INTRODUCTION Contributed by: Ruth Knox and Julian Wolfgramm-King, Paul Hastings LLP
An Unsettled Year It has been an unsettled year for climate law. Every jurisdiction covered by this year’s edition of the Guide now has binding emissions commitments, and, with one exception, none has weakened its headline goal in the past 12 months. New Zealand is that exception, having reduced its 2050 target for biogenic methane in December 2025. The harder task of meeting those targets has arrived at a difficult moment, with energy costs high, defence budgets rising and industry press - ing for relief from carbon costs its competitors do not face. Against the backdrop of a growing challenge to the necessity of climate regulation at the state and fed - eral level in the United States and more jurisprudence articulating the role played by climate change in the legal duties of nation states and public authorities, we are beginning to see the gradual evaluation of the form and substance of climate disclosure regulation and the principles governing the voluntary carbon mar - ket. The unanimous advisory opinion of the Interna - tional Court of Justice (ICJ) on states’ legal duties to address climate change affirmed that a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental to all human rights and that a failure to meet those duties through inaction, fossil fuel subsidies or lack of regula - tion may expose those states to legal accountability including claims from affected states and potentially individuals. While this opinion may support the grow - ing volume of global climate litigation, it remains to be seen whether the ICJ will influence nation states in their evaluation of existing and developing national climate regulation. We have however begun to see the opinion being cited in national jurisprudence; eg, in Canada. The story isn’t simply one of fracturing standards and expectations. There is also a strong countervailing pull towards harmonisation. The standards issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board appear to be becoming a reference point for certain juris - dictions. The United Kingdom and European Union have agreed in principle to link their emissions trading systems and to exempt goods moving between them from each other’s border levies.
Turning Towards Adaptation The most significant shift of the year concerns the balance between reducing emissions and prepar - ing for the consequences of climate change-related events. At the climate conference in Belém in Novem - ber 2025 (COP30), governments were unable to agree a pathway away from fossil fuels despite the support of more than 80 countries and reached no conclusion on deforestation. They did agree to call for a tripling of adaptation finance by 2035 and adopted a set of indicators for measuring progress under the Global Goal on Adaptation. COP30 also produced an acknowledgement no previ - ous meeting had made: that temperature rise above pre-industrial levels is likely to exceed 1.5°C, and that the task is now to limit the extent and duration of that overshoot. This is a meaningful change as expendi - ture on resilience appears less as a concession and more as a necessity. This narrative has seen support across the political spectrum, particularly in the UK. This matters because almost all existing climate law addresses emissions. Very little addresses their con - sequences. Carbon pricing, emissions trading, dis - closure standards, border measures and credit mar - kets all address emissions. There is no established equivalent for resilience. Germany’s Federal Climate Adaptation Act, in force since July 2024, remains one of very few dedicated adaptation statutes anywhere, creating measurable goals for climate adaptation for 2030 and/or 2050. What About All the Targets? The 2035 round of national commitments under the Paris Agreement has now been submitted, with the United Kingdom pledging a reduction of at least 81% against 1990 levels and Canada 45 to 50% against 2005. No jurisdiction covered by this Guide has revised its headline target downward. However, that is a nar - rower claim than it may first appear: an unchanged target and an achievable one are not the same thing, and in several cases the mechanisms meant to deliver the target have been eased while the target itself has stayed fixed. Canada removed its federal consumer fuel charge in April 2025 and suspended federal clean electric - ity rules in Alberta, while proposed securities disclo -
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