Very good evening and of course a happy new year to everyone.
We are starting again with our lecture series on business
and human rights and it is my extreme privilege and pleasure
to welcome our colleague and my good friend Robert McCorkadale
for the first lecture in this year, calendar year.
Robert is a professor of international law and business,
sorry, international law and human rights at the School
of Law at the University of Nottingham,
but that's only one of his many positions and many activities.
He's also an active barrister at big court chambers
where he practices public international law.
He appeared both before the Supreme Court of the UK,
but also before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Robert has also been for 10 years the director
of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.
And previously was also an associate professor
at the Australian National University.
And he's definitely in my view, one of the leading experts,
both academic but also practicing experts
on business and human rights.
And it's wonderful to have you here, Robert,
and to listen to your presentation
on climate change challenges in business and human rights.
And you have the floor.
Thank you so much, Marcus.
It's far too kind an introduction.
And I should just say how deeply impressed I am
by the program that you've created,
both in this extraordinary lecture series,
but also in terms of your PhD students.
I mean, it just is, as far as I know,
unparalleled in the eye of the university.
And congratulations on that.
Okay, so I'm looking at climate change challenges.
Why? Because I've been trying to work on this issue,
both conceptually how it makes sense,
but also in practice, how we can do something in this area.
So let me just start, if I can, if it goes,
to look at some of the news we're seeing every day
about climate change.
I've just given a selection from around the world.
We see time and time again,
this sense to which climate change is something
which is very, very present.
Now, that's of course not a surprise,
but what do we mean by climate change?
So I'm gonna begin with a little bit more kind of,
a bit of climate science, a bit of international documents.
Why? Because I guess I feel if we're to understand
what we're talking about when we're looking at climate change,
we have to work out what the kind of terminology means,
what the languages mean, and what climate science
has told us about this.
And that's particularly important
because particularly when making a kind of an argument
either before a court or even an argument scholarly,
we have to often start with what the climate science is.
So we know where we're going to move from that.
So that's where I'm gonna start
and hopefully it won't be too difficult.
And I've used some graphs and things,
not least because I don't understand it all without a graph.
Okay, so the definition of climate change
has been very much one which has been focused
on the sense to which it's attributed to human activity
and that all does a composition of the global atmosphere.
And that goes right back to the earliest convention on this.
But what's its causes?
Well, the key group, the key organization, if you like,
which has been at the heart of this
is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And they produce a range of surprising number of documents
over the years.
And most of the most recent report 2021 says,
makes it very clear that once again, it's human influence.
And secondly, this is not just what's gonna happen
in the future, which is what a lot of the early information
seem to indicate, but it's what's happening now.
So we're already being affected by climate change.
And we see it in Germany, you had terrible flooding
not so long ago, the heat waves.
I come from Australia where we go from drought to floods
very, very quickly.
And that's happened much more often,
including bushfires more recently.
And it's a sense to which this is happening more and more.
And the example of this is where does this come from?
And that's greenhouse gases.
And these greenhouse gases are definitely ones
which being seen as being the main cause of climate change.
But when we say greenhouse gases,
actually, it's pretty much one greenhouse gas
which is shown as being significantly the most responsible.
And that of course is CO2 or carbon dioxide.
And this graph just indicates just how dominant
that is in the process.
And from that, we then move to, well,
how do we then see what these greenhouse gas emissions
are in a different form?
And I've got to be in a different graph
to try and show different ways of looking at these things.
And we see mainly we're talking about
what are called fossil fuels.
You'll all be familiar with that,
but basically we're talking coal, oil and natural gas.
And we see these global emissions from all sources.
We see over time, in fact, it's increasing the amount
to which CO2s are contributing to global climate change
and particularly through the greenhouse gases.
The greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, there's I think one more graph
I'm just gonna show you because it comes up a lot
when we're talking with business.
And this is these scope one, scope two
and scope three emissions.
Now it's taken me a while to understand what these all mean,
but it really makes a difference.
Because often when you talk to,
or when I talk to companies,
and a lot of my work has been empirical
dealing with companies, either gathering information,
talking to them, surveying them
and sometimes interacting with them,
sometimes working with them,
is to start with the scope one,
which are emissions, which are direct emissions
because you're let's say a factory
and you're producing pollution.
That's the most obvious.
And related to that a scope two,
which maybe it comes from the electricity
that you purchase to run your factory as an example.
But in fact, the largest amount
of global greenhouse gas emissions is scope three.
