A San Bernardino Superior Court judge on Thursday rebuffed Wal-Mart’s plan for a super center in the desert city of Yucca Valley, partly on the grounds that the giant retailer failed to take measures to reduce its contribution to global warming.

Environmentalists had been pressuring Wal-Mart to install solar panels to provide electricity for its proposed 184,000-square-foot store. But the retailer contended that the estimated 7,000 metric tons per year of planet-heating greenhouse gases that would result from the store’s operation was too insignificant to require such measures under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Judge Barry Plotkin, relying on contrary evidence from state air quality officials, ruled otherwise on Thursday, in a case that signals a growing legal consensus that climate change must be considered by businesses and governments promoting new developments.

“California is in the forefront,” said Matthew Vespa, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based advocacy group, which sued Wal-Mart and Yucca Valley. The center also won a case last year against Desert Hot Springs after the city failed to analyze the greenhouse gas emissions that would result from a golf course and 2,600-home development.

Activists have had a powerful ally in California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, who has won agreements from San Bernardino County, ConocoPhillips, the Port of Los Angeles, the San Diego Airport Authority, and Cilion, a Kern County ethanol plant, to measure or mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

The efforts to account for the effect of land use on climate change are part of California’s groundbreaking plan, adopted in December, to slash the state’s overall emissions by about 15% by 2020.