In 'Business, Human Rights and Climate Change: The Gradual Expansion of the Duty of Care' (2024), Dalia Palombo showed that UK courts have incrementally expanded the negligence duty of care so that a parent company can owe it to people harmed by its foreign subsidiaries, but have done so without ever referring to human rights — a 'silent revolution'. She then asked the unresolved question this task poses: whether that incremental development, or an explicit human-rights and international-law framework of the kind used by Dutch courts and the European Court of Human Rights, could stretch UK tort law far enough to hold a corporation liable for its contribution to climate change. The question decomposes into interconnected open elements: the interpretive framework (including horizontal application of the KlimaSeniorinnen ruling between private parties), standing (individual 'neighbour' proximity and KlimaSeniorinnen-style association standing), relaxation of the but-for causation test for cumulative emissions, the availability of mandatory emission-reduction injunctions, and post-Brexit jurisdiction over transnational claims. Major intervening developments — the November 2024 Milieudefensie v Shell appeal judgment (claims dismissed but a general corporate duty of care affirmed; cassation pending), the December 2024 Limbu v Dyson appeal (jurisdiction retained), and the November 2025 first-stage Mariana v BHP judgment (parent-company liability under foreign applicable law) — inform the question without answering it.

Background

Since 2019, English courts have been the forum for transnational business-and-human-rights (BHR) tort claims, in which foreign claimants sue the English parent company of a multinational group for harm inflicted by a foreign subsidiary — for example Zambian villagers suing Vedanta Resources (Vedanta Resources plc v Lungowe, UK Supreme Court 2019) and Nigerian communities suing Shell (Okpabi v Royal Dutch Shell, UK Supreme Court 2021). In English negligence law, a claimant must first show that the defendant owed them a duty of care. Through cases such as Chandler v Cape (Court of Appeal 2012), UK courts developed a parent-company duty of care: a parent may owe a duty of care to persons harmed by its subsidiary's operations where the parent assumed responsibility for a matter such as group-wide health and safety — for instance by imposing group-wide policies. Because this expansion proceeded without any direct reference to human rights or international law, Palombo (2024) calls it a 'silent revolution'.

Climate change is a harder test for this doctrine. In the Netherlands, courts interpreted the open-textured statutory standard of care of Dutch tort law (Article 6:162 of the Dutch Civil Code) in light of human-rights treaties and the Paris Agreement: Urgenda v State of the Netherlands (Dutch Supreme Court 2019) ordered the Dutch state to cut emissions, and Milieudefensie v Royal Dutch Shell (Hague District Court, May 2021) ordered a private company, Shell, to reduce its group-wide emissions — including Scope 3 emissions, meaning emissions from the use of the energy products it sells, across subsidiaries, supply chains and end-users — by net 45% by 2030. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) endorsed a comparable state obligation in Verein KlimaSeniorinnen v Switzerland (Grand Chamber, 9 April 2024), holding under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that states must adopt and effectively apply climate-mitigation measures, that climate claimants cannot be turned away because the harm is future harm, and that a registered association representing affected residents has standing. Under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), UK courts must take relevant ECtHR rulings into account; but HRA remedies run only against public authorities, and whether the KlimaSeniorinnen approach could be applied 'horizontally' — between private parties, such as a corporation and climate victims — in a private-law claim was expressly left open.

Palombo (2024) identifies four obstacles that UK tort law would need to overcome to hold a corporation accountable for its contribution to climate change. (i) The claimant challenge: English civil procedure offers no Dutch-style collective action (Article 3:305a of the Dutch Civil Code allows qualified associations to sue in the general interest), and KlimaSeniorinnen recognised association standing only against states. (ii) The respondent challenge: whether a carbon major's public net-zero commitments can ground an assumption of responsibility toward people affected by climate change. (iii) The causation challenge: the 'but-for' test — the claimant must show the harm would not have occurred but for the defendant's negligence — fails for climate change because no single emitter is necessary for it; however, English asbestos case law (Chandler v Cape; Fairchild v Glenhaven, where employers were held liable although the exact source of each worker's exposure could not be identified, given overwhelming scientific evidence that asbestos causes cancer) shows that courts can relax the test where the science is conclusive, and attribution science increasingly quantifies the shares of global emissions attributable to individual 'carbon majors'. (iv) The harm challenge: harm that has not yet materialised supports, if anything, injunctive relief (a court order requiring or forbidding conduct) rather than damages, and UK courts are reluctant to grant mandatory injunctions outside property-related disputes.

Two cross-cutting concerns complete the picture. First, whether adopting an explicit human-rights and international-law framework — rather than a silent one — would help UK courts overcome these obstacles, as the Dutch experience suggests. Second, incentive design: if parental liability turns on how much oversight a parent exercises, parent companies may reduce oversight or decentralise operations to avoid liability (a 'race to the bottom'), which some scholars argue could be countered by informing the duty of care with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the leading soft-law standard of corporate human-rights due diligence; in the source this appears as a general observation about the business-and-human-rights expansion of parental liability rather than as part of the climate question itself. Procedurally, after Brexit the UK left the Brussels I Recast Regulation, whose rules had secured English jurisdiction over UK-domiciled parents; the forum non conveniens doctrine (under which a court declines jurisdiction when another forum is clearly more appropriate, per Spiliada) has revived, and the first post-Brexit BHR dismissal on that ground — Limbu v Dyson (High Court 2023), migrant workers' claims sent to Malaysia despite their inability to fund proceedings there — was, at the time of the paper, awaiting appeal. Together these questions form what the paper calls an interconnected doctrinal, empirical and litigation agenda: whether corporate climate liability via tort law can be viable in the UK.

