By re-imagining how non-contentious law is deployed, we can design climate action, nature stability and people-centred outcomes into the supply chains that span communities, countries and legal systems. 

Building on our series on the hidden power of non-contentious law, we move from overarching development opportunities and improving legal education and training, to driving sustainability through global supply chains. 

Here, we focus on supply chains not only for their emissions contribution and scale across global markets, but also for the unique role non-contentious law plays in governing them. For multinational companies, the supply chain is a ‘black box’ of risks – a place that hosts the vast majority of their greenhouse gas emissions (scope 3), as well as practices that exacerbate environmental degradation, create poor working conditions, and violate human rights. 

Like software developers working with lines of code, lawyers and business professionals hard-code these negative impacts into legal documents across the supply chain, creating a system that is often opaque to corporations and governments. By stripping them down to their core components, however, we have identified a range of actionable leverage points where everyday commercial, contract and company law can drive sustainability across the entire supply chain.

The challenge now is adoption at scale. We invite funders and organisations across the climate law ecosystem to join us in engineering these levers into the system. 

Mapping global supply chains

Using a mix of 6 years of organisational knowledge, user-centred design and large language models (LLMs), we mapped the key stages of global supply chains, from the extraction of raw materials to the end-of-life of a product. This included the manufacturing, operations and governance processes controlled by the multinational company, and distributed to the end consumer. 

At each stage, we explored workflows, actors, blockers and risks. Across the system, we identified a mix of legal leverage points with high potential for embedding and cascading sustainability into global supply chains, as well as examples of where and how they’re already being addressed and deployed. 

Actionable levers to engineer the system 

Rewiring corporate decision-making 

Existing governance structures prioritise short-term profit over long-term social and environmental responsibility. The C-suite must incentivise and empower legal, finance and procurement teams to deliver sustainability outcomes in supply chains. 

This requires changing how decisions are made. To unlock better governance structures, legal advisors, in particular the General Counsel and panel law firms, need to ensure boards of directors are: 

• Advised on climate and nature-related physical, transition and liability risks, especially supply chain disruption
• Exercising their directors’ duties in alignment with latest scientific evidence, and adopting dedicated governance committees beyond decarbonisation, for example for adaptation and resilience  
• Factoring climate and nature-related risks into decision-making processes, especially 5-10+ year supply contracts that lock them in. 

Organisations are making significant efforts in this area, yet currently realising only a fraction of the potential. This will require, for example, the elevation of climate and nature risk into international corporate standards and legal professional obligations globally. TCLP will publish a corporate governance climate risk toolkit. We will then work with law societies and bar associations to add it to their professional guidance.

Examples of interventions in this area 

• Climate Governance Initiative 

• Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative, for example their guide on managing nature risks for board directors
• The Law Society of England and Wales guidance on the impact of climate change on solicitors 
• Lawyers for Nature, Nature on the Board 
• Matt Gingell, thought piece on why companies need an adaptation committee 
• The Chancery Lane Project, guidance on delivering climate transition plans and factoring climate considerations into board decisions

Integrate sustainability into due diligence processes 

Traditional due diligence and procurement processes often overlook the sustainability impact of suppliers. 

However, these processes are an opportunity to ask suppliers questions, assess them against sustainability performance, and set expectations upfront. When marking responses and selecting suppliers, weight answers related to decarbonisation, adaptation, nature-positive action, and just transition. For example:

• Identify and select tier 1 suppliers with credible climate transition and adaptation plans, and ensure that highest impact contracts incentivise the delivery of them 
• During the tender process, choose a supplier or service provider based on a competitive proposal, including a carbon price, in addition to the other elements of a bid such as price and solution provided 
• Ensure a fair engagement process that provides suppliers with additional financial and technical support that enables them to respond to the climate-related elements of the procurement process. 

To realise the potential of due diligence processes in taking climate and nature action, best practices need to be scaled into new jurisdictions, markets and sectors. One way of doing this is improving the quality and ambition of the standard due diligence terms used across industry groups and trade associations that, combined, represent significant economic value. 

Examples of interventions in this area 

• Scope 3 Peer Group
• Institute for Grocery Distributors, Food Supply Chain Sustainability Framework
• Haelon and Scope 3 Peer Group, Integrate carbon pricing in supplier tenders
• Vodafone created two clause templates depending on the sustainability risk of the supplier (low risk vs high risk)
• The Chancery Lane Project, Raphael’s Procurement DDQ

Create the pre-conditions for action at the outset of a deal 

Environmental considerations are typically treated as a late-stage add-on instead of at the outset of a deal. 