Now scope three comes both upstream and downstream.
Now what that means is both the emissions which occurred
in terms of maybe how you brought your products
into your factory, maybe how you then sold them on,
how they've been used.
And so an example would be if you are a oil company,
maybe then the petrochemicals,
which you then go on to be part of and sell on
through all sorts of different ways.
So scope three is very, very large
in terms of the emissions.
And that's why when we look at the information,
which there is on this area,
we have to make sure we are very careful
when say companies are producing their information
about their emissions,
they're actually telling you enough information
because scope three is really important.
And this is relevant for governments, civil society,
and of course for business themselves.
Now just one other kind of necessary element of this,
which is to consider, well,
what are the effects we're looking at?
And this is relevant because these are some of the things
I've talked about in terms of floods
and impact on desertification things.
But also of course it impacts everybody
and of course species as well,
loss of biodiversity, loss of territory in some cases.
I first was involved in this
when I was giving some advice
to the Commonwealth Secretariat many years ago,
worry about climate refugees
and the sense to which there are some countries in the world,
Kirobass, Tuvalu, for example, two islands in the Pacific,
which will disappear with climate change.
It will disappear because the water will rise.
Are they, if you no longer have your territory,
what is the consequence of that in terms of identity,
in terms of statehood and of course in terms of migration.
But what's important is it's a disproportionate effect.
It's not just on some people, it's on everybody,
but on a large number of people,
it will have a very, very significant effect.
So that's having set out, excuse me,
the broad kind of climate science, if you like,
in a very broad brush way.
Let me move to, if you're looking at this
from kind of a legal perspective,
which is the, I guess, my beginning stance,
what does that mean in terms of the obligations
that there are?
Now, let me start with the obligations on states.
And the important one is one you're very familiar with,
the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,
where 196 states accepted it.
Now, I'm gonna do something which I normally do in classes
and that doesn't always work,
which is to see if I can get this YouTube to work.
So you, hey, that's working.
That's working.
What is the Paris Agreement?
The Paris Agreement is a legal environment.
We're not seeing the video, unfortunately.
To limit global warming to well below two.
Sorry, can you see that, Mark?
Yeah, we do.
I think- We cannot see the video.
I think you have to share a different screen.
It's all right, I'll get out of it then.
Don't worry, I'll go back to where I was before.
Okay, so what it says, much more excitingly
than I could show is that the Paris Agreement
basically creates three key elements.
There's more than that involved,
but there's at least three elements.
The first one is to hold global average temperature
to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,
but with the aim to move to 1.5.
Secondly, prioritizing resilience
and adaptation to climate change, including finance flows.
Now that's an important element we often neglect.
I'm gonna come back to that later.
And also each state should create
their nationally determined contributions to it,
not just to say it's for somebody else.
However, between the time of the Paris Agreement and today,
obviously information has developed.
And the latest information is actually,
we're not talking two degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial levels, we're talking 1.5 degrees.
Now that may not seem that much.
You go outside and you think,
oh, 0.5 degree is not very much.
It's a huge impact.
And the information shows is that the number of people
exposed to climate related risks
and susceptible to poverty, for example,
changes by several hundred million people
by that 0.5 degree.
And in fact, the latest aim is towards
net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
2050 might seem a long way away,
but actually it's amazing how quickly that will come
and therefore actions need to happen now.
So that's the core aspect of what are the state's obligations.
And the starting point on this is,
often when considering these matters,
we start with international environmental law.
That makes sense.
International environmental law was,
is a continuing development
to deal with environmental impacts.
We have quite a amount of law on that.
There's two important cases
by the International Court of Justice,
basically saying this is part of the protection
and control of respect to the environment,
is part of international law
in relation to every single state.
And secondly, it goes further in the case
between Argentina and Uruguay to say a state
is thus obliged to use all means at a disposal
to avoid activities which take place in its territory
or under its jurisdiction, causing significant damage
to the environment of another state.
So that's the framework of international environmental law,
which would seem the right framework going forward to this.
However, it's not a perfect framework,
as I'll explain in a minute,
not least because it's very much state to state
kind of process.
So another way in to look at this is under human rights.
And human rights, there's a number of cases
involving environmental harm,
where the means of looking at it
has been through the human rights lens.
And that human rights lens has shown a number of decisions
by courts around the world,
where there is an environmental harm
and the protection is given to the individuals
or the community which are affected by it.
And it's important to recognize that, of course,
human rights, not only individual rights,
they're also collective rights.
