Corporate Environmental Due Diligence and Value Chains

Environmental law’s toolkit increasingly addresses transnational corporations’ impact on environmental degradation and climate change. A key mechanism is environmental due diligence that has been consolidated in soft and hard law in recent years and found its pinnacle in the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. Born as a spin-off from human rights due diligence, environmental due diligence translates environmental provisions into the corporate realm and brings them to bear along global value chains. The mechanism of due diligence is not foreign to environmental law. Environmental management systems provided a model for the first drafts of human rights due diligence in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This contribution explores environmental due diligence’s conceptual underpinnings and practical implications, its contribution to the toolkit of (transnational) environmental law, and how the future path of (research on) due diligence may be shaped.