There is no climate justice. The first level of judgment of the first climate dispute, called “Last Judgement”, against the Italian State ended in recent weeks with no results: the case was deemed inadmissible due to lack of jurisdiction.
Thus the Court of Rome avoided going into the merits of the requests presented by the 203 actors, of which 24 associations and 179 individuals. «According to the Court, no Italian judge can protect fundamental rights threatened by the inefficiency of the State's climate policies, as happened in many European countries», commented the A Sud association, the first appellant. «It's a rearguard choice. We will continue to fight to see our requests accepted and the right to the climate recognized.”
«After more than two and a half years of hearings and thousands of pages of documentation produced, it was reasonable to expect that the Court would enter into the merits of the judgment. The choice – we read in the A Sud press release – is particularly at odds with the very object of the case, which concerns the urgency of effective action against climate change, the acceleration of which represents a threat to the enjoyment of all human rights recognized and protected by our legal system.”
«With the case, the judge was asked, considering the existence of a precise duty of the State to act effectively to respect the commitments undertaken in the climate field and protect fundamental rights threatened by climate upheavals, to recognize that the insufficiency of climate policies in the field it threatens the enjoyment of fundamental rights and, consequently, to force the State to revise the emission reduction objectives upwards”.
Marica Di Pierri, spokesperson for A Sud and co-coordinator of the Universal Judgment campaign, spoke about the sentence: «This is a missed opportunity for social and environmental issues in our country, but the Court of Rome's desire not to express itself does not means that there are no conditions for a conviction by the State. We cannot deny that we are disappointed with the outcome of the trial and it is certain that we will appeal the decision.”
According to the legal team that followed the case, made up of lawyers and jurists belonging to the Legality for the Climate Network, «the sentence, on the one hand, is clearly in conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and with the European Court of human rights, protection instruments that do not include limits on access to the judge in climate issues, as already recognized by the jurisprudence of numerous European states. On the other hand, it is also contradictory, because, on the one hand, it recognizes the seriousness and lethal urgency of the climate emergency, on the other, however, it establishes that in Italy there would be no possibility of turning to a judge to obtain preventive protection against this situation, despite the fact that such protection has been recognized by the Constitutional Court. Therefore – the lawyers argue – all the conditions to challenge it exist.”
A sentence that makes the general picture even more alarming. In fact, on the climate front, Italy is in default. This is strongly supported by a report by A Sud, written by Filippo P. Fantozzi, Filippo Garelli and Marica Di Pierri, entitled “Inertia in power – Climate obligations and the persistent negligence of the Italian State”, published before the sentence. The situation is worsening year after year. The dossier clearly demonstrates this by highlighting how our country, like many others, is not doing enough.
The document, which focuses on updates relating to the two-year period 2022-2023, highlights the critical points regarding regulatory gaps, the insufficiency of public participation processes, the launch of policies aimed at encouraging the consumption of fossil energy sources and the obstructionism exercised by Italian institutions towards the climate policies of the European Union.
«The scenario outlined – write the speakers on their website where the report is available – is worrying: the current levels of emissions reduction, the limited ambitions for the future and the recently launched policies, incompatible with climate action, highlight a overall commitment far from what is recommended by the scientific community and what is foreseen by current European standards”. We talked about it with Di Pierri.
In your report “Inertia in power” you highlight that Italy is in default, and the situation is getting worse. How?
«The problem does not arise today: Italian climate policies have always been insufficient to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement. However, in recent years the tendency to push the climate issue into a corner has worsened. Ispra, which is the state body for Environmental Protection and Research and not an ecologist association, defines the emission reduction scenarios for 2030 as “unpromising” and records a growing emission trend, destined to be confirmed in the coming years . Even today in our country almost 80 percent of the energy produced comes from fossil fuels and according to the International Monetary Fund we have allocated an enormous 63 billion dollars to subsidize fossil fuels in 2022 alone.”
Are we also behind from a legislative point of view?
«Yes, even at a legislative level we are experiencing a big delay: Italy is one of the few European countries not to have a framework law on climate, which has proven to be a fundamental tool for reducing emissions in many states. And there's more: since the advent of the new government, Italy has contested at European level the adoption of fundamental reforms for decarbonisation, in key sectors such as transport, industry and construction. A rearguard position that is very worrying.”
What should our country do? What are the European standards that Italy should respect?
«The new EU directive provides for a reduction in CO2 emissions of at least 55 percent by 2030, to eliminate them in 2050. However, this target should be broken down into individual countries of the Union, also taking into account historical emissions and technological and financial. In other words, taking into account the principle of fairness. It follows that Italy should foresee a cut well above 55 percent.”
He can do it?
“Certain! For example, by stopping tying our energy system hand and foot to fossil fuels, starting with gas; encouraging renewables and widespread production models such as energy communities much more, reducing and then eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies. The problem is that he doesn't want to do it.”
You write that «if national emissions were to continue at the current rate, Italy would exhaust the carbon budget at its disposal as early as 2025». What are we facing in concrete terms?
«The IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed.) continues to raise alarms about the inadequacy of the measures in place at a global level. Other independent analyses, such as Climate Action Tracker, show that Europe is far from sufficient. Italy is no exception, on the contrary. If all countries reduced emissions as much as Italy, we would face an average increase in global temperatures at the end of the century approaching +3 degrees. Double the safety threshold indicated by the scientific community.”
Extreme climatic events have caused 22 thousand victims in Italy and 111 billion euros in damage between 1980 and 2022. Is the situation worsening? What awaits us?
«Potentially, with current policies, we are heading straight towards a collapse of the climate system, which with a vulnerable territory like the Italian one risks producing dramatic consequences in terms of extreme events, which will be increasingly frequent and destructive: drought, desertification, rising levels of the sea, heat waves and so on. Just look at the scenarios developed periodically by the CMCC, the Euro-Mediterranean Center on climate change, to get an idea of what awaits us.”
What do you think of the Mattei plan proposed by Meloni?
«Why, has anyone understood specifically what it is? It's all very nebulous, but what we seem to see clearly is that behind this label lies a new, more refined, energetic colonialism. The government's rhetoric follows in every way the ambitions of Eni, which has always been responsible for Italian energy policies. The objective seems more than anything else, to put it bluntly, to get lots of gas and few migrants from Africa. Then, also methodologically, the fact that the president of the African Union stated that the African states were not consulted says a lot about the “equal” and “non-predatory” (to use the words of the Prime Minister) character of the plan.” .
Do you still have faith in climate change policy? Why isn't what you ask done?
«Let's start from the second: what should be done is not being done because the interests in the field are very strong. Just think of the carbon mayors and the influence they have in the UN climate conferences, for one. On the first question, let's put it this way: we trust civil society more than politics. All major political changes have occurred thanks to strong social pressures. We are aiming for this: we work to create awareness among people and to put pressure on institutions, in schools and in the squares as well as in courtrooms.”
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