And the example, perhaps,
is the case there against Nicaragua,
which in the R.S. Tigny case,
which of course was a case by an indigenous community
about their effect on the environment
of their human rights.
So that's a traditional way of looking at these things,
either general environmental law or general human rights law.
But as far as show, when I move to the next slide,
these are inadequate,
they're limited as a means to consider climate change.
Why?
Because when we even talk in human rights language,
as we've got there from the European Union,
we've got there from the UN High Commissioner
and the UN Human Rights Special Procedures,
we see it's a planet wide threat,
not just one state to another.
And it's a huge number of human rights,
includes both individual rights, such as right to life,
right to health, includes group rights,
such as self-determination.
It's a massive breadth of potential impacts,
not just a kind of a much more limited range.
So when considering state obligations,
there's a need to start with a sense of this is not
quite the same as any other current issue,
which is normally within an international law approach.
So then how can we go forward with this?
Well, the starting point for me is the seminal decision
by the Supreme Court of the Netherlands
and the case court again, again,
many of which of whom you'll be very familiar with.
Here they argued in human rights terms,
say using European Convention for Human Rights,
a threat to life under Article 2,
it's a threat to health and respect for private
and family life.
Firstly, quite a neat one,
because the right to health isn't directly
within the European Convention for Human Rights,
but they brought it together in terms of private
and family life.
And the other interesting element,
which I thought was thoughtfully considered was
in this instance, the Netherlands said,
well, wait a minute,
we're just one of many states with obligations.
Why should we have any fault on this
if other states aren't doing it as well?
And the court said, well, you still have your own obligations.
Just because others aren't doing it,
doesn't mean you don't have your own obligations.
And took the decision that the government must cut
its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25%
by the end of 2020 compared to 1990 levels.
So quite a significant decision.
And subsequently there's been a lot of other litigation
in many states, some successful, some unsuccessful,
based on legislative procedures,
on constitutional matters, on judicial approaches,
which I'm not gonna get into,
but just important that there's a lot
of these decisions happening,
which are against governments, government agencies,
government itself for not taking the action
they should take in this regard.
And that's kind of a very helpful start.
And it is only, it is a good start.
But in my view, doesn't take business
and human rights far enough.
Why? Because it's still this rigid idea
that international law is only about states.
And one of the extraordinary things
about business and human rights is it challenges
that strict kind of state-based approach
to international law.
It looks much more broadly and begins to look
at business responsibility in a very coherent
and effective way.
So I wanna then change my focus to,
okay, where do we fit business within this directly,
not just as some kind of consequence of state action.
So what we see there is, well,
we're kind of stuck a little bit.
Why? Because the UN guiding principles,
which we all tend to start with,
well, doesn't mention climate change at all,
even slightly, not even kind of a hint at it.
Of course, now in light of views since 2011,
we begin to say, yes, of course it has
to really mention climate change,
the lovely way we can interpret these things,
because here's the Office of the High Commission
of Human Rights saying, well, of course,
as part of their pillar one duty, states would be expected
to take business-related climate change.
And of course, business should set science-based targets
to agree with the Paris Agreement.
We're waiting on the excellent working group
and business human rights to report on this.
And of course, they're right to look at it this way.
They're right to try and find a way of considering
the business and human rights agenda through the UNGPs
and trying to find climate change within it.
It's a right starting point.
I'm gonna say it's not enough,
but I'm gonna say it's a right starting point.
And so then I think, well, why don't I look a bit more
maybe at the OECD guidelines?
Why?
Because although climate change isn't expressed
to be mentioned, there is a separate section
on the environment, which includes some mention
of disclosure of greenhouse gases.
So here we have a guideline,
which directly includes the same basic principles
as the UN guiding principles within it.
But it also has environment.
And what we find is the OECD,
which has got some great work
on responsible business conduct,
then says, well, our guidelines should help business
ensure net zero targets are implemented
with integrity, accountability and responsibility,
because it's part of this broader range
of social environmental expectations.
So it's this kind of expectation
that some of our other guidelines will just be big enough
to cover it despite climate change not being mentioned.
So where can we go to from here?
Well, there is some excellent work looking
at trying to draw out from the documents we have
a consideration of where climate change fits.
And I think that's a really good starting point.
So just before we do that,
when we're looking at climate change and human rights,
I always start with what is human rights due diligence.
Now, oops, sorry.
Now I know that that's not where everybody starts.
