The Changing Landscape of Liability: A Director's Guide to Trends in Corporate Environmental, Social and Economic Liability
The issue of past, current and potential liabilities has exercised boards of large companies for decades. This report makes the case that the landscape of liability - and therefore the risks for companies and to shareholder value - is changing and changing rapidly. It explores the evidence, maps the changes and attempts to guide business with the help of studies to navigate new and uncharted territory. The studies examine and draw conclusions in relation to climate change, human rights, obesity and legacy issues.
As the first comprehensive study of the link between CR/SD and strategic social/environmental risk management, the report has relevance across a wide range of functions including managers involved in corporate responsibility, corporate governance and risk management.
Significant among its recommendations is a call for companies to shift from passive to active corporate responsibility as the best way to mitigate risk to shareholder value from society's increasing expectations of social, environmental and economic responsibility. It includes examples of what this means in practice.
NOTICE TO READERS
The Legacy study focuses on Bhopal specifically to highlight the potential for ‘moral liability’ to arise regardless of the legal position.
The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, who are committed to proving legal liability beyond the 1989 settlement, have raised concern that the study as printed may give the impression that SustainAbility endorses Dow and Union Carbide’s claims of ‘legal innocence’.
Given our focus on the moral aspects of the case, we have not and do not offer an opinion on the outstanding legal issues. We have, however, made a number of changes to the PDF version of this report in order to avoid any risk of ambiguity in our assessment.
The detailed comparison of changes is available to download in the PDF 'Addendum The Changing Landscape of Liability'.
