomed the court’s refusal to ban new projects or set production targets, while signalling disagreement with the scope 3 requirement itself.

Following deliberation by its board of directors, TotalEnergies filed an appeal on 27 July 2026. The company’s central argument, laid out in its English-language communiqué on the appeal, is that climate change, as a global phenomenon, should not fall within the scope of a due diligence law never designed to regulate a company’s customers, and that the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) does not itself extend to customer use of products. The coalition of plaintiff NGOs sees it differently: in a joint press statement issued after the ruling, Sherpa described the decision as confirmation that the duty of vigilance “fully applies to climate risks generated by multinational corporations,” rejecting the position — also defended by the French public prosecutor at the hearing — that the law was never meant to cover climate. An independent summary aimed at a business and human rights audience is available from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, which tracks corporate accountability cases across dozens of jurisdictions.

For Ksapa, this ruling confirms a shift we had already flagged in our own analysis of climate litigation and corporate environmental accountability: the question courts are now asking is no longer whether indirect, downstream emissions fall within a company’s sphere of responsibility, but how that responsibility should be mapped, measured and governed over time.

A Widening Global Pattern of Climate Litigation

The TotalEnergies ruling does not stand alone. It lands amid a fast-growing body of climate litigation targeting corporate emitters across jurisdictions — from Milieudefensie’s case against Shell in the Netherlands to Indonesian plaintiffs’ claims in Asmania et al. v. Holcim in Switzerland, both cited alongside the TotalEnergies case in recent comparative legal commentary. Wire coverage of the June 2026 ruling, syndicated internationally through outlets such as Insurance Journal, placed the decision squarely within this global trend, noting that French prosecutors had unsuccessfully argued the duty of vigilance law was never intended to cover climate change at all.

Within France specifically, the TotalEnergies case is the second major milestone in a jurisprudence that took nearly six years to develop after the 2017 law’s adoption. The first came in the case against La Poste: on 5 December 2023, the Paris Judicial Court found the postal operator’s vigilance plan inadequate following a claim brought by the Sud PTT union over undeclared subcontracted labour. That ruling, long left unconfirmed on appeal, was upheld in full by the Paris Court of Appeal on 17 June 2025, establishing a first concrete baseline of what an adequate vigilance plan requires: a precise, prioritised risk map, subcontractor evaluation procedures, and an effective grievance mechanism.

The TotalEnergies decision builds directly on that foundation while extending it into genuinely new territory, explicitly folding climate change into the statutory notion of “environment” and treating scope 3 as the relevant boundary for risk mapping. This reading dovetails with the direction Ksapa has tracked in the EU’s own due diligence framework, where the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive requires companies to identify actual and potential adverse impacts on both human rights and the environment across their value chains — a scope that, as we set out when helping companies assess whether they are CS3D ready, was never fully settled on the question of customer-use emissions. The compromise text eventually adopted for the CSDDD narrowed some of that ambiguity, but as our review of the directive’s entry into a new era for business noted, roughly half of surveyed stakeholders already agreed that human rights due diligence should rightly include climate impacts — a consensus the French courts appear to be catching up with in real time.

It would be a mistake, however, to read this ruling as an unqualified win for claimant associations. The court was careful not to substitute itself for the company in setting its climate trajectory, a restraint that reflects the continued caution of French judges when claims edge toward industrial policy rather than disclosure and risk management. That tension — between demanding transparency on risk and refusing to steer corporate strategy — is exactly what Ksapa explored at an event on mediation as an alternative to duty-of-vigilance litigation, convened with companies, unions and civil society organisations. Ten years after the law’s adoption, litigation is accelerating, but as we argued in Corporate Due Diligence at Ten: Is Mediation the Missing Piece?, it remains costly in time, uncertainty and reputation for every party involved, which keeps sharpening the case for structured dialogue over adversarial proceedings whenever the underlying issues are genuinely addressable.

What This Means for Companies Everywhere

Beyond the specifics of TotalEnergies, the ruling sends a clear signal to the roughly 270 French companies covered by the 2017 law, and to the far larger population of multinationals that will fall under the CSDDD once it is fully in force: risk mapping can no longer stop at scope 1 and 2. As Ksapa has documented, scope 3 emissions typically represent the largest share of a company’s carbon footprint, particularly in energy-intensive sectors, where they can dwarf direct emissions many times over — a pattern our investors’ guide to human rights due diligence has repeatedly flagged for private equity and institutional investors assessing portfolio companies. Financed emissions can represent the overwhelming majority of a financial institution’s total footprint, a dynamic Ksapa has explored with 14 private equity firms through a joint working group on advancing human rights due diligence in private equity.

For legal, sustainability and risk teams, the immediate task is twofold. First, ensure the vigilance plan’s risk mapping explicitly captures emissions tied to product use, built on a documented and defensible methodology — an exercise Ksapa has supported for years, including through practical work on carbon sequestration due diligence that gives industrial buyers concrete tools to address their own scope 3 exposure through supply chain investment. Second, plan for the fact that courts, as illustrated by the January 2027 review date set in the TotalEnergies case, are no longer satisfied with declaratory injunctions: they are increasingly building in short, enforceable timelines to verify real-world implementation.

This push toward enforceable implementation sits within a broader tightening of expectations that Ksapa tracked as more demanding sustainability rules took effect across the EU — from scope 3 supplier management challenges to the scrutiny of critical minerals sourcing behind the clean energy transition. It is echoed, too, in our own assessment of human rights due diligence trends with CoBS, which found that more than 50 countries are now moving toward some form of mandatory human rights due diligence, making the French precedent relevant well beyond its own borders. Companies with international value chains should also read the ruling against the backdrop of COP30: as Ksapa argued in COP30 to Action: Business Value Chain Leadership, regulatory uncertainty on trade and carbon adjustment mechanisms is set to persist through 2028, which makes voluntary, credible value-chain decarbonisation a competitive necessity independent of how any single court case is ultimately resolved.

Finally, TotalEnergies’ decision to appeal is a reminder that the litigation route remains long and uncertain for every party, including companies contesting an adverse ruling. That is precisely why Ksapa continues to advocate for structured dialogue between companies, unions and civil society upstream of the courtroom, rather than as damage control once a case is already filed. Our ongoing coverage of these developments, updated as the case law evolves, tracks how climate litigation is reshaping corporate environmental accountability worldwide.

Where This Leaves Companies

The 25 June 2026 ruling marks a significant, though not final, step in defining what corporate climate vigilance actually requires. It confirms that scope 3 belongs inside the risk-mapping perimeter, while refusing to turn the judge into a regulator of corporate strategy. The appeal now before the Paris Court of Appeal will determine whether this expansive reading of “environment” survives a second round of scrutiny — with a judicial review already scheduled for 21 January 2027 to check whether the ordered measures have actually been implemented. In the meantime, companies covered by duty-of-vigilance or equivalent due diligence laws, in France and increasingly across the EU, have every reason to treat this case as an early warning rather than a distant legal curiosity, and to start reviewing their own climate risk mapping now.

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