They also ask that ENI be required to revise its industrial strategy in order to reduce emissions from its activities by at least 45% by 2030 compared with 2020 levels, in line with the stringent indications of the international scientific community for keeping the average rise in global temperature within 1.5 degrees Celsius (essentially, the goal of the Paris Agreement). Finally, they request that the Ministry of Economy and Finance, an ENI shareholder, be ordered to adopt a climate policy for its investee company that is in line with the Paris Agreement.
Why this extreme measure by the environmental organisation, known throughout the world and also very active in Italy? Greenpeace’s assessment is that ENI’s current decarbonisation strategy ‘is clearly in breach of the commitments made at international level by the Italian government and by the company itself’. Despite record windfall profits made in 2022, ENI continues – according to Greenpeace – ‘to invest in expanding its fossil fuel business, to the detriment of the climate and of local communities around the world who suffer the impacts of global warming’.
The activists also have the CEO Claudio Descalzi in their sights: his reappointment at the head of the company by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, endorsed by the entire government, ‘makes the latter complicit in choices that aggravate the climate crisis’.
The citizens who have joined the organisations in this legal battle are no less clear about ENI’s responsibilities. ‘ENI’s conduct’ said Vanni, one of the twelve who have put themselves forward personally, ‘contributes considerably to worsening the climate crisis, with ever worse consequences for me and for my area, the Polesine. Near the Po Delta, the sea will advance further and further into our land, and with the rise of the salt wedge we risk living in a veritable desert or being forced to abandon our home and our land’.
Rachele, from Piedmont, echoes him: ‘The region where I live is already suffering the effects of a dramatic drought, as shown by the very low rainfall recorded this winter. That is why I decided to take part in this legal action as an injured party. I do not think it is right that Italy’s main energy supplier, of which the State is moreover the largest shareholder, can carry on year after year with an investment programme that goes against the targets set by the latest IPCC report, the world’s foremost scientific authority on climate change’.
Greenpeace’s legal initiative – which, it should be stressed, is the first of its kind against a private-law company in Italy, and is backed by a petition that can be read and signed on the organisation’s website – is part of the campaign called #LaGiustaCausa: a climate litigation, that is, a climate-related legal action, in the wake of what has been happening since 2015 in many parts of the world (there are over two thousand such litigations to date).
The most famous of these, so to speak, is probably the legal action brought by Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie), together with Greenpeace Netherlands, other organisations and 17,379 individual co-plaintiffs, which in May 2021 won a case before a Dutch court ruling that Shell is responsible for having harmed the planet’s climate and ordering the British company to reduce its carbon emissions. Shell subsequently appealed the ruling.
For its part, ENI, as also emerges from the article in Repubblica of 9 May , acknowledges the legal action, stating that it has nothing to do with what is alleged against it, and therefore declares that it will assert its rights in court, demonstrating that the defamatory accusations are unfounded, in order to protect its name. It reserves the right to take any legal action of its own.