I start there with business
because human rights due diligence strikes me
as the preventative way forward.
If companies did proper human rights due diligence,
we wouldn't need the litigation
that sometimes I get involved in
because you wouldn't have all the human rights impacts.
So this is the starting point.
And if they actually introduced climate change
as part of their assessment, the integration,
their tracking and their communication,
then there's an extent to which it would move forward
much more effectively as a natural part
of approaches within corporations.
And this is just a quick summary
of human rights due diligence,
just for those who maybe aren't familiar with it.
We're talking about human rights impacts.
So we have to remember that when we're talking about this,
we're talking about the impacts on stakeholders.
It could be the community, it could be employees,
it could be consumers, it could be a range of entities.
Not starting with the impact on the business.
We start with the impact on the stakeholder.
So it's either where it's been caused
or contributed to by that company,
or it's directly linked through its business relationship.
So I said it's about risks to rights holders.
And it's not the same,
it'll vary with the size, the risk and the nature.
But the other major difference
and remembering that this is not the same
as ordinary business due diligence, it's ongoing.
It's not one off,
because every time your company starts a new operation,
every time it does some kind of activity,
maybe even annually,
they should review their human rights risks
and not determine it in advance.
I've certainly been involved in companies that say,
oh, our main risks are A, B and C.
And I say, what about the fact you're also doing Y and Z?
They're like, oh, we didn't think of that.
So there's a sense to which thinking
about the breadth of risk.
I just give that briefly for those
who are not familiar with it.
But it's quite important in the sense that
if companies actually want to take it seriously,
they need to include as part of their ordinary processes,
climate change within their human rights due diligence.
And I'm helped in this by the wonderful work of Chiara Mackey,
who's come across it, she's written, for example,
I've given you an article here
from the Business and Human Rights Journal,
talking about how we can talk of human rights due diligence
as including considerations of climate change.
I'm just repeating really what she says here,
but we need to think of it as human rights due diligence
as not just human rights in a narrow sense,
but a much broader sense.
And that it's a standard of conduct
which should bind all business.
And it shouldn't be a surprise,
business responds a matter of risk mitigation,
trying to reduce emissions,
but trying to induce other negative impacts.
And also bringing out this notion of contribution,
which is an important notion I'll come back to,
which is where there's an act or a mission that assists
or helps bring about the underlying violation
or increases the likelihood of the event.
So when I might directly maybe pollute water,
then obviously that's you've caused it.
But if I, for example, am a factory,
which suddenly the weather's really hot,
my demand of my suppliers,
well, I now want you to produce
lots and lots of goods right now.
And the consequences,
the workers don't get the full protection
that they would normally have.
You've contributed to an impact
on human rights to those workers.
So this is her clever thought
in how climate is part of due diligence.
And what she comes up against is what you sometimes hear.
I'm sorry, I love cartoons.
So you're gonna get a cartoon.
So this is cartoon where we have in theory,
a CEO saying, why, why, why, why do I pretend to care
when I don't?
And he's subordinate saying,
well, of course you don't care.
Now, the interesting thing is I give this,
because this is the example of where we feel
most businesses are on climate change.
My experience is it's not so straightforward.
There are a number of businesses
who do really want to do something about climate change
and actually do it for a range of reasons.
Some of it is, of course, competitive.
Some of it is because it's the right thing to do.
And some of it is because they're aware
of diminishing resources.
So yes, there are some CEOs who are seen in this cartoon,
but there are also many others who would be prepared
to consider moving forward on reductions.
In the same way, there's been this huge change
in health and safety as a consequence in many companies,
though sadly not all.
Okay, having had a little bit of a break with the cartoon,
let's then take it the next step further.
So we've tried to reinterpret the existing business
and human rights position by means of considerations
that I've just shown.
Let's then see how that works when we litigate it,
when we actually bring a case against companies.
Well, there are a range of examples.
The national contact points, which are a mechanism,
a supervisory mechanism under the OECD guidelines.
Every single state, which is part of the OECD,
which are the main industrialized states,
should have a national contact point
for which an individual affected or group affected
can bring a case against a company
based on them not complying with the OECD guidelines.
Now, this is important, why?
Because as I showed before, the OECD guidelines
include both human rights and the environment.
And perhaps the most useful starting point for this
is a case brought by Oxfam and others
against the ING bank, the Dutch bank.
On the basis that ING had not even mentioned
in their reporting or anything,
it's indirect greenhouse gas emission impacts.
