Sarah Finch

When Sarah Finch learned in 2019 that her local government had approved an oil drilling project near her home in southeast England, she was shocked. “I always thought that was something that happened somewhere else,” says the climate activist. Adding to her alarm was the fact that this project had been approved without any consideration of the 10 million metric tons of planet-warming emissions that would come from burning the oil pumped out of this new site. These “scope 3” emissions weren’t calculated or included in the planning application, nor had they been for any other fossil fuel project applications in the U.K. up to that point. “This failure to assess the emissions from a fuel when it's burned just seemed to be universal across oil, gas, and coal,” Finch says. “I thought, well, this can’t be right. This can’t be lawful.” So she decided to challenge the decision in court on behalf of her local climate organization, the Weald Action Group.

In a landmark decision this past June, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled in her favor, saying developers of any proposed fossil fuel project must disclose potential scope 3 emissions so decision makers have a complete picture of the environmental impacts when considering whether to grant approval. While the ruling doesn’t ban these projects outright, it does make it harder for them to get the green light, and opens the door to legal challenges for many dozens of projects yet to go ahead. “It means that any decision has to be made with a very clear-eyed understanding of what that implies, as opposed to before, when they just didn't really have to think about it,” Finch explains.

The Finch ruling quickly galvanized legal challenges against other fossil fuel expansions. A proposal to drill for oil in an area of outstanding beauty? Quashed in July. Plans for Britain’s first new coal mine in 30 years? Axed in September. And in August, as an “inevitable consequence” of the Finch ruling, the U.K. government pulled its support for what would have been the two biggest oil and gas projects in the North Sea, leaving developers Shell and Equinor alone to defend their proposals against climate campaigners’ lawsuits. The ruling is also forcing the government to come up with new environmental guidance for the oil and gas sector. If seen as setting a precedent for similar cases across Europe, the Finch ruling could have international impact. “I really hope that we have reached a tipping point where the days of just approving new fossil fuel production without really considering the climate impact property are now over, and this case has been part of that,” Finch says.