The International Bar Association (IBA) has embarked on a new initiative to help lawyers and law firms better understand nature-related risks.
The Nature-Intelligent Legal Services series has been structured into three parts, comprising a business case guide for legal nature risk and opportunity, a nature-intelligent legal services toolkit to assess client nature exposures, and a nature-intelligence advisory and clause guide to help lawyers embed nature into legal advice and contracts.
The series was launched in February in the run-up to this year’s Earth Day on 22 April. Corporate and nature lawyer Jenni Ramos, who co-authored the IBA’s Nature-Intelligent Legal Services series, said that since the Earth Day movement began in 1970, it marked a moment where “the scale of environmental damage” could no longer be ignored.
She added: “The Nature-Intelligent Legal Services series has arrived at a similar inflexion point, in recent years the global business and finance community has recognised nature-related risks and opportunities as core determinants of commercial viability.
“All lawyers now have the opportunity and tools to treat nature-related impacts and dependencies as a foreground commercial reality that will inform their day-to-day advice to clients, across all practice areas.”
The series was developed in partnership with the IBA Environment, Health and Safety Law Committee, the IBA Law Firm Management Committee and the IBA Legal Policy & Research Unit.
Biodiversity law specialists also contributed, alongside input from sustainability consultancy Nature Positive, which focused on sectoral nature-exposure methodology.
Wangui Kaniaru, co-chair of the IBA Law Firm Management Committee ESG Subcommittee, said: “Over half of global GDP, about $58trn, depends on nature. The IBA Nature-Intelligent Legal Services Toolkit is a first-of-its-kind resource that helps lawyers across all jurisdictions move beyond carbon-only thinking and start treating nature dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities as core pillars for client attraction and retention.”
According to the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks Report, over the next decade half of the world’s most critical risks will be related to environmental conditions. Extreme weather events were viewed as the most serious risk, followed by biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.
The European Central Bank in 2023 said that 75% of corporate bank loans in the euro area were made to non-financial companies that have a significant dependency on at least one ecosystem.
The series will feature at the forthcoming IBA Annual Environmental, Social and Governance Conference, titled ‘ESG in Evolution: the legal imperatives of tomorrow’.
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