The Coming of Age of Environmental and Climate Due Diligence along Value Chains

Environmental law’s toolkit increasingly addresses transnational corporations’ impact on environmental degradation and climate change. A key mechanism is environmental due diligence that has been consolidated in soft and hard law in recent years and found its pinnacle in the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Born as a spin-off from human rights due diligence, environmental due diligence translates environmental provisions into the corporate realm and brings them to bear along global value chains. The mechanism of due diligence is not foreign to environmental law. Environmental management systems provided a model for the first drafts of human rights due diligence in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This contribution explores environmental due diligence’s conceptual underpinnings and practical implications, its contribution to the toolkit of (transnational) environmental law, and how the future path of (research on) due diligence may be shaped.

Klaas Hendrik Eller is Associate Professor at the Amsterdam Center for Transformative Private Law (ACT). His research interests are centred around the role of (private) law in social and technological change, particularly through an angle of contract and economic law, alongside comparative and private international law as well as human rights. He is currently working on a 3-year project ‘Recoding Global Production: Towards a Legal Ethnography of Sustainable Global Supply Chains‘, funded by a VENI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of the German Law Journal, and editor of Kritische Justiz, and a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy (AYA).

Klaas obtained his PhD from the University of Cologne and holds law degrees from Cologne and the Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). Klaas passed the German bar exam (Referendariat) at the High Court of Berlin, held fellowships at both Tel Aviv University’s and Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics and was a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP, Harvard Law School)