Remember this scope three, the sense to which,
if you are, for example, a bank,
investing in another company,
which is polluting or whatever,
then you have a scope three emission.
And what was interesting is the Dutch
national contact point said,
well, actually, firstly, yes,
they should include climate change.
And just because there's no methodology yet,
or no international accepted standard yet,
it does not mean the company shouldn't do anything.
So it's quite an important statement
that companies can't just say,
well, we don't know what to do,
so we don't do anything.
They said, you still need to try and do something.
And a similar kind of case,
Client Earth brought one against BP,
the big oil company,
on the basis of what's often called greenwashing,
sense to which the advertising misled the public
as to how much they were reducing
their low carbon energy activities
when the reality was it was tiny.
And the consequences of that
is BP removed their advertising.
Now that all sounds good.
So let me then kind of bring us back to Earth,
if that's the right word,
with the most recent decision,
which is a case, Friends of the Earth,
against the ANZ Bank,
which is Australian New Zealand Bank in Australia,
before the Australian national contact point.
And this was on the basis that ANZ's investments
and financial support of fossil fuels
had contributed to the massive bushfires,
which had happened in the past.
Which had happened in Australia the year before.
And here we see three interesting elements of the claim,
of the decision rather by the national contact point.
They recognize that every entity in the chain
does have obligations regarding climate change,
from government to business to individuals.
But here they then say,
despite all our efforts to make the OECD guidelines
appear to be good and able to be applied to climate change.
Well, they're just not prescriptive.
They don't actually seek to regulate ways
in which enterprises actively manage climate risk.
So we see that our existing provisions
do not go far enough.
So they say, yeah,
the guidelines are increasingly aware of it,
but we aren't yet there.
So this is our difficulty
at the international regulation level,
unless there's expressed statements about climate change,
we're beginning to run into difficulties with litigation.
Now, okay, we move from that litigation
to some other national court litigation.
Let's see where we can go from there.
So once again, I'm gonna start with a Dutch case.
Probably the most important case, oops, sorry.
That's the most important case on this area,
which is a case called Milieu de Foncie and Royal Dutch Shell.
And in that, it was a case brought against Shell,
which is both a British and a Dutch company,
in terms of their emissions,
saying that their emissions had impact,
they contributed to impact
on a range of different claimants.
And what was interesting for the first time,
a national court directly referred
to the UN guiding principles to help say that firstly,
they reflect current insights.
And secondly, as the second quotation says,
well, even if Shell hasn't committed itself directly
to the UNGPs, that doesn't matter.
It still is relevant.
And then they also bring in the Paris agreement.
They say that's the best available science
on climate change.
So we've got to include that,
include that as how we're considering
whether there's a duty of care on Shell
to do something about emissions.
And they also use this phrase,
which you remember I mentioned before
when I looked at the Genda case, you say,
Shell can't resolve this global problem on its own,
but that doesn't absolve it of any responsibility.
They still have some, at least with those
which can control and influence.
And then their conclusion,
which is an astonishing conclusion
in terms of where we had been prior to this case,
they said Shell is obliged to reduce their CO2 emissions,
one, two, and three of their whole group
by net 45% at the end of 2030 relative to 2019.
Now that's a very, very powerful statement
by a court saying, okay, this is what obligations
under the UNGPs, under Paris agreement,
combine those all together, there's a duty of care.
Quite a startling decision.
So suddenly we're moving a long way forward
in considering making business responsible in a legal way
for their climate change and with their actions rather,
which cause climate change or contribute to climate change.
Now, there's lots and lots of cases in this area.
I'm only gonna give you a very, very brief overview on it,
partly for time and partly for just,
there's many cases that I am able to do.
What I want to show from this is the diversity
of these cases and the diversity of argument.
So we have everything from a liability
for a glacial melting in Peru,
because a German electrical company was acting
in such a way that that was its consequences
to an argument saying this is about fundamental rights,
to arguments about nuisance and a duty on a company
not to contribute to climate change, to directors duties,
to using national law, the French duty of Vichylox law,
to trespass and finally to illegal deforestation
and illegal coal.
They're all different ways of acting.
The only downside I should say is most of these
have not been successful
and some of them are still being argued.
So we don't have a definitive position on this,
but it is important to see that what we've got is
there's a lot of litigation going on.
Some of these rely on international business
and human rights regulation.
Some of them just simply rely on the state's
constitutional, legislative or other kind of judicial basis.
So there is a lot of litigation on this,
but what are the problems here?