To introduce sustainability into a transaction, legal advisors can support multinational companies to embed climate and nature action into the deal’s commercial rationale and pre-contractual documents, such as heads of terms and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). 

This approach ensures that sustainability ambitions are formalised early, allowing parties to agree on expectations, secure board approvals, and align the relationship’s commercial purpose with environmental goals. 

Examples of interventions in this area 

• The Chancery Lane Project’s, Introduce climate provisions to contract parties 

Implement decarbonisation clauses 

Supply chain contracts contain hidden emissions which are locked into binding agreements over long-term periods. This makes it very difficult for companies to achieve their climate targets. 

Requiring suppliers to reduce emissions is a scalable way of decarbonising supply chains. Contracts, especially those with high carbon impact or nearing contract renewal, are a major opportunity for including decarbonisation provisions, which can then be cascaded to subcontractors and tier 2 suppliers, while balancing their respective capacities and ensuring support is provided. 

This requires legal, sustainability and procurement teams to amend tenders and standard terms to include reporting obligations and incentive mechanisms, like preferred supplier status for meeting targets. To ensure continuous progress, it’s important that the contract framework includes regular reviews with suppliers, as well as mechanisms to increase the ambition of KPIs over the duration of the agreement. 

Examples of interventions in this area

• Telstra’s development and adoption of a standard decarbonisation clause across 80% of its supply chain spend
• The Chancery Lane Project, Consolidated Sustainability Clauses for Supply Chain Contracts

Create shared responsibility contracts

Traditional supply chain contracts rely on a “Code of Conduct” model, where the buyer places all compliance obligations and costs solely on the supplier. Under this structure, any deviation from standards is treated as a material breach, incentivising suppliers to hide violations to avoid contract termination rather than resolve them. 

Rather than transferring risk, shared responsibility contracts are an opportunity to build supply chain resiliency and manage market volatility. To achieve this, contracts could incorporate mechanisms for equity and fairness, such as agreed models for sharing financial risk during market disruptions, rather than forcing the supplier to absorb the total hit. This relational approach prioritises remediation over termination. 

Examples of interventions in this area

• Responsible Contracting Project’s core principles 
• Responsible Contracting Project, European model clauses aligned with corporate sustainability regulations 

Scaling opportunities for the field 

While we share organisational examples and case studies of impact, there are a range of cross-cutting opportunities that could help activate and scale the identified levers, and provide more coordinated action across the field. For example:

• Developing education and training resources
• Alignment with international standards and frameworks 
• Targeted responses to regulatory roll backs
• Harnessing the disruption and benefits of artificial intelligence. 

We envisage the shape and delivery of these opportunities being scaled at three levels: 

1. Community level: Deployment through small groups of external organisations to help meet minimum requirements and raise overall ambition.
   Example: We identified and developed guidance to support California Climate Disclosure Laws using AI and working with local lawyers and industry experts to validate and implement the content, including alignment in supplier policies and contracts.
   
2. Digital distribution and comms: Deployment through individual and shared digital and communications channels.
   Example: We’re developing a knowledge graph to make our legal content machine readable, which will help us build a stack of digital tools, like analysing climate-aligned language in contracts, that users can integrate into their existing legal products and services.
   
3. Third party deployment: Deployment distributed through third party platforms or applications, like large language models or legal AI platforms.
   Example: We are building technical infrastructure that will help consolidate and distribute contract-focussed content, from corporate governance to shared responsibility, to law firms, legal tech providers, knowledge management owners, and standard form contract regulators.

By working this way across the ecosystem, we can increase the relevancy and efficiency of our work, meet legal and business professionals in their knowledge systems and increasingly augmented workflows, and co-develop solutions that scale to the size of the systemic challenges we are trying to solve. 

A blueprint for sustainable supply chains 

We’ve shown that it’s possible to align billions of dollars of supply chain activity with ambitious action. Using the power of non-contentious law, we have a blueprint for a scalable and replicable approach to driving sustainability into multinational and government supply chains around the world. 

Over the course of 2025, the climate-law ecosystem has faced increased geopolitical complexity, government roll-backs on key pieces of supply chain sustainability regulation, and rapid technology advancements interrupting our capacity to deliver impact. Although this landscape creates unprecedented uncertainty and challenges, it also creates fertile conditions for our work to fulfil its true potential. 

The opportunity now is to move from drawing these designs to building them into the system at scale. Alongside and beyond our mission of mainstreaming climate-aligned legal contracting, we look forward to collaborating across the field to establish new market norms at the intersection of non-contentious law and sustainable supply chains.