Two environmental organizations faced off against government representatives on Monday as three High Court judges heard the country’s first petition against the state’s policy on global warming emissions.

Representing the petitioners Green Course and Youth Climate Protest, Assaf Fink charged that there was an internal contradiction between the international community’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030 and the government’s target for the same date of 27%.

The former was set out in the Sixth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022 as the only way to implement the Paris agreement, ratified by Israel among other countries. That agreement seeks to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6˚F), preferably 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7˚F), relative to pre-industrial levels.

Fink argued that a 2021 government decision to cut emissions by 27% by 2030, compared with 2015 levels, was directly based on the Paris Agreement that Israel had ratified, but was insufficient to keep temperature rises below 2 degrees.

He went on to claim that the government’s policy violated Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty “not to violate the life, body, or dignity of a human being,” and to entitle every human being to “protection of his life, body, and dignity.”

These, he said, were violated by failures, for example, to prevent harmful heatwaves by not acting vigorously enough to lower the human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide,........

© The Times of Israel