Summary

Despite climate risk becoming increasingly foreseeable and material, regulated professions have yet to integrate these critical considerations into the rules and standards that they are governed by. In general, changes in professional regulations are driven by the organisations that manage and enforce them.

The potential exists to make managing climate risk a normal part of how regulated professionals work. Our work at The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP) tells us that we can do this by linking climate risk to existing professional duties, like acting in their clients’ best interests or warning about foreseeable dangers, instead of creating new rules.

Importantly, this doesn’t just apply to lawyers but to most, if not all, other regulated professionals.

Our research tells us that to make climate risk part of regulated professionals’ duties, we need to:

• Use neutral, professional language, such as foreseeable risks, risk management, and existing duties, not new ones.
• Understand risk deeply, so we can articulate how climate risk is a foreseeable and important business risk, which fits with professionals’ duty to act in their clients’ best interests.
• Gather and become fluent in detailed, sector-specific information, so we can break down risks (physical, transition, legal) for each type of profession, as well as major sectors.
• Adopt a balanced approach, using voluntary action to encourage mandatory changes, while also directly influencing current regulations.

To achieve the widespread action we need, action needs to be galvanised across many different groups, including:

• Regulators, who can address climate risks in their rules and standards.
• Governance and professional bodies, who can turn these duties into clear policies.
• Clients and market players, who can create demand through checks (due diligence) and reporting requirements.
• Professional indemnity insurers, who can encourage climate risk advice by adjusting insurance costs (premiums).
• NGOs and academics, who can increase pressure and provide evidence.
• Legal professionals, who can start lawsuits to clarify what counts as negligence.

By adding climate considerations to professional duties it is possible to make decarbonisation a daily part of the jobs of the professionals who control the economy worldwide, directly helping to speed up climate action.

Background

Global political changes in 2025 have led some governments to focus less on climate change. At the same time, other countries are strengthening regulations, which creates more uncertainty for companies. Together, these changes make it even more urgent for companies to take climate action.

This regulatory divergence creates both risks and opportunities for businesses, and presents a compelling requirement for businesses to take control of their climate action through contracts. Why? Because divergence creates uncertainty and uncertainty creates risk, which companies need to manage.

As a result, because professionals working with companies play a key role in corporate decisions and risk management, their duties are becoming a crucial way to maintain and increase climate action.

In this way the role of regulated professionals in taking climate action has been elevated.

Exploring Professional Duties

Given these changes, the “duty of care” within many regulated professions’ rules could be a powerful tool for climate action.

Between April and July 2025, research we undertook at TCLP showed that this idea is both legally sound and practical. There’s a lot of past legal decisions (case law) that suggest solicitors might have a duty to advise on climate risk and, in some situations, could be found negligent for not doing so. While there isn’t yet a direct case about climate-related negligence, the fact that duty cases depend on specific circumstances means the risk is real. The Law Society’s climate change guidance and Stephen Tromans’ legal opinion on property lawyers’ duty to advise clients about climate risk strongly support this view. Although our work has focused on the UK and law, we understand our findings are generally applicable globally and across different professions.

Our work so far has led to five key conclusions:

1. Regulated professionals probably have a duty to advise on climate risk. Not advising could be seen as negligence, even though there’s no direct legal precedent for climate negligence yet.
2. “Professional obligations” is the best way to describe this, rather than “duty of care.” This covers contractual, regulatory, and legal duties, and can be used in different countries. “Acting in the client’s best interest” is also a useful phrase.
3. Being specific is vital: Connect climate risks to particular areas of practice, breaking them down into physical, transition, and legal risks, with details for specific sectors to encourage behaviour change.
4. Activate professional tools: Embed the idea into existing systems like ongoing professional training, qualification exams, client expectations, insurers, firm risk departments, and regulatory guidance.
5. A balanced, sector-led approach is best, starting with high-impact areas like corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), property sales (conveyancing) and supply chains.

An additional finding from our work so far is that relevant duties aren’t limited to law: similar duties exist in other professions (like accounting, engineering, and the fiduciary duties for pension trustees) that are worth exploring further.

Together, these findings show that presenting climate risk as part of professional duties is a practical way to make sustainability a core part of regulated professions, and has the potential to widely change behaviour across professions. By using this approach, regulated professionals can be given a neutral reason to engage with climate-related legal information.

The Challenge

Our assessment is that we can activate an underused tool with huge potential to shift behavior across the economy on a large scale.

The size and reach of the opportunity we’ve found:

• Goes beyond law and applies to many regulated professions that are central to economic activity.
• Is relevant to most, if not all, countries worldwide.
• For each profession, requires a multi-sided response, using market forces and regulation, activating key players like insurers and investors, targeting regulators, government, and professional bodies, and potentially using lawsuits.
• Demands a coordinated response involving many expert groups, including NGOs, businesses, regulatory bodies, and government, rather than just one organisation.

We need to create a solution that matches the size of this opportunity. This is outside the current scope of the organisation I lead. So, we are beginning to look beyond our core focus to develop this work, initially developing partnerships with relevant organisations in areas such as accounting and engineering, and seeking funding for this work. And TCLP has begun to develop this work in the field of law. We have published a draft set of resources that connect professional duties to the activities of lawyers across key sectors and focuses. And in 2026 we’ll publish a series of Q&A interviews with leading legal experts on how to deal with climate risk through contracts. This will start the lawyer-focused part of this work and give us public resources to build upon.