Sarah Finch

An Unexpected Battleground

The United Kingdom is Europe’s third-largest producer of oil and gas, despite its commitment to a 68% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and a net-zero economy by 2050. In 2024, the country produced 31 million metric tons of oil (220 million barrels) and 29.5 million metric tons of oil equivalent of gas, most of which was extracted from the North Sea. Roughly 80% of the oil is exported and burned elsewhere.

The Weald is a 500-square-mile, heavily wooded region that spans five counties in southeastern England, occupying a unique geological basin of oil and gas reserves. The basin contains a projected 140 million to over 1 billion barrels of oil, which developers have been eager to exploit. UK Oil and Gas (UKOG) has shared a vision for “back-to-back” wells across the Weald—some 2,400 oil wells in 100 locations—in order to transform the region into a “new Texas.”

In 2014, Horse Hill Developments Ltd. (HHDL)—a subsidiary of UKOG—drilled the first of two exploratory oil wells on a 5-acre site in Horse Hill, a rural area in the Surrey countryside within the Weald.

A Seasoned Campaigner

Sarah Finch, 62, grew up in Surrey and has had a keen interest in the environment for as long as she can remember, struck as a child by news reports about deforestation and acid rain. She has devoted herself to environmental activism for decades, while working as a writer, editor, and briefly as a local elected official. Today, concern about the escalating threats to nature and human civilization—as well as her children’s future—motivates her to fight climate change and oppose oil and gas development in the Weald and elsewhere. She was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders in 2024 and received the Sheila McKechnie Foundation National Campaigner Award in 2025.

A Righteous Campaign

In 2010, Sarah was dismayed to discover—via a local newspaper’s planning notices—the proposal to drill for oil at Horse Hill, six miles from her home. She soon learned that this was just one of many planned oil and gas developments across the Weald. Sarah joined forces with others to form the Weald Action Group (WAG)—an all-volunteer coalition of local campaigns against fossil fuel extraction in the region—to oppose these plans.

Together, the WAG members succeeded in getting a number of drilling applications refused or withdrawn. However, development of the Horse Hill site continued, with a second well permitted in 2017.

Then, in December 2018, HHDL applied to the Surrey County Council for planning permission to begin producing oil from the two existing wells at Horse Hill and drill four additional wells—projecting 3.3 million tons of oil (24+ million barrels) from the six wells over 25 years. The development was viewed as a test case for the expansion of drilling across the Weald, employing unconventional methods of extraction, like acid fracking.

Sarah, fellow campaigners, and local residents set to work to oppose this plan, raising concerns about water pollution, earthquakes, emissions from onsite operations, and climate impacts. Upon digging into the facts, Sarah discovered that the project’s environmental impact statement mentioned emissions from local operations—like drilling and roadwork—but omitted the roughly 10.6 million metric tons of CO2 that would result from burning the oil. The majority of fossil fuels extracted in the UK are slated for export and, ultimately, burned in other countries, allowing developers and decision-makers to ignore the projects’ downstream effects—known as “scope 3” emissions.

When the council approved the plans, despite activists’ well-reasoned objections, WAG decided to challenge the decision in court. WAG made scope 3 emissions a primary focus of its complaint and, to minimize financial liability if the group were to lose in court, it needed to choose one person to represent them. Sarah volunteered to front the case.

From Local to Global

WAG’s first two applications for judicial review of the county council’s permit to HHDL were rejected, but on the third try Sarah was granted permission to appeal to the British High Court, which heard the case in November 2020. When the court affirmed the county council’s decision, Sarah took the case to the national Court of Appeal.

As drilling—and protests—at Horse Hill continued, Sarah and WAG launched crowdfunding campaigns to cover legal fees, including sponsored walks, art sales, and musical performances. Sarah issued press releases and outlined her arguments to the media. Her organizing helped bring protesters from all walks of life to demonstrate outside the appeal court as it heard arguments in November 2021.

In February 2022, the Court of Appeal also ruled against Sarah, but one of the three judges sided with her, raising the question of whether to appeal one last time to the UK Supreme Court. Exhausted and out of money, some WAG members were skeptical that yet another appeal would be worthwhile, but they persisted, convinced that justice was on their side.

After securing funding from Law for Change, a funder that supports underdog legal fights for the common good, Sarah appealed to the Supreme Court in March 2022. Powerful interests had joined the county council’s side, including UKOG, the British national government, and the promoters of a planned coal mine in Whitehaven that had also been approved based only on local emissions. Sarah had recruited environmental lawyers from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK to support her side. When the Supreme Court heard the case in June 2023, Sarah attended the two-day hearing as lawyers argued on WAG’s behalf. For the next year, WAG members awaited a decision, bracing themselves for what could be their biggest loss yet.

A Huge Precedent

In June 2024, nearly five years after the initial county council decision, the Supreme Court handed down a 3-2 decision in WAG’s favor. The decision stated that the Surrey County Council had acted unlawfully in approving the development at Horse Hill because the project’s environmental impact assessment failed to consider the climate impacts of burning the oil to be extracted there. The judge who issued the majority opinion asserted that “all likely significant effects of the project must be assessed, irrespective of where (or when) those effects will be generated or felt.” The judgment rendered invalid the planning permits at Horse Hill, which continued to operate unlawfully until it finally ceased production in November 2024.

The ripple effects of the judgment were immediate. In August 2024, citing the ruling, the UK government pulled its support for two major North Sea oil developments. In September, the High Court revoked permission for the Whitehaven coal mine, and in November the government announced plans to ban new coal mine licenses entirely. By the end of the year, the “Finch ruling” (as it was dubbed) had resulted in the delay or cancellation of projects whose scope 3 emissions would total almost 400 million metric tons of CO2—roughly the entire domestic carbon emissions of the UK in 2024. Today, Sarah and WAG continue to support the ruling’s application in proposed new extractive developments around the UK. Currently, they are opposing applications for onshore oil production at Waddock Cross in Dorset and Biscathorpe in Lincolnshire, among others.

What started as a local campaign to stop a handful of new oil wells in a remote location snowballed into a landmark ruling with sweeping national and potentially international implications. Scope 3 emissions are now better understood as essential considerations in environmental assessments, which is also affecting other sectors: Several applications for intensive animal production have been turned down, citing the Finch ruling that all indirect effects of a project must be considered. As Sarah notes, “When you have a chocolate cake, it is not the making of the cake but the eating of it that affects your waistline.” When it comes to oil, “the burning of it is far more harmful to the climate than getting it out of the ground.”