Well, I think there's a range of challenges.
The first one is so much is about the state.
The state has got these obligations and even COP26,
which we just had,
almost didn't mention business obligations.
Climate change isn't mentioned in international regulation,
mentioned in very, very few national legislations.
We've looked at the national contact points,
pretty limited use.
National case law, as I've just said,
is dependent on these factors,
doesn't kind of start from a necessarily as yet
a strong coherent argument.
And simply looking at the environment by itself
is not enough because of the human rights element.
So it's this mixture of environment and human rights
and broad-based impacts,
which make climate change such a difficult one to argue
in relation to business obligations.
And then what are the other challenges?
Now, I want to raise this because although I am primarily
a scholar, I'm also very often brought into cases.
And this is where I start.
Okay, who's bringing the case?
Does that matter, you'd have thought?
Well, no, anybody can bring it.
But actually that's not been the case.
I mean, I mentioned that Milieu de Foncie
and the Royal Dutch Shell case.
In fact, the courts main focus was on the particular
local impact of people in the Weddeci,
sorry, Waddensee, looking at the particular consequences
to them of climate change.
It wasn't a, here's a whole international
community affected.
And so when thinking about the case,
think about trying to think that the court
will in the end want somebody who can bring a claim
which is related to the jurisdiction of the court.
Secondly, the evidence.
It's really hard to get this evidence.
Companies don't willingly hand over all their documents.
It can be very difficult to find.
And who's the experts?
I can tell you what, you know, Marcus is a rare example.
There are not that many lawyers with these expertise.
You've got to know climate change science,
but you also got to know environmental law,
human rights law, public international,
private international, criminal law,
huge number of areas of law.
You've got to know enough to pull it together.
And the courts don't understand they'll
be very resistant to it.
And some courts will say, wait a minute,
we're not going to interfere with a business which
might bring in money to our community.
And simply the resources to bring these cases
are considerable.
And if you are a community far away from a rule of law court,
you're going to have great difficulty.
And then who do you bring the case against?
Is it the para company?
Is it the financial institution that funded it?
Is it the state owned entity?
Is it the company itself?
There's a lot of issues which have
consequences in terms of some of the ones I'm looking at.
Because I think one of the hardest ones is,
what is your claim?
I gave an example.
Some were in use and some in trespass.
Some were about joint liability.
Cause is going to be difficult, going
to be very difficult to find that a company has
caused climate change.
Mainly they're going to contribute to climate change.
Not a lot of case law which shows how you can argue that.
So who is the duty of care owed to?
And the courts would say, it's not us, not for us to decide.
And in any event, the applicable law is somewhere else.
And we end up worrying in the end
about even getting to this stage.
So it's still very difficult. I say there are challenges,
which is why that was my title.
Because I'm not going to give, I can't give solutions.
And I always talk about remedies.
And we talk about remedies to the victims.
Because a fine to a company is not a remedy to the victim.
Asking the company to clean up is a starting point,
but it won't prevent them doing it again.
So thinking about what the right kind of remedy is,
is really, really important.
And my final slide is, well, what are the ways forward?
I think some of them are very specific regulatory ones,
such as, for example, if the European mandatory
due diligence legislation comes in,
it needs to have express reference to climate change.
I think we need to think about laws beyond just law
in relation to business and human rights,
but maybe company law, directors duties, financial accounting.
Not just think so that the climate is not even considered
as a capital, which is being dug away every day by a resource
company, but actually changing our financial accounting.
Thinking about the operations, so that how a company engages
on a regular basis is part of their whole consideration
of climate change.
And thinking about, particularly, scope three.
Now, of course, there's litigation,
I've just mentioned, it has to be innovative and diverse.
And think about how states and business obligations
can be ones where it is actually one which both of them
are involved in.
I mean, there was a case of lead poisoning in Kenya
where the action was mainly against the state,
but in the end, the company was also
found liable within the same course of the claim.
And of course, thinking about human rights in this sense,
not just kind of as a bare environmental case.
And the other ones which I'm finding more and more
are engaged in this area are the investors.
Why?
Because the ESG, environmental, social, and governance
approach is becoming more and more common.
And thinking this is one which brings them all together,
climate change.
And finally, of course, public pressure.
That's you as government, that's business,
and very often business can do it.
But I think the challenges here are ones which are real,
but ones which are slowly moving forward in terms of beginning
to create a sense of possibility to make businesses and states
accountable in the end for their climate change impacts.
Thank you.