From Belgium to Niger Delta: Climate Change Impact Accountability

A courtroom in Western Europe could create possibilities for rewriting the rules of climate impact accountability for the oil-soaked communities of Nigeria's Niger Delta.

On a farm in Hainaut, the westernmost province of Belgium, Hugues Falys grows strawberries, raises cattle, and has become, perhaps, one of the most consequential figures in the global fight against climate change impact with big corporations. In March 2024, he filed suit against TotalEnergies, the French energy giant, before the Tournai Commercial Court — the first climate case ever brought in Belgium against a multinational corporation. The Tournai court was expected to hand down its verdict this week but instead decided to suspend proceedings until September, pending the conclusion of a parallel Paris case in June. Crucially, the court affirmed that it "retains full jurisdiction over the entire dispute."

The single "full jurisdiction” declaration has sent some ripples through corporate boardrooms from Paris to Port Harcourt. Or at least, open up some much-needed conversations. For communities of Nigeria's Niger Delta ravaged by the extraction of its oil-rich resources.

Falys is seeking €130,000 in damages for four extreme weather events between 2016 and 2020—a storm that destroyed his strawberry and potato crops, followed by three periods of drought that devastated his fodder production and forced him to reduce his cattle herd. The sums are modest. The ambition is not. The case demands that TotalEnergies implement a credible transition plan including a halt to new fossil-fuel investments, a 47% reduction in oil and gas production by 2030, and a 75% reduction by 2040.

What makes the Tournai case legally explosive is not the amount of money at stake, but the theory of liability. The plaintiffs argue the firm can be held liable for global warming because of emissions generated when its products are burned—a claim TotalEnergies rejects, accusing pressure groups of "instrumentalizing the judiciary." Their Belgian lawyer, Marie Doutrepont, stated the implication plainly: if Belgium is found competent to hear the case, "that means that Total can be sued in any country where damages caused by climate change are felt." 

Few places on earth have felt those damages more acutely than the Niger Delta.

A double wound

The Niger Delta is one of the world's great ecological paradoxes. The region produces the oil wealth that finances the Nigerian state, and it absorbs, almost entirely, the environmental cost of doing so. Spanning about 70,000 square kilometers of wetlands, mangroves, and rivers, the Delta has experienced over 10,000 oil spill incidents between 2011 and 2022 alone, releasing more than 500,000 barrels of crude into the environment. Home to millions, it is simultaneously one of the most resource-rich and most environmentally degraded regions on the continent.

Climate change is compounding a pre-existing catastrophe. Global warming is altering salinity gradients, increasing floods, and disrupting hydrological regimes in ways that intensify the mobility and toxicity of oil-related contaminants already present in Delta waterways.  In short, the region faces a grim synergy: oil pollution weakens natural defenses against flooding, climate change brings more flooding, and more flooding spreads the poison further.

The mangroves, which once served as the Niger Delta's primary coastal buffer, are vanishing at an alarming pace. Between 2016 and 2024, mangrove mortality in the Delta ran at 5,644 hectares a year — the equivalent of 17 Central Park forest areas being lost annually. Without these forests, coastlines are exposed to surging seas and storm surges with no natural defense. Fishing yields collapse. Freshwater aquifers are contaminated by saltwater intrusion.

Gas flaring, the burning of natural gas extracted alongside crude oil, has persisted in the Delta for decades despite legal prohibition. Annual flaring volumes reached approximately 5.3 billion cubic meters in recent estimates, and Nigeria's total flared gas surged 12% in 2024, contributing notably to global carbon emissions. The irony is brutal: a region that has powered the economies of others is now among the most exposed to the climate consequences of that power.

Big oil's quiet exit

What makes the legal precedent in Tournai especially urgent is that the major oil companies are quietly walking away. Last year, four oil majors—ExxonMobil, Equinor, ENI, and TotalEnergies—received approval from Nigeria's upstream petroleum regulator to sell their onshore and shallow-water assets in the Delta. Shell's divestment was approved shortly after. Questions and conversation continue about their exit strategy, where they leave behind degraded pipelines, contaminated soil, and communities that have little legal recourse to match these multinationals.

TotalEnergies stated it had fully met its financial obligations on remediation funding, including contributions to Nigeria's Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP). But a 2025 assessment noted that HYPREP's long-term impacts depend on the replenishment of a trust fund whose future finances remain uncertain. The cleanup of Ogoniland alone, according to a 2011 UN Environment Programme report, was estimated to take thirty years.

This is why Tournai matters so much to the Niger Delta region. If a Belgian court can maintain jurisdiction over TotalEnergies for climate damages suffered on European soil, it opens a legal corridor for communities in the Global South to pursue similar claims. The principle that a fossil fuel company can be held responsible for emissions generated when its products are burned, not just where they are drilled, is a transformative step in international and environmental law. A farmer in Bayelsa or Rivers State who can show that flooding destroyed his crops and that TotalEnergies's decades of extraction and its continued emissions contributed to that flooding might one day find a court willing to hear his case.

Precedent, slowly built

The legal landscape is shifting, unevenly. In 2021, Dutch courts issued a landmark ruling ordering Shell to cut its net carbon emissions, finding they contributed to global warming. But the judgement was overturned on appeal, and the case is now before the Dutch Supreme Court. A German court dismissed a case brought by a Peruvian farmer against RWE over a melting glacier but ruled, in a significant step, that corporate polluters could in principle be held liable for climate damages. Each case adds a brick to a wall and a layer to building a case for communities across the globe with similar judicial tussles.

TotalEnergies has called it absurd to single out any one company for the pace of the energy transition, arguing it represents less than two per cent of the oil and gas sector. The argument may seem justified, but history can hardly be ignored. TotalEnergies is one of 21 fossil fuel companies responsible for more than a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and since the 1970s has been aware of the climate impact of its activities.

For communities along Nigeria's coast who fish in poisoned creeks, watch their homes flood with greater regularity each decade, and breathe soot-thickened air from gas flares, the Belgian farmer's lawsuit is some form of acknowledgement and possibly an encouragement that someone, somewhere, can be held responsible—a precedent worth watching because I bet there are still some legal tussles up front in this matter.