Inevitably our businesses impact the environment. Since the advent of comprehensive environmental regulation in the 1990s, until relatively recently business has been able to understand and manage its exposure to losses and claims arising from its impact by complying with regulatory duties and standards. Recently though, regulation has retreated. When regulation retreats beyond the tolerance of civil society, we see the law being used in different ways to hold businesses to account for their impacts. This risk is more opaque. Consequently, it may be more difficult to justify mitigation expenditure, especially when profit margins are under pressure.

In this Breakfast Briefing we will explore the mechanisms that civil society uses to arrest the retreat of regulation and share some current developments in the fields of plastics, health and wellbeing, climate change and waste management. We will examine civil society's role in combating climate change and how it is intensifying its push for accelerated transition. We will also discuss the new Net Zero GHG emissions by 2050 legislative target and the wide-reaching changes required to meet that target across society and business.