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8% share of renewable sources in electric generation by 2017, 12% by 2019, 16% by 2021; 18% by 2023 and 20% by 2025

8% share of renewable sources in electric generation by 2016

On August 1, 2023, Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN) (an ENGO) filed a judicial claim asking for a precautionary order that prevents national authorities, including the Secretary of Climate Change, the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development and the Secretary of Energy, from providing consent for offshore seismic exploration and/or offshore fossil fuel exploitation until a proper environmental impact assessment and a strategic environmental assessment have been carried out, as the already conducted environmental impact assessment was described as deficient. According to the claim, these environmental assessments should include an assessment of activities’ cumulative and climate impacts, a consideration of energy alternatives and a cost-benefit analysis in the context of a just energy transition. Furthermore, FARN asked for the immediate halt of any already consented offshore exploration activity until the mentioned assessments had been conducted. This precautionary claim is an accessory to a future civil claim that FARN intends to file next with the aim to prevent environmental damages in the marine ecosystem and challenge the technical reasonableness of developing projects that are contrary to Argentina’s climate commitments. 
Among the deficiencies observed in already conducted environmental assessments, the claim mentions an underestimation of projects’ GEI emissions, including methane emissions due to leakages in the exploration and production stage and emissions due to the combustion of the extracted fossil fuels. Allegedly, this deficiency prevented authorities from properly considering the cumulative impacts of GEI emissions on the climate. 
Different legal grounds are alleged by FARN in the claim, including Article 41 of the Argentinean Constitution (right to a healthy environment), the duty to prevent environmental damage (Art. 2.g., Act 25.675), access to environmental information (Art. 16, Act 25.675), the duty to conduct environmental assessment (Art. 11 and 13, Act 25.675), the environmental principles (precaution, prevention, sustainability, intergenerational equity, non-regression), the Climate Change Act 27.520, the Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Escazú Agreement and the American Convention on Human Rights (as interpreted by the Inter-American Court in its Advisory Opinion 23/17). 
According to the claim, several transnational corporations are involved in the development of these activities together with YPF (the national energy corporation), including Equinor, Exxon Mobil, Qatar Petroleum Pluspetrol, Shell, Tullow, and Total Austral. This is not the first case challenging fossil fuel exploration and exploitation activities in the Argentinean Sea. 
On September 14, 2023, the Federal Court rejected the precautionary order on the grounds that the case presents a high degree of technical complexity that cannot be addressed in an interim instance. 
This decision was appealed by FARN on October 1, 2023, indicating that the court did not rule on the central aspect of the claim, which was to verify the cumulative impacts of the different offshore exploration and extraction projects according to the legal grounds alleged. FARN argued that the request did not require the determination of technically complex issues but the enforcement of compliance with the law in terms of environmental impacts.
This appeal was rejected by the Court of Appeal on 22 November, 2023, on the same grounds: technically complex issues cannot be addressed in a precautionary claim. On December 5, 2023, FARN appealed this decision before the Supreme Court. 

On July 12, 2023, several Indigenous Communities and an ENGO (Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales – FARN) filed a claim before the Superior Tribunal of Justice of the Jujuy Province challenging the constitutionality of the new provincial constitution. The claim involved several arguments, some of them are environmental and one is climatic. Among others, the plaintiffs alleged the breach of the right of the Indigenous Communities to free, prior and informed consent, the right to access information, the right of human rights defenders in environmental matters, the non-regression principle as contained in the Escazú Agreement and the infringement of international and national environmental provisions. 
Regarding this last argument and particularly climate concerns, the plaintiffs observed that Jujuy is home to (high-Andean) wetlands (salt pans, salt flats, lagoons, meadows) that provide a range of key environmental benefits, such as climate mitigation and adaptation, and that those ecosystems are threatened by the impacts of climate change and human activities with high impact, including the increasing lithium mining. In this context, the plaintiffs argued, there is a need to develop a sound protection of these ecosystems that includes an intergenerational approach and the rights of the future generation. This protection is, however, according to the plaintiffs, disregarded by the new constitutional text that regulates these ecosystems mainly as objects of exploitation and production. In this sense, the new constitutional text would not engage with the National Climate Change Act, nor with the NDC or the National Long-Term Strategy. Particularly, the provincial constitutional text would breach the principle of priority introduced by the National Climate Change Act and that establishes that adaptation and mitigation policies must prioritize the needs of vulnerable groups in the context of climate change (Art. 4.c Act 27.520). 

