Fiduciary Duties and Climate Change: What Do Directors and Trustees Owe?

About this event

As the physical and financial risks of climate change become harder to ignore, the people responsible for running companies and managing pension savings face a pressing legal question: what do their fiduciary duties require of them? Company directors must act in the way they consider most likely to promote the success of the company, and pension fund trustees must act in the best interests of their beneficiaries.

How those obligations apply to a risk that is long-term, systemic and politically contested is a matter of live debate among lawyers, investors, regulators and boards, and recent political pushback against sustainable finance, particularly in the United States, has added a further layer of uncertainty for those making decisions in practice. At this event, David Rouch will present the central arguments of his forthcoming Law Quarterly Review article, Fiduciaries' Duties in Flux: Directors' and Pension Trustees' Action on Systemic Climate Threats in the Face of a Commons Dilemma. The article argues that fiduciaries' duties have evolved in ways that now prompt action, with significant implications for how boards and trustees approach systemic climate risk. David Kershaw will then respond from the perspective of company law and corporate governance, testing the argument against the wider doctrinal landscape. Jo Myerson, a pension fund trustee, will reflect on how the legal arguments meet commercial pressures, regulatory expectations and the demands of stakeholders in practice. The event will close with questions from the audience. The event will be of particular interest to lawyers, investors, pension trustees, company directors, policymakers and regulators, as well as students and researchers working on company law, financial regulation and sustainability.

About the speakers

David Rouch is a partner at Freshfields, specialising in financial services law and regulation, and author of The Social Licence for Financial Markets: Reaching for the End and Why It Counts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He was lead author of A Legal Framework for Impact, the 2021 report for UNEP FI, PRI and The Generation Foundation on investors' duties and sustainability.

Professor David Kershaw is Professor of Law at LSE and was Dean of LSE Law School from 2021 to 2025. His work focuses on corporate law, takeover regulation and fiduciary law, and his books include The Foundations of Anglo-American Corporate Fiduciary Law (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Jo Myerson is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE. A former lawyer, she chairs pension scheme boards as a professional trustee director and sits on the DWP's Technical Working Group drafting guidance on pension trustee fiduciary duty.

Tom Gosling (Chair) is Professor in Practice and Director of the Initiative in Sustainable Finance in the Financial Markets Group at LSE, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE Law School. He publishes on sustainable investing, stewardship and fiduciary duty, and previously spent more than 20 years as a board adviser, latterly as a senior partner at PwC.

About the hosts

The Sustainability Regulation Observatory, part of the LSE Global School of Sustainability, is dedicated to understanding how sustainability regulation works, where it falls short, and how it can be improved. It brings together academics, practitioners and policymakers to examine the legal and governance systems that shape the response to climate change and other sustainability challenges.

Please note, that although ticketed, seating will operate on a first-come, first-serve basis.

This event will be followed by a drinks' reception.

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