[MCN] Costs of carbon emissions: Company directors face court costs from legal liability

[Lance Olsen]

Australian Financial Review  March 29, 2019

Directors' climate liability exposure increasing 'exponentially'

Ben Potter <https://www.afr.com/ben-potter-j7gdk>  Senior Reporter

https://www.afr.com/news/directors-climate-liability-exposure-increasing-exponentially-20190327-h1cuja <https://www.afr.com/news/directors-climate-liability-exposure-increasing-exponentially-20190327-h1cuja>

Excerpts

The exposure of individual company directors to the risk of "climate change litigation" <https://www.afr.com/news/climate-litigation-could-become-like-tobacco-actions-martijn-wilder-20180405-h0yctd> is increasing, probably exponentially, a new legal opinion asserts.

Sydney SC Noel Hutley and barrister Sebastian Hartford Davis write <http://https//cpd.org.au/2019/03/directors-duties-2019/> that it is obvious that climate change is affecting the economy, "and it is increasingly difficult in our view for directors of companies of scale to pretend that climate change will not intersect with the interests of their firms".

They conclude that there are now "significant and well publicised risks associated with climate change and global warming that would be regarded by a court as foreseeable", and that "it is apparent that regulators now expect much more from companies than cursory acknowledgement and disclosure of climate change risks.


Sectors most exposed are banking, insurance, asset and building ownership and management, energy, transport, agriculture, food and forestry. The opinion is an update to their landmark October 2016 opinion <https://www.afr.com/business/legal/directors-ignore-climate-change-risks-at-their-own-peril-20161101-gsf6lv> which found that directors who ignored climate risk now could be liable for breaching their duty of care in future.


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“We contend that traditional approaches to forest conservation and management will be inadequate ... in the 21st century. New approaches ... acknowledge that change is inevitable and sometimes irreversible, 
and that maintenance of ecosystem services depends in part on novel ecosystems, i.e., species combinations with no analog in the past.”

Forest Ecology and Management 360 (2016) 80–96 

Review and synthesis 

Achievable future conditions as a framework for guiding forest conservation and management 

S.W. Golladay a,, K.L. Martin b, J.M. Vose b, D.N. Wear b, A.P. Covich c, R.J. Hobbs d, K.D. Klepzig e, G.E. Likens f,g, R.J. Naiman h, A.W. Shearer i 

a J.W. Jones Ecological Research Center, 3988 Jones Center Dr, Newton, GA 39819, USA
b USDA Forest Service, Center for Integrated Forest Science and Synthesis, Research Triangle Park, Campus Box 8008, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA 

c Odum School of Ecology, 140 E Green Str, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
d School of Plant Biology, 35 Stirling Hwy, University of Western Australia (M090), Crawley, WA 6009, Australia
e USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, 200 WT Weaver Blvd, Asheville, NC 28804, USA

f Cary Institute of Ecosystem Sciences, 2801 Sharon Turnpike, PO Box AB, Millbrook, NY 12545, USA
g Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA
h School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington and CENRM, University of Western Australia, 133 Wilson Lane, Friday Harbor, WA 98250, USA
i School of Architecture – Center for Sustainable Development, The University of Texas at Austin, 310 Inner Campus Drive, B7500, Austin, TX 78712, USA 






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