On December 30, 2021, the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development published Resolution 436/2021 approving the implementation of an offshore seismic acquisition project submitted by the Norwegian company Equinor. This approval of offshore fossil fuel exploration resulted in several lawsuits seeking an injunction to halt the project and an order declaring the approval’s regulations null and void. Some of those lawsuits are, partially, grounded on climate concerns. Other relevant cases can be found <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/non-us-case/guillermo-tristan-montenegro-v-ministry-of-environment-and-sustainable-development/">here</a> and <a href="https://climatecasechart.com/non-us-case/greenpeace-argentina-et-al-v-argentina-et-al/">here</a>.

On January 7, 2022, the NGO ‘Organización de Ambientalistas Organizados’ sued the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development for its approval of the offshore exploration activities. Initially, the claim was presented as a habeas corpus for the protection of the Southern Right Whale and its habitats, but after the dismissal of the claim by the Federal Court, the Court of Appeal admitted it and asked for its conversion into a constitutional collective action (amparo ambiental colectivo). The main focus of the new claim remained the protection of the Southern Right Whale, but also introduced concerns regarding the climate impacts of the project. On these issues, the lawsuit refers to the urgency raised by the IPCC reports, the project’s incompatibility with the available carbon budget (citing the 2021 International Energy Agency reports), the Argentinian NDC, and, more generally, the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals. 

On January 14, 2022, all the three climate lawsuits against the offshore exploration activities (together with other non-climate related cases) were combined, and the court will hand down a single judgment for all.  

On February 11, 2022, the Federal Court of Mar del Plata ordered a halt to the fossil fuel exploration activities. The order does not make any mention of climate change concerns. Instead, the judge focuses on failures regarding procedural rights (participation and information) with explicit mention of the Escazú Agreement, lack of strategic environmental assessment, and possible risk to marine biodiversity. In the decision, the precautionary principle plays a key role. On February 15, 2022, the government filed an appeal to the injunction order. In its appeal, the government is also asking for the removal of the judge from the case. On February 18, 2022, a different judge (Federal Court of Mar del Plata N.4) allowed the appeal to proceed with suspensive effect. That means that the exploration activity can go ahead until the Federal Court of Appeal revises the injunction order.  

On June 3, 2022, the Federal Court of Appeal (Federal Chamber of Mar del Plata) annulled the injunction relief delivered by the Federal Court on February 11, 2022. However, at the same time, the Court ordered the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, as a new injunction, to issue a new complementary environmental impact assessment that considers possible cumulative impacts of the activities. In this new assessment, the spatial and temporal scope of the project's implementation must be analyzed and weighed. It is also mandatory to include the participation of the National Parks Administration and to consider the results of the public consultative hearings, organized at both local (public hearing initiated on 30 May 2022), and national levels (public consultation which ended on 19 May 2022). Finally, the Court asked for the inclusion of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development in the control and monitoring of compliance with the Environmental Impact Statement and its corresponding Environmental Management Plan (a task before assumed only by the Secretary of Energy). In this sense, exploration activities should stop (again) until all these requirements are met. Climate arguments were not developed by the Court of Appeal.

On December 5, 2022, the Federal Court of Appeal (Federal Chamber of Mar del Plata) considered that the authority had met all the requirements asked in its order of June 3th. That implies the termination of the injunction and, therefore, the exploration activity can go ahead until a final decision on the merits is delivered. Climate arguments are, once again, absent in the Court of Appeal's decision. The plaintiffs announced their intention to appeal this decision before the Supreme Court. 

On March 14, 2024, the National State submitted its written reply to the complaint (the corporation defendants’ reply was submitted on 3 March 2022). 


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