Our co-lead of Climate & Nature, Tom Lawless, speaks to Ben Metz, Executive Director of The Chancery Lane Project, about how the law is scaling climate solutions and the opportunities emerging from the political backlash against climate action.
- Tell us about The Chancery Lane Project – what does it do and why does it matter?
At The Chancery Lane Project, our mission is to help organisations use contracts and legal processes to build a greener, fairer, and more inclusive economy. Contracts shape the way the world does business, so transforming them is one of the fastest ways we can tackle the climate and nature crises. Our goal is to make climate-conscious contracting the norm and align economic activity everywhere with a decarbonised, nature-positive future.
We create free, practical legal resources that make it easier to embed climate action into everyday work, from clauses and guides to real-world case studies. These tools help lawyers and businesses turn ambition into action and ensure their decisions contribute to long-term sustainability. We have also made available an online training program on climate contracting in action and host a Climate Clauses Working Group, which provides practical support and collaborative spaces for professionals to implement climate-aligned contracts.
This is a collective effort. We collaborate with lawyers, businesses, climate experts, and policymakers worldwide to develop, test, and share effective solutions. Our multidisciplinary team brings together legal, communications, design, digital and research expertise to make our content accessible, useful and ready to apply.
We are proud to work with a growing community of organisations, governments and professionals across sectors such as the built environment, finance, food and agriculture, and supply chains. By collaborating with networks, associations and professional bodies, we help embed climate-aligned thinking across the legal and business ecosystems and move faster towards a sustainable global economy.
- What are the most popular clauses, and what does that say about the challenges companies are most commonly facing?
One of our most popular clauses is Raphael’s Clause, our Climate Change Due Diligence Questionnaire for Suppliers. Its popularity highlights a challenge many organisations face: how to turn climate commitments into practical action across complex supply chains.
The questionnaire helps make procurement a genuine conversation about climate action rather than a tick-box exercise. It encourages suppliers to share how they manage climate risks and opportunities, giving procurement teams a clearer view of how well their partners align with their own goals. Drawing on frameworks such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and IFRS S2, it offers a flexible menu of questions that can be tailored to each contract, sector, or supplier.
Ultimately, Raphael’s Clause shows that many organisations want to engage suppliers in meaningful dialogue about sustainability but need simple, credible tools to do it. This clause helps bridge that gap, creating more transparency, accountability and shared progress across the supply chain.
- What does your work at TCLP right now tell you about how companies are reacting to the political backlash against climate action? Moreover, what do you think is going to be a big topic in climate action over the next 12 months?
You can’t get away from the politics. But within the current political and economic upheaval, there are also remarkable opportunities emerging.
Here’s how we see it. Some governments are rolling back their climate commitments and legislation. That doesn’t mean a uniform retreat around the world; it means growing divergence in regulation, law and policy. This divergence creates uncertainty for businesses, and uncertainty translates directly into risk. More risk means a stronger imperative for bold, ambitious and rapid corporate climate action. The result is a paradox. Political rollback in some places is driving greater climate action elsewhere, as companies recognise the need to manage growing risk and act decisively. This shift creates enormous potential for climate action at scale, as momentum moves increasingly from governments to corporate actors.
That is why we are adapting our content to help organisations respond. For example, our pilot guidance for the new California climate disclosure laws. While federal policy may be stalling, California and at least five other states are pressing ahead with legislation aligned with the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. Divergence like this increases uncertainty, heightens risk and, in turn, strengthens the case for strong corporate climate action.
Our work now focuses on helping organisations make sense of this evolving landscape through a legal lens. We have also released new climate risk tools to address the rise in corporate climate risk and to support those ready to meet it head-on.
- What are you optimistic about?
Artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of discussion about its environmental impacts, and rightly so. At the same time, many governments and private sector actors focus on AI’s potential for economic growth. But perhaps we should also be asking whether growth itself is part of the problem.
We need to act to reduce energy use, minimise emissions, and ensure data centres and AI systems are configured responsibly. At the same time, the potential for AI to help us scale the distribution of our content is remarkable. We’re thrilled to have received grant funding from the Patrick J McGovern Foundation to build the infrastructure that will allow us to realise this opportunity. It’s an exciting step with huge potential. Watch this space.
- What has TCLP taught you about how to foster successful collaborations for climate action – what can others learn?
Have you seen the South Park scene from a few years ago with the gnomes and their business plan? Phase 1: Collect underpants, Phase 2: unknown, Phase 3: Profit. It has become a meme and is a surprisingly apt analogy for many climate action projects. Phase 1 happens [reports are produced, research is done], but phase 2 is often missing or poorly conceived. Phase 3 [actual change] cannot happen without it.
For our climate risk project, phase 1 was producing tools that help key individuals in companies understand climate risk as reasonably foreseeable. Our phase 2 is what sets us apart: aggregating and promoting instances of corporate climate action on risk. This phase was built through intensive collaboration with around 20 stakeholders. We listened, adapted when we got it wrong, tested, and refined [arriving at a robust, actionable solution].
Phase 3 is where the impact hits: regulatory bodies, professional associations, and other authorities are compelled to adjust the rules governing the profession, embedding climate into the duty of care framework. None of this would have been possible without a strong, iterative, collaborative phase 2. Unlike the gnomes, our underpants-to-profit plan actually works.
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