Two court decisions have given climate protection a real boost.

In April the Federal Constitutional Court rejected part of the Climate Protection Act;

a district court in the Netherlands this week sentenced the Shell group to comply with ambitious climate targets.

Both judgments choose different paths for their justification;

However, the common pivotal point is the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016 as well as scientific findings on which the agreement is based and which subsequently underpinned its urgency.

Jasper von Altenbockum

Responsible editor for domestic politics.

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    These references are nothing new to politics.

    But the judgments from Karlsruhe and The Hague have made the climate targets an enforceable right.

    In the case of Germany, there is only a way around concrete climate targets if the constitution is disregarded.

    So far, this has been the subject of political controversy.

    It's official now.

    Both judgments meet, so to speak, in the realm of the gigatons.

    The goal of limiting global warming to a certain level can be calculated down to the amount of carbon dioxide that can still be emitted nationally.

    Each country has a certain “remaining budget”.

    If Germany wants to make its contribution to limit the global warming by 1.75 degrees, it has had 6.7 gigatons since 2020.

    Both dishes relate to the CO2 budget

    The degree target is a compromise related to the Paris Agreement. It defines a limitation of the temperature increase of less than two degrees, but if possible a limitation of only 1.5 degrees is aimed for. The difference also has a serious impact on the “remaining budget”. Karlsruhe takes the view that 1.5 degrees would be the sensible target and criticizes the fact that the Climate Protection Act was still drafted in the spirit of the two-degree target.

    In this scientific basis, the constitutional court follows the reports of the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) of the UN and the Advisory Council of the Federal Government. The budgets of the states are important because exceeding them also means exceeding ("tipping point") the earth temperature, which causes irreversible damage, ie changes the climate forever. Both dishes refer to the respective CO2 budget, The Hague in the form of the CO2 concentration in the air, Karlsruhe in the form of the global and national emissions.

    Karlsruhe goes into far more detail than the district court in The Hague. The core of the constitutional court's justification is the observation that the “German” budget will be largely consumed by the CO2 emissions (around six gigatons) permitted in the Climate Protection Act by 2030, i.e. twenty years before the climate neutrality that has been strived for up to now. After 2030, there would therefore no longer be any leeway to gradually phase out CO2 emissions. An "emergency stop" would have to be accepted.

    The Federal Constitutional Court takes into account that such budget calculations contain “not insignificant uncertainties”.

    The national budget can turn out to be much higher, but it can also turn out to be much lower.

    However, this has no consequence for the legislature, because its duty of care requires it, especially in this case, to take precautions so that the level of knowledge changes so that they can later turn out to be exaggerated.

    What is remarkable about the judgment, however, is that no consequences are required for the decisive time, namely the years before 2030, but for the years after 2030, i.e. for the time when it could actually be too late according to the reasoning for the judgment.