Problem Statement

Whether, and by what doctrinal route, UK tort law can hold a corporation accountable for its contribution to climate change — that is, whether the incremental, human-rights-silent expansion of the parent-company duty of care can be developed far enough, or should instead be developed by explicit recourse to human rights and international law (the ECHR as interpreted in KlimaSeniorinnen, the Paris Agreement, the UNGPs), so that a domestic corporate climate claim could succeed. Following the source, the question unfolds through interconnected open elements: (a) the interpretive framework — whether and to what extent UK courts may adopt an explicit human-rights and international-law framework when determining private-law duties and remedies against corporations, including whether and how KlimaSeniorinnen applies horizontally between private parties, including corporations; (b) standing — whether any victim of climate change can be a 'neighbour' of a UK carbon major under the proximity analysis, and whether UK courts would recognise KlimaSeniorinnen-style association standing, which the source frames through a 'jurisdictional test' (an association registered in the jurisdiction representing the interests of residents within it), given that English civil procedure lacks the Dutch-style class-action mechanism for tort victims; (c) causation — whether and how asbestos-style flexible causal reasoning, grounded in attribution science on cumulative emissions, can relax the classical but-for test in climate cases; (d) remedies — whether UK courts can grant mandatory injunctive relief ordering emissions reductions against a private corporation for prospective climate harms, and if so on what legal standard and with what scope (parent company, subsidiaries, supply chains, end-users); and (e) procedure — whether and how the post-Brexit jurisdictional framework (revived forum non conveniens and the substantial-justice test, as exemplified by Limbu) preserves the jurisdictional pathway for such transnational claims. The deliverable is the umbrella question stated above — whether, and by what doctrinal route, UK tort law can hold a corporation accountable for its contribution to climate change; elements (a)–(e) are the interconnected analytical strands to be addressed in reaching that answer, not five stand-alone deliverables. The pending and subsequent litigation (the Milieudefensie cassation, the Mariana appeals and damages stage, the Limbu trial) informs these doctrinal questions as context without answering them.

References

  1. Dalia Palombo, 'Business, Human Rights and Climate Change: The Gradual Expansion of the Duty of Care' (2024) 44(4) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 889–919, doi:10.1093/ojls/gqae023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqae023
  2. Milieudefensie et al. v Shell plc (on appeal: Shell plc v Milieudefensie et al.), Court of Appeal of The Hague, 12 November 2024, ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2024:2100 (English translation), case no. 200.302.332/01, https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2024:2100
  3. Dhan Kumar Limbu & Ors v Dyson Technology Limited & Ors [2024] EWCA Civ 1564 (Court of Appeal, England and Wales, 13 December 2024), https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2024/1564
  4. Dhan Kumar Limbu & Ors v Dyson Technology Limited & Ors [2026] EWHC 38 (KB) (High Court, 14 January 2026), https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2026/38
  5. Catarina Oliveira da Silva & Ors v Brazil Iron Limited & Anor [2025] EWHC 606 (KB) (High Court, 14 March 2025), https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/606
  6. Município de Mariana & Ors v BHP Group (UK) Limited & Anor [2025] EWHC 3001 (TCC) (High Court, 14 November 2025), https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/tcc/2025/3001
  7. Bengt Johannsen, Louis J. Kotzé and Chiara Macchi, 'An empty victory? Shell v. Milieudefensie et al 2024, the legal obligations of carbon majors, and the prospects for future climate litigation action' (2025) 34(1) Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law 270–278, doi:10.1111/reel.12604, https://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12604
  8. Isabela Keuschnigg, Clemens Kaupa, Joana Setzer, L. Delta Merner, Kaia Turowski, Paul Lachapelle, Allison Shyrock and Aradhna Tandon, 'Integrating Scope 3 Emissions into Corporate Climate Change Litigation: Evolution, Challenges, and Responses' (2025) 72(3) Netherlands International Law Review 417–457, doi:10.1007/s40802-026-00288-0, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40802-026-00288-0
  9. Jan-Erik Schirmer, 'Climate Liability after Lliuya v RWE: Causation and Duty Demystified' (2025) 16(3) Journal of European Tort Law 265–295, doi:10.1515/jetl-2025-0015, https://doi.org/10.1515/jetl-2025-0015
  10. Paul L. Davies, 'Parent Company Liability in the UK: Corporate Law, Tort and Private International Law' (2026, SSRN preprint), doi:10.2139/ssrn.7246380, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7246380
  11. Matilda Becker, Alexis McGivern and Grace Wright-Arora, 'From carbon to care: Reimagining just transitions in corporate climate governance' (2026) 175 Geoforum, article 104756, doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104756, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104756