In my work we’ve been exploring how the contemporary reality of climate change informs the reasonable foreseeability logic, across professional obligations. This piece summarises our thinking, more of which is available at The Chancery Lane Project.

A professional’s job, at its core, is to see risk before their client does. That is what a solicitor, an auditor, an engineer, a company director is paid for. They carry duties, set by common law and by their professional codes, to advise their client on the risks that a competent member of their profession would reasonably foresee.

“Reasonably foreseeable” is not a vague standard. It is a legal test, older than any climate policy, that decides whether a professional has fallen below the standard of their calling. It runs through the law of negligence, through most codes of professional conduct, and through the duty to warn. The question it asks is simple. At the moment the professional gave advice, was this risk something a reasonably competent member of their profession ought to have seen?

For climate risk, the answer has changed.

Twenty years ago, the physical and transition risks of climate change could plausibly be described as too uncertain in character, location, and timing to advise on. A solicitor acting on a property transaction, or an auditor signing off a set of accounts, could credibly say the risks were too diffuse to price. That is no longer true. Attribution science links specific weather events to human influence with measurable confidence. The insurance industry has repriced flood, fire, and storm risk across whole regions. The IPCC working group outputs are treated by regulators as the planning baseline. In the UK, The Law Society’s Climate Change Guidance for Solicitors (2023) and Climate Change and Property Practice Note (2025) set out, in plain terms, what solicitors are now expected to consider. The Legal Services Board has described climate as a profound systemic risk that engages competence, integrity, and best-interest duties across a lawyer’s career.

The foreseeability gate has moved. The risks have not changed their character. Our ability to see them has.

This matters because once a risk becomes reasonably foreseeable, the professional’s duty attaches automatically. No new statute or international treaty is needed. The obligation was already there, waiting for the world to catch up with the science. The lever is existing legal machinery, not new legislation. That makes it an unusually durable tool. It does not depend on a political majority in any one country, or on any one government staying in office.

There are concrete consequences. A conveyancer who fails to flag climate-related physical risk to a buyer of coastal property may be in breach of duty. A pension trustee who ignores transition risk in an investment decision may be in breach of fiduciary duty. An auditor who signs off accounts without testing the resilience of the business model to decarbonisation pathways may be exposed. A director who fails to consider foreseeable climate risk in a strategy sign-off may be outside the scope of their section 172 duties. None of this is a prediction. It is the application of doctrine that was written long before any of us thought about net zero.

The same logic applies outside climate. Foreseeability is not a climate concept. It is a test we apply to any risk a professional ought to be able to see.

Take AI. As the capability of these systems becomes better mapped, the risks they pose in specific deployments become more foreseeable. A developer, a procurement lawyer, or a board approving an AI system can no longer plead ignorance of widely documented failure modes. Take biodiversity loss, where supply chain exposure is now traceable. Take pandemic preparedness, where the patterns of zoonotic spillover are better understood with each cycle. Take corporate complicity, where this month’s Lafarge verdict in Paris rejected the defence that senior executives could not have known what their operations in Syria were funding. In each case, the question is the same. At what point did a risk move from unforeseeable to reasonably foreseeable for a competent professional?

The lever is not a new duty. It is the old one, catching up with what we now know.

What changes if we use it properly? The work shifts from arguing about whether a given risk is real, to a narrower and more productive question. Is this the kind of risk a competent professional, doing their job today, should be able to see? That question has traction in boardrooms, in audit files, in panel review meetings with professional indemnity insurers, in CPD design, and in the advice note on a transaction. It is less theatrical than litigation, and probably more useful.

The doctrine is already there, and the evidence has shifted. The duties follow automatically. The only remaining question is whether we choose to use the lever we already have.