26 April 2021
Company directors that rush to make net zero pledges without fully examining the firm’s ability to meet the goals could be guilty of “misleading or deceptive conduct” and vulnerable to regulatory or legal penalties.
They also have a legal obligation to act on climate risk, not just to disclose it, or face accusations of “greenwashing” that could carry real legal consequences.
Those are the opinions of lawyers Noel Hutley SC and Sebastian Hartford Davis, published in an official update to their landmark 2016 legal opinion entitled “Climate Change and Directors’ Duties”, commonly known as the Hutley opinion.
The update followed a business and regulatory roundtable on climate risk hosted by the Centre for Policy Development, and attended by major business groups including the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
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As of late 2020, we continue to work through the
dislocation of COVID-19 across all sectors of the economy,
including the major projects sector. Despite regulating complex
billion dollar infrastructure with design lives of up to 100 years,
in most part the contracts for these projects were negotiated with
little consideration of the possibility of a global
pandemic.
As a consequence, the parties bound by these contracts are left
to ponder, argue and dispute over where the disruption, delay and
cost consequences of COVID-19 should fall, bound by the terms they